וישלחו את כתנת הפסים ויביאו אל אביהם ויאמרו זאת מצאנו הכר נא הכתנת בנך הוא אם לא ... (לז-לב)
The clothing worn by prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps contributed to their dehumanization by erasing individuality and reducing them to an indistinct mass. The highly visible and distinctive colors made any attempt to escape extremely difficult. Each inmate was issued one set of clothes. Any loss of items, especially the cap, was punished. Clothing could be changed only every six to eight weeks. Prisoners had no soap, and rarely had the strength to wash their clothes in the little free time allowed them. Holocaust historians say that finding coats and jackets from the camps today are fairly rare, since most of the clothing worn by concentration camp prisoners was burned because of lice and other potential diseases. Also, most freed prisoners didn’t want to leave reminders of their horrifying ordeal and never thought to keep them around.
The story of Benzion Peresecki - who later became Ben Peres - is told in extraordinary detail, thanks largely to the serial number on his prisoner jacket and careful records he kept and that his family found after he died. A woman by the name of Jillian Eisman was rummaging through a packed closet during a Long Island tag sale when she immediately recognized the symbol of horror and hate: A jacket worn by a prisoner at the Nazi Dachau concentration camp during World War II.
“I knew exactly what it was, even before I saw the numbers (on the chest),” said Eisman, who purchased the jacket for $2 at the sale and donated it to the Kupferberg Holocaust Center. Curators there not only put the jacket on display but also unearthed the story of the person who wore it: Ben Peres, a teenager forced to make munitions for the German war effort, spent four years in a DP camp and then came to America, never telling his children much about Dachau or that he kept the jacket.
In some labor camps during the winter months, inmates received a prisoner outfit made of somewhat heavier material and, if they were very lucky, a coat or sweater as well. Very few people owned an actual coat in the camps, and used a “kotz” - a woolen blanket, that was draped over their bodies for protection against the harsh elements.
One young woman, by the name of Esther Grosz, possessed such a “kotz” and wore it at all times, for fear that it might be discarded by the SS, or someone might steal it in the night. She came up with a brilliant plan. On her way to work on the night shift, she noticed a female day-shift laborer who was walking in the bitter cold without a coat. The woman heading for the day shift was without a coat because the Germans had punished her for some imagined “misdeed” by taking away her coat.
Esther felt compassion for this woman who would be forced to work for hours without protection from the elements.
One morning, as her night-shift was walking back into camp and the day-shift was heading out, she made eye contact with the woman and without hesitation, threw her “kotz” to the woman. The woman, Rivka Weiss, was surprised at this sudden action, but also very thankful. She had been working in freezing conditions for quite some time and did not know how she would survive day after day under these conditions. Rivka wore the coat all day and when her shift ended and she was now heading back into the camp, she saw Esther walking out to begin her night-shift. Instantly, she threw the coat back to her. The next day, this “coat throwing” repeated itself and continued throughout the duration of the war. The person heading to work wore the kotz.
This coat throwing was very risky. Obviously, had they been spotted by an SS guard while the coat was being transferred, it could have spelled disaster. It would seem that the genuine kindness of both women, was their merit of protection. Furthermore, had one of them gone back to her barracks one day with a kotz, and the next day without one, too many questions would have resulted and both women might have been paying with their lives. The fact that they each wore the coat half the day resulted in no one in the sleeping quarters finding out that she had obtained the kotz, when in fact it was shared with another person intentionally. At the Labor Camp, this was not known and therefore went unnoticed.
After liberation, the two women met. Although both had the same maiden name Grosz, they were not related by blood and lived in different countries. However, Rivka was married to Ephraim Weiss, who just so happened to be Esther’s first cousin.