John Löwenhardt

The fruits of revenge

27 January 2023 by John Löwenhardt Leave a Comment

A personal quest
Written and published in 2013, republished on this website on the occasion of its tenth anniversary.

It took many decades for the quest to mature. In 2010 an event triggered it. The quest suddenly popped up. I was sixty-two years of age. It has since come to dominate my life, it has turned into the purpose of my life. The quest is one of recreation and reconstruction. And ultimately, a very personal revenge on Hitler and the Nazis who sought to obliterate my relatives. They succeeded in killing most – I estimate three-quarters of them. They must not succeed in wiping out the memory of their lives before the Holocaust. I will not let them.

Recreation and reconstruction… Four large extended Jewish families from the Netherlands – German border area. The Weijls from Oldenzaal, the Ten Brinks from Denekamp, the De Leeuws from Almelo and the Löwenhardts from the Ruhr area. Twenty-five nuclear families in all. How did they live? What was their livelihood? Their social position? Their religious attitude? Fromm and observant or highly assimilated? Participation in Jewish social life? What did they speak about, how and where did they find marriage partners?
Continue below the picture >>

My grandparents Löwenhardt-Ten Brink (left) and De Leeuw-Weijl, Enschede appr. 1940
All were murdered in October 1944

I knew, three years ago, that it would not be easy. The sources are limited. They did not write letters or diaries – and if they did, these have been lost. I had a small collection of photographs, and very few written documents – that was all. Possibly the most important document I had read in secret, as a young boy: seven, eight years old – perhaps nine. It was on the nightstand of my parents and I read it without them noticing. It was a carbon copy of a procès-verbal. It reported on the interrogation of the men who had murdered my maternal grandparents. Attached to it was a report on the exhumation and identification of human remains found in shallow graves in the forest near Vierhouten, dated 7 November 1945. Among them were my grandfather Arnold de Leeuw, my grandmother Louisa and uncle Johan de Leeuw, their son. My mother was the only survivor. Neither she nor my father ever knew that I had read these documents.

I jump from the mid-1950s to 2010. On a Monday morning in February, I attended an event in the public library of Dortmund-Eving, the city district including the former village of Lindenhorst where my grandparents Löwenhardt had lived. Some eighty people (including a neo-Nazi sympathizer) had gathered for the presentation of a folder guiding people along places of remembrance. It had come about as a result of the endeavours of volunteers who had researched the histories of victims of the Holocaust, including my grandparents. Two years before I had witnessed the placing of two ‘Stumble stones’ (Stolpersteine) in the pavement in front of their former butcher’s shop at Lindenhorster Straße 235.

That morning in the Dortmund library was the trigger. Impressed by the large turnout and the work of the many volunteers, I told myself that I must act. I was sitting on pictures, memories and (a few) documents… and doing nothing. They, the volunteers, had no direct relation to my ancestors, no responsibility for the crimes of their fathers and grandfathers, and no good reason to ask me for forgiveness (as two years before, to my embarrassment, an older gentleman had done while trying to embrace me). It was high time for me to save my ancestors from oblivion.

Did I expect to succeed? I expected nothing at all. The urge soon developed into an obsession. It overshadowed any thought of expectations. I just had to do it. Could I have imagined, three years ago, what I have found in the meantime? By no means, no way. The findings have been beyond belief. I have found – and am in touch with – four living relatives about whom I had never heard before. Two are in Australia, one is in Africa, and the fourth is in New York. I soon discovered that those who managed to escape from the horrors of our continent gave me the biggest headaches. It was far easier to trace the lives of those who had been swallowed by the gas chambers than those who had rebuilt their lives in foreign lands.

I was lucky: the start of my quest coincided with the launch of a new website, ‘CommunityJoodsMonument’ (CJM, Community Jewish Monument), built around the database of the 102,000 Jewish Holocaust victims deported from The Netherlands. Isaac Lipschits (1930-2008) campaigned for their names to be turned into an online monument. In 2005 the website had been launched. Five years later, the year in which I started my quest, a blogging community was added to the online monument. From the start, I could search for lost relatives online – and publish my stories about them on the same site.

