THE STORY
OF STEPHAN KRULIS’S SUITCASE
Sue Hampel
Over the last two decades, I have returned to the Auschwitz Memorial many times, accompanied by Australian university and high school students, adults and descendants of Holocaust survivors. These people are all interested in grappling with the past in some attempt to grasp the enormity of what happened here, in the largest Jewish ‘cemetery’ in the world.
As it turned out, Tom and Lorelle Krulis were part of a recent heritage tour that I took to Poland in June 2024. Tom had filled me in on his father’s story. Tom wanted to trace his father’s footsteps during the war period, with a particular focus on Auschwitz, where he knew his father and grandmother had been incarcerated. Tom had been made aware,
a couple of months before our trip, that his father’s suitcase had been identified with the name Stephan Krulis.
Fifteen year old Stephan Krulis had carried his battered dark brown leather suitcase on a transport from Theresienstadt ghetto to Auschwitz on 20 October 1944. He was one of 1500 Jews in the transport. After the selection, 173 men became prisoners, and Stephan was registered and tattooed with the number B-13533. Only 76 people from this transport survived until liberation (including psychiatrist Viktor Frankl).
Stephan was ordered by SS guards to leave the suitcase on the train. What we do know about Stephan is that on arrival into Auschwitz, he was advised to lie about his age, so when questioned on the ramp, he replied in fluent German that he was 17 years old, healthy and fit for hard labour.
Stephan spent 4-5 days in this camp before he was transferred to Furstengrube and Gleiwitz subcamps of Auschwitz and then Mittelbau-Dora and finally to Bergen Belsen where he was liberated on 15 April 1945. Stephan’s mother, Esther Krulis died in Auschwitz on 6 March 1943.
Tom grew up with knowledge of his father’s stories. He knew the history of Stephan’s survival against the odds. But the suitcase that had been left on the train in October 1944, wasn’t part of that story.
So it was serendipitous that when Tom was visiting the Memorial, not long after he had seen the photo of his father’s suitcase in a Polish history book, he knew it was imperative to locate this important item. Our guide was Paweł Sawicki, deputy spokesman of the Museum and editor-in-chief of Memoria. When he was given the information about Stephan’s suitcase, within ten minutes, thanks to the detective skills of Hanna Kubik and Łukasz Janiga from the Collections of the Museum, Tom set eyes on his father’s suitcase. Over 80 years had passed, and this precious possession was now in the gloved hands of his son, Tom.
I watched Tom’s face full of emotion as he encountered this relic from the past. I thought about all those people who had passed through the gates of Auschwitz, never to return. I thought about my father, Andre Zelig, who was the same age as Stephan when he arrived at Birkenau in May 1944 with his entire family, only be the sole survivor of this nightmare. Did he also leave a battered brown suitcase on the ramp that could be discovered by his daughter one day?
There are spaces in Auschwitz Memorial dedicated to the belongings and personal possessions brought by deportees and found at the site of the camp after liberation. Thousands of items are on display behind walled glass panels, including suitcases, kitchen utensils, shoes, eyeglasses, and religious objects. They bear witness not only to the scale of the plunder carried out by Nazi Germany, but also to the suffering and death of their owners.
10