Miriam Gold was born on November 30, 1930, in the Romanian city of Bacău. Her first memories weren’t of words or people, but of wool—warm, comforting, the scent of lanolin and lavender. She was just three years old the first time her grandmother, Buba Esther, placed yarn in her tiny hands and said, “We tell stories in loops, not letters.”
Miriam believed her.
While other children in the courtyard played with balls or dolls, Miriam sat beside her Buba, needles clicking like clock hands, forming stitches of time. Her favorite color was blue. Her second favorite was sunset-orange. Her fingers moved quickly, and her eyes never missed a dropped stitch.
“You knit like you’ve done it in another life,” her grandmother often said.
Miriam didn’t know about past lives, but she believed in patterns, in warmth, in memory.
2. The Blanket of Names
When she was seven, Miriam began her first real project: a blanket made of squares, each one a color for someone she loved.
Royal blue for her father, Elias, a schoolteacher who smelled like ink and pipe tobacco. Raspberry red for her mother, Rifka, who hummed lullabies even while baking. Pale green for her baby brother Yitzhak, who laughed when the light hit the spoon just right.
Each stitch was a story. Each row a memory.
Buba added her own: mustard yellow, the color of sunflowers from the old village in Moldova; coal-gray for the husband she'd lost in the Great War.
“We knit what we remember,” she’d say, “because memory unravels.”
Miriam nodded. She didn’t understand all of it—but she knew this: threads told truth.
3. A City of Shadows – 1940
By the time Miriam turned ten, the world outside her yarn was changing. Laws came. Neighbors disappeared. Her father came home one day with bruises on his face and silence in his mouth.
Jews were no longer allowed in certain schools. Shops were vandalized. The bakery that sold her favorite walnut strudel was boarded up.
One morning, she asked her grandmother, “Can threads protect us?”
Buba said, “Not from hate. But they can remind us we were whole once.”
So Miriam kept knitting. Scarves for children who no longer smiled. Hats for neighbors who had been stripped of dignity. A sleeve here, a repair there—tiny acts of defiance against unraveling.
4. The Yarn Smuggler
In 1941, when the ghetto was formed, their world shrank to a few streets and a few meals a week. But somehow, Buba kept getting yarn.
No one ever asked how.
Some said she had friends in the resistance. Others believed she traded heirlooms. Miriam never asked. She only watched, as her grandmother’s hands trembled more but refused to rest.
They shared a blanket with another family, and Miriam’s half was stitched with words in Hebrew: Zachor. Remember.
She began secretly knitting wristbands for the children—tiny pieces of thread with their initials, favorite colors, or little patterns like leaves or stars.
“Why?” a boy once asked her.
“So someone will know you were here,” Miriam said.
5. The Night of Burning Books
In the winter of 1942, the Nazis ordered the destruction of all Jewish books, sacred and secular. A pile was made in the square. People were forced to watch.
Miriam stood behind a wire fence and clutched a small ball of wool in her pocket. It was all she had left of her father’s old sweater.
As the flames rose, Buba whispered, “When they burn books, they burn people next.”
That night, Miriam didn’t sleep. She picked up her needles and began a new project: a scarf in two colors—ashes and snow. She didn't know what it would become, only that it needed to be made.
6. Threads in the Cattle Car
In early 1944, the Gold family was deported.
They were herded into a cattle car—forty people, no food, little air, children crying, old men praying.
Miriam held her knitting bag like it was a baby. In it were scraps: blue, gray, green, yellow. The beginnings of a shawl. And a pair of needles, sharpened thin to look like hairpins.
For two days, she didn’t move. She just counted stitches in her head. Forward loop. Purl. Slip stitch.
A woman beside her noticed. “Why bother?” she asked. “We are not going anywhere good.”
Miriam replied, “Then I’ll carry something good there.”
7. Auschwitz – The Land of Nothing
The gates of Auschwitz were made of iron lies.
Miriam was separated from her grandmother within minutes. Then from her mother. She never saw her brother again.
Children were kept in a special barrack. Cold. Crowded. Colorless.
But at night, beneath the straw, Miriam pulled out her knitting. Not to wear, but to remember.
She made small squares—hidden in the lining of her uniform. Each night, she added one stitch. One loop. One breath.
A girl beside her named Zofia asked, “What is that?”
Miriam said, “My family. They live here now.”
Zofia asked, “Are you afraid?”
“Yes,” Miriam said. “But this helps.”
8. The Patchwork Underground
By April, a group of girls in the children’s barracks were secretly helping Miriam. They stole threads—cut from hems, found on corpses, plucked from old sacks. A red string from a fallen glove. A blue thread from a curtain used as a rag.
Each color was a person. A story.
They called themselves the Patchwork Underground.
At night, they huddled close and stitched in the dark.
“We can’t escape,” Zofia whispered, “but our thread can.”
9. The Final Stitch
In the summer of 1944, selections increased. Rumors of liberation came. So did rumors of extermination.
One night, a guard discovered a scrap of the knitting. It had a tiny embroidered name: Yitzhak.
He grabbed Miriam. “What is this?”
“A memory,” she said.
He slapped her. Took the cloth. She didn’t cry.
That night, she made one last square with the last of the red thread. She stitched one word in trembling Hebrew: Tikvah—hope.
The next day, Miriam Gold was sent to the gas chamber.
She was thirteen years old.
10. After the Smoke
When Auschwitz was liberated, a Russian nurse found something wedged beneath a loose board in the children’s barrack. A tiny bundle of cloth, threadbare but colorful.
It was a patchwork of twenty-one squares. Some had names. Others just initials. A few were simply colors.
Folded inside was a note in Romanian, written in childish script:
“My name is Miriam Gold. I am thirteen. I knit to remember.
If this is found, please know we were here. We had names. We had homes. We had hearts.” - from a FB article by Defined History
Just another reminder that knitting is good for the soul...
Keep clicking and stitching,
Glenys
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