From early youth I had known that most of them had been murdered in gas chambers. But this had always been knowledge in the abstract. As I collected names and fates, more and more names and dreadful fates, the full extent of the horror hit home. It brought me to tears, tears my parents had not been able to shed. For them, burdened by guilt feelings, the urge had been to forget and to move on.

Slowly and with great effort, names were put on the faces in the pictures that I had inherited from my parents. The family took shape and acquired a face. And each time I could upload a picture and a story to the CJM site, it felt like victory: they were BACK, snatched away from oblivion. Their bodies had been turned into ashes, their faces had lain in the dark of a wooden box for some seventy years. Now they went onto the internet, for anybody anywhere in the world to see and notice. It was all the gratification that I needed. My role was a humble one. Find them, identify them, give them a face and show it to the world.

But there was more to come. In July 2010 I was able to visit the grave of my great-grandmother Pauline Löwenhardt-Lennhoff (1847-1933) in the Jewish section of the cemetery of Dortmund-Wambel. The gravestone had been discovered by my friend Magdalena Strugholz. A few days later I was in Lütgeneder, the village where my other great-grandmother had been born – and discovered that the street where her house was located now bore the family name: Kleeblattstraße. Three months later I stood at her grave in Denekamp, Hannchen ten Brink-Kleeblatt (1861-1930). On 3 February 2011, I received notice from the Dortmund city archive that my grandfather’s brother Siegmund and his wife had not only had a daughter (All three murdered in Auschwitz), but two sons as well – who had escaped to England in March 1939. Even more results, excellent results, were to come. One month later one of these two sons, Hans-Georg Löwenhardt, left a note for me on the JCM site. He had changed his name long ago but was alive and well in Africa, 87 years old. I started a Skype conversation with the living past.

And more unexpected findings. In July 2011 I discovered the wartime correspondence between two sisters, nieces of my grandfather Löwenhardt. They were Klara in Westerbork Transit Camp and Friedel in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Their short letters allowed me to reconstruct the first (and only) three years in the life of Klara’s son Kurt Ikenberg.

My task was complicated by an early decision. I knew that I was not alone. Many are researching and publicizing the fates of their lost Jewish relatives. But most of my fellow researchers deal with one person, one nuclear family… or one extended family at the most. I had decided otherwise. I had grown up lacking grandparents. But was there a good reason to ‘do’ only these two couples, Arnold and Louisa de Leeuw (parents of my mother) and Adolf and Julia Löwenhardt (parents of my father)? Could I ignore (out of pragmatism? cost effectiveness?) their brothers and sisters and the children of these brothers and sisters? By what criterion? Of course, I could not.

So from the start, I deal with twenty-five nuclear families, twelve in Germany and thirteen in the Twente region in the east of The Netherlands. It is no mean task and it will see no end. Its vastness allows for no planning. It makes no sense to start with, for example, Arnold and Louisa and their son Johan, murdered by Dutch SS in the forest near Vierhouten, to research their lives in full depth before I move on to a second family. I will not live to be 120 years, it would take too long. So guided by findings in archives, chance emails that arrive in my inbox, and my accidental stumbling into hidden data, I switch from one family to another. More or less by trial and error. The picture will never be complete, the entire family picture. But it gradually loses its opaqueness. Small sections of contours in different parts of the picture turn sharp, more and more of them.

A Dutch proverb says The tree of revenge does not carry fruit. My revenge has carried many fruits. If you want to see for yourself, read the stories published on this website since 27 January 2013.

The way to the Löwenhardts

13 October 2021 by John Löwenhardt 1 Comment

by guest author Sebastian Zimmer, Oranienburg, Germany

In 2021, my wife and I began to take a closer look at our two family stories. The decisive factor was a death that moved us very much and made us realize how little we actually knew. We set ourselves the goal of learning from the living everything there is to learn in order to collect and document these findings. We created family trees and quickly received many hits on the Internet. For the first time, we were able to view documents and public registrations about our family.

