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On Thursday, 10 July 2025, a personal belonging of Halina Kucharczyk (née Łątkiewicz), a survivor of the Ravensbrück concentration camp, was returned to her granddaughters Sylwia and Anna at the Ravensbrück Memorial Museum.

The return took place as part of the #StolenMemory initiative run by the Arolsen Archives. The project is dedicated to giving back personal items that were taken from people persecuted by the Nazis. Halina Kucharczyk’s ring had been kept in the personal effects storage at Ravensbrück and was returned to her family thanks to the efforts of a project volunteer.

#StolenMemory
Watches, wedding rings, letters and photographs – in the concentration camps, the Nazis took everything from the people they imprisoned. Around 2,000 of these items, known as Effekten, are still kept at the Arolsen Archives and are waiting to be returned to the families of their original owners. Some of these items, including Halina Kucharczyk’s ring, were taken from women imprisoned at Ravensbrück and stored by the SS in the camp’s effects storage.

Halina Łątkiewicz (later Kucharczyk) was born on 6 February 1924 in Warsaw, where she lived with her mother. In the summer of 1944, during the Warsaw Uprising, she was arrested by the German occupiers and deported to Ravensbrück. It is likely that she was later transferred to one of the many subcamps of Neuengamme – the envelope holding her ring suggests this. Halina was liberated by the American army on 2 May 1945. Later that year, she married Stanisław Kucharczyk in a Displaced Persons camp in Schleswig-Holstein. In December 1945, the couple returned to Poland. Halina died there in June 1999.

In spring 2025, project volunteer Manuela Golc was able to contact the family through the cemetery office in Radom. The visit to the memorial last Thursday was the family’s first. For Halina’s granddaughters, it was an emotional experience. They shared that their grandmother had never spoken about her time in the camp. They only learned about the ring a few months ago.

The family brought photos and documents from their personal archive and shared copies with the memorial and the Arolsen Archives.

This was the first time a personal item was returned to a family at the Ravensbrück Memorial Museum as part of the #StolenMemory project.