Gratitude Monday: Base and precious metals

Last week NPR reported a story that really reached out to me. You may recall an earlier story of how staff at the Auschwitz museum discovered two pieces of jewelry hidden in the false bottom of an enamel mug. The original owner—one of hundreds of thousands to pass through the work-and-death camp—is unknown, so the narrative surrounding the mug, the ring and the necklace remains ephemeral and very sad.

But that report sparked a listener to contact NPR with a similar story from her own family history. You can read it here, but the condensed version is that when the German army began the invasion of Poland in 1939, a Jewish couple in Warsaw, Guta and Meyer Rak, took precautions against the presumed chaotic future. They took their gold jewelry to a goldsmith and asked him to melt it down and hide it in the lip of an ordinary tin tea canister.

When they picked it up some time later, of course there was no way of knowing whether the goldsmith had done what he’d been paid for, because the whole point was that the precious metal be completely hidden. He could well just have kept the gold as well as their payment, lined the tin with more base metal and handed that over; after all—even if they did discover deceit, what could they do about it? The Raks took the canister with them as they fled to the East, and it stayed with them through years in Soviet labor camps, and more years of travel until they settled in the Bronx.

They never attempted to retrieve the gold—they always managed with what was visible, without having to dip into their secret reserve—so they lived their long lives without knowing whether their reserve still existed. It took them decades before they even told their daughter what the rusty old tea canister represented.

But when their granddaughter was planning her wedding, she decided to use whatever metal the tin contained for her wedding rings. She found a jeweler who likes a challenge, and he made a special tool to pull out the lining around the lip that would cause minimal damage to the canister.

And he found gold.

The Warsaw goldsmith had not taken advantage of the dark times to cheat customers he would never see again. And he’d done a masterful job using lead to solder the gold securely to tin—apparently a tricky balance.

The Raks kept their battered old canister with them for 70 years, trusting that, whatever came along, they could always pull out something extra from the can if it was needed to get them to better times. But they managed without ever needing it.

And their granddaughter and her husband wear daily reminders of that story of honor, trust, hope and resilience.

I am grateful that this story has come to light to remind us that such precious metals are possible, even in the basest of times.