It was a lot of fun and increased our motivation to continue searching. We searched the Internet for family members descended from the Löwenhardts. Here we came across the page of John Löwenhardt. Through the data on the Löwenhardt Foundation website, we originally concluded that the family came from West Germany / Oberhemer and did not fit in with our Löwenhardt family from Berlin / Brandenburg. We therefore did not establish a connection, which would later turn out to be wrong.

A few years ago, we received additional information about our family from a cousin of my grandmother. Marion Lubina had documents, photos and records. From her and the documents, we learned that we are of Jewish descent. I was very surprised because nothing hinting at this had been passed on in our family. Many questions were asked and my search went in a new direction.

Later I also learned important details from closer relatives. Again and again, the question arose, are we really of Jewish descent? How do you determine this and were our ancestors also aware of it? There was disagreement in the family about this. Some could not understand the connections properly. Only one point was clear, namely that my great-grandmother Gerda Eischleb was Jewish. On her, they had a death certificate in Hebrew script.

At that point, I was summarizing what data I had. I knew my great-grandmother Gerda was Jewish and was married to a non-Jew, Curt Eischleb. They owned a typewriter shop in Berlin Charlottenburg. My maternal great-great-grandmother was Selma Löwenhardt. She lived in Kleiststraße in Berlin Schöneberg.

When developing the family tree, I noticed that for the most part the women’s names were known, but those of the husbands were not. This is also the case with my great-great-grandmother Selma. No matter which relative I asked, I always got the answer that they were sure, her name was Selma. However, nobody knew her husband’s name. This is exactly what awakened my ambition to find the name of Selma’s husband and to have clarity. Of course, I was also interested in other details such as Selma’s birth name and how she had passed away. About the cause of death, there was only speculation. At the same time, I continued to be concerned with the “Jewish question”, to what extent all ancestors were aware that they were Jewish and how intensively they lived out Jewish customs?

With the information I had collected up to that point, I searched the Internet for more. I found what I was looking for faster than I thought. In an old phone book, I found Selma’s last name. The maiden name was Dobriner, living at Kleiststraße 3. The entry confirmed my previous data. The reference to her last name made it easier for me to get more details.

Now I searched a genealogy portal and found matches linked to documents that proved that in 1942 she was deported in “Welle Acht” (Eighth deportation Wave) from Berlin to the Riga ghetto and murdered together with a Heinz Löwenhardt.

But who was this Heinz Löwenhardt? Was he Selma’s child – or her husband? A child of whom the descendants knew nothing first raised skepticism. We were looking for more evidence of who Heinz Löwenhardt was. It was difficult to find out anything about him at first. There were several references to the name Heinz Löwenhardt.

Soon after, I found the marriage certificate of Selma Dobriner. It was written in Sütterlin [old German] script, which was not so easy for us to decipher. After several attempts, we read about the marriage between the wife Selma Löwenhardt, née Dobriner, born 1870 in Filehne and descending from Hermann and Ernestine Dobriner, née Leiser. The husband was Salomon Löwenhardt (merchant), born in Oberhemer in 1873, descended from Levy Löwenhardt and Pauline Lennhoff. They married on 28 August 1903 in Berlin Schöneberg.

Such a find! A single document that told us so much. We had found the name of the husband, his parents and those of Selma, as well as the date and place of marriage. Suddenly we became aware that Salomon was the firstborn son of the Löwenhardts from Oberhemer and that therefore the connection to John Löwenhardt had been the right track from the start. It was also clear that Heinz Löwenhardt could not be her husband. We now suspected that it had to be her son.

