Reply to Thread

Message:: [QUOTE="DonnaML, post: 5646435, member: 110350"][USER=111037]@Only a Poor Old Man[/USER], please understand that loss of property was the least of it.  Coincidentally, today happens to be Holocaust Memorial Day, and I would be thinking about all of this anyway, but it's difficult to talk about. So I'll try to do it  once here, so I can refer people to this post if they ask about it in the future. (I don't think [USER=73385]@tibor[/USER] will mind this further derailing of his thread, given our communications today by private message.) As briefly as possible, my mother lost 11 people in her immediate family to the Holocaust -- seven uncles and aunts, two grandparents, and two first cousins. Seven of the 11 were born and/or lived in the family house in the photos, and were deported by the Nazis on Oct. 22, 1940, along with most of the rest of the Jews of Baden, to concentration camps run by the Vichy French in Southern France. Four of those seven were later gassed at Auschwitz before the end of 1942 (including my mother's Aunt Martha, the one in the photo), and the other three died elsewhere -- one of them, my mother's Uncle Gustav, machine-gunned in a ditch in May 1944 in Lithuania or Latvia, where the "Convoy 73" train from Drancy near Paris had taken him and 900 other Jews, one (my great-grandfather Moses) who died of the cold and disease at the age of 86 in March 1941, four months after his deportation from Baden to a French-run concentration camp, and one (my great-grandmother Lina) who survived four years in two camps until Liberation in 1944, in the hope of seeing her children again, but died a few weeks later. By comparison, my mother herself was lucky enough to be on the first Kindertransport to England in Dec. 1938, three weeks after Kristallnacht, leaving her home and country and parents at the age of 15. Her parents managed to survive in Berlin until May 27, 1941 (a few months before the borders of the Reich were closed to Jewish emigration and the deportations from Berlin to the "East" began), when they were able to get a ship to the USA after taking a sealed train from Berlin to the French-Spanish border under Gestapo guard, and then another train through Spain to Portugal and Lisbon. My mother joined them in NYC in late 1943, after spending nearly five years with two foster-families, mostly in London, and then living on her own. Thus, the compensation proceedings begun in West Germany circa 1949 or 1950 by the surviving family members, the heirs of those who perished, involvedmore than the loss of the house (which was confiscated) and the property it contained -- which was all sold at public auction, down to the last used pillow, a couple of months after the deportation, on Dec. 13, 1940. This is the list of auction results for the sale of my great-grandparents' property, which I was able to find a few years ago in one of the restitution files I obtained from the archive in Freiburg. It includes the names of the buyers of each item, with the proceeds to the German government totaling 1,020 RM. [ATTACH=full]1242319[/ATTACH][ATTACH=full]1242320[/ATTACH] In addition to compensation for the property inside the house, I believe the family (including my mother as heir to my grandmother, who died in 1947) also received perhaps 4,000 or 5,000 DM in total compensation for the house itself, sometime in the early 1950s.  I don't remember the exchange rate with the dollar back then, although I once looked it up. (As mentioned, I was able to order copies of the restitution case files from the archive in Freiburg, one file for each murdered family member.) I do remember as one other example that in 1956 the family received a total of 600 DM in compensation for the "wrongful imprisonment" and death of my great-grandfather, calculated as 150 DM (considerably less than that in dollars) for each of the four full months he was in the camp from Oct. 22, 1940 until his death on March 19, 1941. Compensation for the two partial months was denied, because not specifically authorized by the restitution laws. Here is the relevant portion of the decision, translated into English: [ATTACH=full]1242347[/ATTACH] Sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s -- some of these proceedings dragged on well into the 1970s -- my mother was awarded about $5,000 on her claim for "interruption of education." You have to remember that many of the West German judicial officials who made these determinations had rather dubious histories themselves under the Nazi regime. Complete de-Nazification would have left nobody to run West Germany, as the rationale went. The reason I was in the village of my grandmother's family in 2018 (together with my son), and was able to photograph the old family house, was to be present, and to speak, at the ceremony to install seven "Stolpersteine" (see <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolperstein" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolperstein" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolperstein</a>) on the sidewalk in front of the house, one for each perished member of the family.  Unfortunately, my mother couldn't be there; she died many years ago, when I was 20, as a result of a car accident we were in while she was driving me home from college at the end of a school year. So my son and I represented her, and her branch of the family. Other family members, also descendants of my great-grandparents, attended from France, Belgium, and Israel. Here are photos of the seven Stolpersteine, before and after installation: . [ATTACH=full]1242350[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]1242351[/ATTACH] Five of the seven have no actual graves, so these will be the only tangible individual memorial they will ever have. This has all been a brief summary of my family's history in the mid-20th century, written in a way that I hope avoids specifically identifying myself too much.  I could write a book! And, in fact, an 85-page journal-sized booklet about my family was written by a group of German people living in the area, with my involvement, and was published in conjunction with the Stolpersteine ceremony, with photos and documents (mostly old family letters I have from the 1933-1945 period) that I contributed. An expanded version into a full-length book is in the works. Both are in German. I hope this explains things a little.[/QUOTE]

Create my FREE Account!

Log in or Sign up

Reply to Thread

Useful Searches