Never Forget

For more than seven decades, Rose Maklan Ross held tightly to family artifacts from the Holocaust.

As a child who was born in a displaced camp – and whose parents survived Auschwitz, Kaiserwald and Stutthof – these were treasured items. But, after the Delray Beach resident read that the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s acquisitions curator was looking for remnants of the Holocaust in South Florida, she decided to donate part of her collection to the organization. 

“When I saw the article in the SunSentinel, I felt as if I could finally let go and felt that I was able to give my parents the respect and acknowledgment that they were indeed there, survived the Holocaust and had a place where they could rest,” Ross said in a press release. 

The donated items include photos from the displaced persons camp and documents identifying her parents, Leo and Gisela, as camp survivors. 

“My mother never wanted to speak about the past, but I grew up consumed by the ghosts, the nightmares that would sometimes come to me of faces I have never seen,” Ross said in a press release. “I am 73, and, in case something happened to me, I did not want the boxes storing our family’s remnants from the Holocaust to go to my children, have them look at it, talk, cry and then respectfully put it into another box and on another shelf.”

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