On the homepage and Facebook page Löwenhardt Foundation, we searched for further hints. We discovered the image of the garden party in Woodstock Illinois in 1956. The picture first steered our research in a different direction since we recognized other family members. Käthe Meyerowitz, daughter of Selma and Salomon Löwenhardt, and Alfred Meyerowitz sat together with their daughter Alice Meyerowitz at a table in the countryside. The youngest person Gerda Meyerowitz was only known to us through the naturalization notices. The Meyerowitz family members from Berlin had been in hiding separately from each other throughout Germany to survive. Johanna Löwenhardt had to be their aunt. Finding a family photo from the USA was a stroke of luck and overwhelming.

The story The firstborn on the picture and its aftermath can be read here. Suddenly I was linked to the widely extended Löwenhardt family from Oberhemer. That was more than I had ever dreamed of. A lively exchange of information now took place with John Löwenhardt.

To be continued: 1. The Tomb of Great-grandmother Gerda; 2. The grave of Great-great-grandfather Löwenhardt

A big thank you to my wife Tamara for the research and support in writing the texts.

Translated from German to English by John Löwenhardt

The firstborn

25 May 2021 by John Löwenhardt 4 Comments

Or: hidden by ivy

It began with a picture: a family gathering around a table in the garden. One man, three women and a girl named Gerda. An unusual picture, the five persons are identified by their first name. Date and place are known as well: 1956, McHenry Illinois, USA. The handwriting is Käthe’s. 1

I knew right away that Johanna in the center was Johanna Loewenhardt. She was born in Oberhemer, Germany, sixteen months after my grandfather Adolf. Johanna and he had ten siblings, the firstborn in 1873 and the youngest (Hermann) in 1892. Yes, a Jewish middle class family with twelve children.

At the time of the picture ‘aunt Hanny’ looked remarkably young for her 71 years. With her husband and two sons she had arrived in the USA in August 1910. When the picture was taken she had been a US citizen for 36 years. 2 But who were Alfred, Alice, Gerda and Käthe? Friends? Chance acquaintances? Family perhaps? Their first names did not ring a bell and they were not to be found in the extended family tree I have been researching since 2010.

Facebook

I had long forgotten about the mysterious picture when on 4 May 2021 Facebook alerted me to a message by Tamara Zimmer from Berlin. Tamara reacted to my posting of the picture almost eight years earlier. On 10 September 2013 I had written: WHO KNOWS THIS FAMILY? The picture was taken in Woodstock Illinois USA. Second from right sitting is Johanna Benning-Löwenhardt (1885-1972) with Alfred and Käthe (…) and their daughters Alice and Gerda. But… what was their family name?

In all those years no one had responded to my posting… until Tamara. The family name, she wrote, was Meyerowitz. Just one word, a name. It made a world of difference. My quest took off full speed. It led to unexpected findings.

Sebastian

Tamara referred me to her husband Sebastian and we started an email correspondence. He wrote that Käthe Meyerowitz was a daughter of Salomon Löwenhardt. It took me some time to grasp that he was referring to my great-uncle Salomon born in 1873 and not to his grandfather, my great-great grandfather Salomon. It was an Eureka moment indeed! As it later turned out, Sebastian is a great-great grandson of my great-uncle Salomon.

Grandfather Adolf Löwenhardt (1883-1944) came from a family of twelve siblings, three girls (including Johanna) and nine boys. Ever since I started my research into family history, data on the firstborn of these twelve had been lacking. Sometime in the 1950s the city authorities in Hermer, Westfalia, had sent my father birth certificates on eleven of the twelve children. Number one was Isidor Löwenhardt, born in December 1874. How come there had been twelve children but only eleven certificates?

With the help of Mr. Thomas, Hemer’s city archivist, I had found that civil registration had started only in 1874 and that earlier births, including those of Jewish children, were registered in church books only. And so I found Salomon, born in Oberhemer on 26 August 1873 and named after his grandfather. The firstborn! For a very long time this was all I knew about him. [See the simplified Löwenhardt family tree]

Sebastian mailed me scans of three important documents: Salomon’s civil marriage certificate made up in Berlin on 28 August 1903; his death certificate; and the birth certificate of his second daughter, Gerda.

