Pair of silver candlesticks with floral engraving recovered in postwar Germany

Charlotte Helena Cohen (Lotte Salus) was born on January 31, 1920, in Weseke, Germany. Her father, Willie, was a tailor. Her mother, Elsa, was his second wife. Willie was liberal in his religious beliefs, but Elsa was from an Orthodox background. Lotte had eight siblings, she was the fourth youngest: Herman, who was in the US, Ruth, Frieda, Erma, Leo, born 1925, Hermann, Julien, and Adiet. In 1922, the family moved to Westerbourg, Holland, ten minutes from the German border. There were twenty-five Jewish families and two synagogues. She went to a Protestant school for two years, and then attended a Jewish school in Bocken. She learned German and Hebrew, and took knitting and sewing lessons at a convent. The school was closed in 1933 after Hitler came to power in Germany. Lotte began working in 1935. She worked as a nanny for a Jewish family in Bocholt, Germany, near the Dutch border, and on a dairy farm in Ramsdorf. In November 1938, around the time of Kristallnacht, the windows of the family she worked for in Bocholt were broken and the family was briefly jailed. She was at the home of a paternal aunt in Cologne, Germany, when war broke out in September 1939. Her father sent a man to take her to Amsterdam where she stayed briefly with one of her married sisters, and then with her mother. From January to May 1940, Lotte lived in a mansion in The Hague that housed Jewish refugee teenagers. In May 1940, Germany occupied the Netherlands. Lotte's parents, brother Leo, and a sister were taken to Westerbork internment camp. Lotte received a notice that she must register at the police station. When she went there, she was arrested and taken to Westerbork where she lived in an apartment with her family. She was assigned to clean the guard barracks. Another sister arrived with her husband and three children, but was soon deported to Auschwitz concentration camp. In January 1944, Lotte and her siblings voluntarily accompanied their parents to Theresienstadt concentration camp. The family was separated as men and women lived in different barracks. Her sister, Erma, and her husband and daughter were already there. Lotte again was assigned to a cleaning detail. On May 23, 1944, the family was shipped to Auschwitz where her parents were killed. Lotte was tattooed with a number. Her younger sister died in the camp; another sister became pregnant and was taken away. Her brother was sent to Mauthausen. Lotte and one sister were among those selected for deportation to Stutthof. There was no housing for them and they slept outside on the ground. In the fall of 1944, Lotte was transferred to Praust labor camp near Danzig where she pushed a wagon and carried bricks. She was eventually sent back to Auschwitz. As the Soviet Army approached the camp in January 1945, the German guards burned the prisoners who could not walk and forced the others on a death march. On March 13, they were liberated by Russian troops. Lotte and most of the other women were raped by the soldiers. There was talk of sending the female prisoners to Russian camps, but Lotte, convinced that the camp would be as bad as the German ones, convinced a guard to let her go. Lotte got a train to Berlin and went to a Jewish old age home that was being used as a hospital, but was turned away. She found a synagogue where she was fed twice a day. In October, she was relocated to a displaced persons camp in west Germany with the assistance of a Jewish aid society. The US Air Force helped her get to Hanover and she was able to return to her home town. She was taken in by the family of a childhood friend in Gemen. All of her family had perished, except for her brother, Herman, who had immigrated before the war. When he was located in Philadelphia, Lotte was able to join him in October 1949. She met Ernst Salus, who was from Vienna. They married on October 22, 1950, and had two children. Lotte passed away, age 77, in 1997.

The candlesticks were donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2008 by Lisa Rosenblum, the daughter of Lotte Salus.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Lisa Rosenblum