Tiny wooden shoe at Auschwitz a reminder of Nazi brutality

O?WI?CIM, Poland (Christian Examiner) – It is a small token illustrating the defiance of the human spirit – a carved wooden shoe, only one-quarter of an inch long and attached to a small chain.

What is likely a primitive piece of jewelry – which the Nazis forbade concentration camp prisoners from wearing – was found earlier this month between bricks in the attic wall of a building in Auschwitz.

The UK Daily Mail reports the tiny clog was found by maintenance workers doing routine upkeep on a building at the Budy-Bor sub-camp, part of the Auschwitz camp system that has been preserved as a memorial to Holocaust victims and a reminder of the cruelty of Adolf Hitler's regime during World War II.

Agnieszka Molenda, chairman of the Foundation of Memory Sites Near Auschwitz-Birkenau (FPMP), said the clog could have been a symbol of resistance. The fact that it is a clog could also indicate that the person who carved it was from Holland, where the shoe is a national symbol.

The barracks, however, was also the site of the massacre of 90 French-Jewish women, beaten to death by Nazi prison guards, on Oct. 5, 1942. Molenda said it might have belonged to one of the victims of that atrocity.

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