Two days after his thirtieth birthday, Salomon married 32 years old Selma Dobriner from Filehne (now named Wieleń, in western Poland). By this time, Salomon was living in Berlin and this is where the couple settled. Their first child – daughter Edith – was born in December 1904 in Berlin-Rixdorf now Berlin-Neukölln. Two more girls and one boy were born in the following six years: Gerda in 1907, Käthe in 1908 and Heinz in 1910. In this period Salomon’s occupation was listed as bookkeeper and the family lived at Kaiserstraße 32a, probably in Berlin-Mariendorf.

The children were four to nine years old when in August 1914 their father had to report for the front. With his eight brothers he belonged to the Jewish family with almost the largest number of sons at the fronts. There were various reports in the press about the valiant Löwenhardt family and in 1917 their mother Pauline received a distinction from the Kaiser.

The death certificate indicated that Salomon died on 18 February 1923 when he was 49 years old. His widow Selma testified that he had died at home, Kleiststraße 3. She was 52 years old; the children were between 12 and 18 years. Salomon was buried at the Jewish Cemetery Berlin-Weißensee.

Bundesarchiv

Thanks to Sebastian Zimmer I now had an indication of Salomon Junior’s family. To start with the son: in years past I had noticed something remarkable when consulting the online Gedenkbuch 3 of the German National Archives, the Bundesarchiv. The Gedenkbuch listed one Heinz Löwenhardt born in Berlin in 1910, who had died in the Riga ghetto. The name of my very own father was Heinz Löwenhardt, born in Dortmund-Lindenhorst in 1913 – but he had fled Germany in 1935 and thanks to his timely departure I can write these words. It now transpired that the Berlin Heinz was the only son of Selma and Salomon Junior and a cousin of my father.

At the time of his death, Salomon’s occupation was listed as tradesman and the family lived in an elegant section of the German capital, Berlin-Charlottenburg. His widow Selma lived to be 71. With her son Heinz and 1.032 other Berlin Jews, she was deported to the ghetto of Riga in Latvia on 13 January 1942. They had continued living at Kleiststraße 3. On the transport list, Heinz’s profession and civil status were listed as worker and single, ‘able to work’. The train arrived after a gruesome journey of three days and nights. Selma and Heinz were never seen again.

Heinz had been the fourth child. About the first two, Edith (born 1904) and Gerda (1906-39) we know little. But we know much more on Käthe, who was born in Berlin on 7 July 1908.

In July 1933, a few months after Hitler had come to power, Käthe Löwenhardt married the 29 years old engineer Alfred Meyerowitz. Alfred had been born into a Jewish family in Gelsenkirchen in the industrial Ruhr area. The marriage ceremony in Berlin took place two days before Käthe’s 25th birthday. For this family, things happened in the first days of July: the day before their second marriage anniversary, their first daughter was born and they named her Alice.

Arolsen

The details of Heinz’ profession and status I found in the transport list of the 8th ‘East transport’ from Berlin dated 13 January 1942, held in the archives of Bad Arolsen in Hessen, Germany. ‘Arolsen Archives’ is the current name for the International Tracing Service that started shortly after the Second World War. It had a huge task in tracking down displaced and missing persons. Since a few years the archives present their holdings on victims of Nazi persecution through a publicly accessible search machine that is a great asset to reseachers like me. A vast amount of Nazi records has been digitalized.

The Arolsen Archives are a valuable addition to the Gedenkbuch since their scope is much wider. The Gedenkbuch lists only basic data of Jews living in and deported from Germany whereas the Arolsen Archives present original documents as well. It has collected sources on all victims of nazi persecution, irrespective of their country of origin.

So it will be of no surprise that after ‘Heinz Löwenhardt’ my next query in the digital Arolsen archive was ‘Meyerowitz’. The picture with which it all started testified to the fact that Alfred, Käthe and Alice had managed to survive the Holocaust – but how, and where? I had been told that Käthe might have had a number tattooed on her left arm, indicating that she had been deported to Auschwitz… Was there any indication in the records?

