Memorabilia of Leon Haber Museum of the history of Polish Jews

The collection consists of memorabilia: pre-war family photographs; a letter written by Leon Haber to his daughter shortly before his death; German documents.Leon Haber was a Polish Jew from Lviv, where he lived in the first half of the 20th century. He was a bookkeeper. He married a Polish woman of Austrian origin, Greta née Hering (1899-1984). They had two daughters, Inga (Krystyna; b. 1926) and Rosel (Ewa; b. 1927), raised bilingually (they spoke German with their mother and Polish with their father) and Roman Catholic.

Before her marriage, Greta Hering was for a few years the caretaker of the children of Maurice and Frieda Axer (hence her name appears in Erwin Axer's Ćwiczenia pamięci (Memory Exercises), published in several volumes of memoirs - in many of the notes concerning his early childhood). Later on, they continued to maintain close contact, so close that the Axers invited Greta Haber and her family to summer holidays. Hence, photographs from Sławsko appear in the collection.

After Lviv was occupied by the Germans in 1941, Haber was imprisoned (in the autumn) in a camp in Vinnitsa. He kept accounts there and was valued by the commandant, which is probably why he was given several days' leave to return home (in the collection). He was executed as a hostage in October 1943.At the end of the war, his widow and daughters escaped from Lviv (already before the NKVD) to Rzeszów, using the surname Cieślewicz (Greta spelled her first name as Małgorzata), and then to Lubań.

The mementoes were donated to the museum by Krzysztof Krochmalski, son of the elder Haber daughter, together with the text of his extensive memoirs about his grandfather.

Przemysław Kaniecki