This charm bracelet was assembled by Greta Perlman, a prisoner in the Theresienstadt concentration camp during World War II. Very little is known about Perlman. She was a Czech Jew and was interned in Theresienstadt from late 1941 to late 1944. On October 4, 1944, she was deported to the Auschwitz death camp and later to Bergen-Belsen. She survived and immigrated to the United States after the war.


Theresienstadt, also known by its Czech name of Terezín, was originally a small town in Bohemia. Under the Nazi occupation in World War II, it was turned into a transit camp for Jews and other prisoners on their way to extermination sites. The Germans designed it to appear to the world as a “model settlement.”


Internees were sometimes able to make artworks clandestinely in the camp workshops, but a large group of charms like this is very rare. They were either given to Perlman as personal mementos or collected by her in exchange for food, when she worked in the camp kitchen. She may have gathered the pieces into a bracelet later, in the United States.


Much of the art produced in the camp has come down to us because it was bricked up in walls or buried by prisoners before their deportation to extermination camps, and recovered after the Liberation. Although we do not know for certain, this is probably how the charms survived, along with the five watercolors on display in this gallery. They were made at Theresienstadt by prisoner artists and bequeathed by Perlman to the Jewish Museum in 1975, along with the bracelet.
The charms on Perlman’s bracelet, made in secret and under duress, bear hidden meanings. To decode them sheds light on her life and her struggle to survive.