I found none. Neither of Käthe, nor of Alfred or Alice. The Arolsen archive holds several documents on them but none of these point to them having been caught by the Nazi authorities. Had any of them been deported to a camp or ghetto, I would have expected traces of this in the archive. Nothing of the sort – so the story of their survival remained hidden.

The archives hold, for example, Alice’s vaccination card filled out at her first vaccination on 25 April 1936. I shows that she entered school in Berlin at age six in 1941.

Yad Vashem

Possibly the Meyerowitz family was among the approximately two thousand Berlin Jews who went underground and survived. Perhaps try Yad Vashem’s databases, I thought. The Yad Vashem Institute and Museum in Jerusalem has been collecting data for a long time and it awards the ‘Righteous Among Nations’ distinction to courageous people who helped Jews survive the Shoah, often at great risk to themselves.

And indeed, it took me only a few clicks in two online databases to find that Alice had been saved by the catholic priest, later much respected cardinal Joseph Höffner (1906-1987) and his sister Helene. In 2004 Yad Vashem awarded them the Righteous Among Nations Distinction. 4

In 1942 Höffner was a young priest in Kail on Moselle river when a group of children evacuated from Berlin arrived. Among the children was the eight-year-old Esther Meyerowitz who concealed her Jewish identity by the name of Christa Koch. This evacuation was part of a programme termed Kinderlandverschickung aimed at moving non-Jewish children out of harm’s way, i.e. out of the large cities.

Höffner knew in advance that Christa Koch was Jewish. His sister Elisabeth in Berlin had arranged the cover. At her arrival he saw to the child’s well being in person. First he placed her with a sister who worked for the local church without telling her Christa’s true identity. When in the Spring of 1943 Höffner was to be transferred to Trier, the Heucher family of farmers in Kail agreed to take her in. In their farmhouse Esther-Christa survived unharmed. In October 1945 Höffner applied with the American military administration for permission for Esther to travel to Berlin to be reunited with her parents.

Kath.net

To me only one question remained. Was the Esther Meyerowitz / Christa Koch of the Yad Vashem databases really Alice Meyerowitz? Was it wishful thinking, perhaps? Could I be mistaken? A Google search led to the German catholic news site Kath.net, with a report of 7 May 2004 on the presentation of the Yad Vashem awards. From this report it appears that the name Alice was added to Esther’s first name at the moment of Höffners application with the American military for a travel permit. There is no doubt that the girl’s real name was Alice. That name was on her vaccination card (Impfkarte) created in April 1936 when she received her first shot. At the moment she went underground in Berlin and Elisabeth Höffner ‘inserted’ her in the Kinderlandverschickung programme, her real first name was entirely dropped when Christa Koch became the false name for Esther Meyerowitz.

Berlin street books

Alice was ten years old when in October 1945 she was reunited with her parents, one month after her sister Gerda (Esther) was born. They lived in Berlin-Wilmersdorf with the Weichselbaum family at Wilmersdorferstraße. Gerda may have been named after Käthe’s sister who had died prematurely at the age of 32 in 1939.

Back to the Arolsen Archives. Here I found that the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) of the United States, a Jewish charity supporting refugees, sponsored the family’s immigration to the US.

On 8 April 1947 Alfred (then 42), Käthe (38), Alice (11) and Gerda (1 ½) boarded the steamship Earnie Pyle in Bremen harbour and set sail for New York. The S.S. Earnie Pyle (picture) was used in 1946-47 to transport Jewish displaced persons from Europe to the US. In the ship’s passenger list, their future address in the USA was listed as 12-46 Lefferts Blvrd, Kew Gardens, Long Island, NY; their passport or visa numbers were 20670 to 20673. Whether after their arrival in the USA they went to aunt Johanna in Kansas City or uncle Hermann in Detroit, remains unknown. But the McHenry picture testifies that by 1956 family relations were restored.

Der Schild

Thanks to these sources, in only three weeks time my knowledge of the firstborn Löwenhardt and his Berlin-based family had expanded widely. But questions remain. Salomon came from a very large Jewish family, and a healthy family. In the late nineteenth century, infant and child mortality in Germany and other European countries was still high, roughly fifteen to twenty percent. So allow me to use the word ‘amazing’ when observing that none of the twelve Löwenhardt children died prematurely. Of the eleven children born after Salomon, so between 1874 (Isidor) and 1892 (Hermann), the first who died – in 1941 – was Julie, aged 58.

And even more surprising: all nine sons had been front soldiers in World War One; almost all had been wounded; but by war’s end in 1918 all were still alive. Since the Löwenhardt brothers came from a soldierly Jewish family, in the late 1930s they were instrumentalized in the anti-Nazi Jewish press. More than once Der Schild, the newspaper of the German Union of Jewish Front Soldiers (Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten) published on them, hoping to counter Nazi arguments that German Jews lacked patriotism.

In an extensive article in its issue of 6 March 1936 [translated here], the newspaper documented that six out of the nine Löwenhardt brothers suffered war wounds, including two who suffered four wounds each, with one of these (Hermann) suffering the consequences of ‘severe gas poisoning’. According to the same article ‘as a result of severe war injuries, one brother later died’.

This can only refer to Salomon who, after all, died in 1923, five years after the end of the war. For unknown reasons, in Der Schild the firstborn Löwenhardt brother was consistently referred to as Georg.

Twenty years later followed the big slaughter, the Holocaust. Between 1942 and 1944 six of the remaining eight brothers were killed by their fellow Germans for being Jewish.

USHMM

I thought I had done the job, the story had been written. Then on 23 May Sebastian surprised me with two gems. He mailed me a picture of the matsewa (tombstone) of Salomon Georg Loewenhardt at the Weißensee cemetery. That morning with his wife he had visited the cemetery and uncovered the gravestone from the ivy of many decades. Hidden by ivy the 98 year old inscription was entirely intact. All details matched and the mystery of Salomon being named Georg in Der Schild, was solved. [Continue below pictures]

Tombstone (*matsewa*) of Salomon Georg Löwenhardt [Images T & S Zimmer]

A few hours later Sebastian sent me a link to an oral history interview kept at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, USHMM. I had checked the museum’s databases a few days before but had found no interview with Alice Meyerowitz. As it turned out, by the time the interview was made in 1984, she had changed her name to Lisa Lehner.

In 50 minutes, Lisa / Alice told her moving story and everything matched with what I had found from behind my computer. Of course, she added many details I had not found. I would do her injustice if I tried to summarize her story. Whoever is interested, can watch her video first hand at the USHMM website with reference: interview with Lisa Lehner, accession number: 1989.346.129 | RG Number: RG-50.031.0129.

Epilogue

At the outset, when I was still ignorant of coming discoveries, I structured this story by the sources that I used. The idea was that such structuring might be helpful to readers with their own quest. Now that I have heard Lisa’s story, part of my search in the online archives has seemingly become redundant. Had I known of her 1984 interview prior to the launch of my search, I would have done things differently. And yet, there is a lesson to be learned.

The lesson is simple: never underestimate the human touch. Partly as a result of the pandemic, my research was entirely online. We, all of us genealogy and family history freaks, are in luck in that these days so many archival documents are available online. But help from fellow (wo)men does make a difference. I am very grateful to Sebastian and Tamara Zimmer and to Rolf Fischer for their generosity and support.

With thanks to mrs. Henriëtte Feltham for polishing up my English.

Noten / Footnotes

Lisa Lehner by e-mail, 13 June 2021[↩]
More on Johanna in Sailing to Europe[↩]
Memorial Book on Jewish victims of Nazi persecution in Germany, 1933-1945[↩]
righteous.yadvashem.org[↩]

Sternlager

6 June 2020 by John Löwenhardt Leave a Comment

Hermann Kleeblatt died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, in its section named Sternlager, ‘Star Camp’. He was seventy years of age and the last of his family to fall prey to the Nazis. All were dead: his son Arthur with his own family in Auschwitz, September 1942; his son Walter in Sobibor (April 1943) and his wife Lina who had died in Westerbork Transit Camp in The Netherlands on 28 December 1943. The youngest son, Richard, born in 1906, was the only one to survive.

Hermann was brother to my great-grandmother Hannchen ten Brink-Kleeblatt (1861-1930). Most likely he was also the person who introduced her oldest daughter Julia to his young neighbour in Dortmund-Lindenhorst, butcher Adolf Löwenhardt. Julia and Adolf married in 1912.

In official documents such as the Gedenkbuch (‘Memorial Book’) of the German National Archives, Hermann is listed to have died on 12 September 1944. That was his seventieth birthday… which made me suspicious. A coincidence? Would he really have passed away on his seventieth birthday? Bergen-Belsen was not an extermination camp but it knew extreme hunger and a deadly typhus epidemic. Whoever was weak or lost hope, whoever gave up the fight to survive, whoever became apathetic, died. Had Hermann Kleeblatt lost all hope on the eve of his birthday?

Probably the only picture of Hermann Kleeblatt and his wife Lina in their grocer store in Dortmund-Lindenhorst

Reading the book by historian Evelien Gans on Jaap and Ischa Meijer made me write to the Bergen-Belsen Memorial in Germany. In her book, Gans presents an extensive impression of ‘life’ in the Sternlager. But was Hermann really housed in this part of the camp? And why in Bergen-Belsen after all? It was a so-called exchange camp, meant for Jews, mainly from The Netherlands, who the Nazis planned to exchange against Germans from abroad. Hermann was the only member of my extended family who ended up in Bergen-Belsen. Why?

The name Sternlager refers to the fact that its inmates were allowed to wear their civil clothes but had to carry a ‘Jew star’ on their chest. Family members could stay close to each other and for the elderly, there was a separate barrack, the ‘Altersheim’. Is this where they would have put Hermann?

On 24 February 2014 I receive an email sent by Elfriede Schulz of the Bergen-Belsen Memorial. She has been so kind to research Hermann Kleeblatt’s stay at the camp. To my question of why he was sent to Bergen-Belsen she has no answer. It remains a mystery. But she confirms that he was indeed in the Sternlager. And then her surprise: Hermann died on 2 January 1945, having stayed in the camp for eleven months. This is shown on a list made by Josef Weiss.

For four months in late 1944 and early 1945, Josef (‘Jupp’) Weiss (1893-1976) was Judenältester, ‘Senior Jew’ or leader of the Jews in the Sternlager. Weiss, too, had fled Germany for The Netherlands and had been deported to Bergen-Belsen via Westerbork Transit Camp. He had been at Westerbork for twenty months when on 29 September 1943 Hermann and his wife Lina arrived. Lina died three months later, and on 11 January 1944 Josef Weiss and his family were deported to Bergen-Belsen. Hermann Kleeblatt, now a widower, was put on the next transport, on 1 February. Hermann and Josef may have known each other. Both had come from North Rhine-Westfalia and their deportation histories showed partial overlaps.

Both during and after the war, Weiss enjoyed an excellent reputation. As ‘Judenältester’ he was the pivot between the camp commander and the inmates. Some predecessors had abused this position, but in his behaviour ‘Jupp’ Weiss showed to be a ‘Mensch’ who was respected by both inmates and camp guards. Every day he used to walk alongside the cart on which Sternlager’s deceased were taken away, saying kaddish.

Weiss kept secret lists, one of these with names and dates of the deceased. This list shows Hermann Kleeblatt, born 12 September 1874 and died 2 January 1945. Two months down the same secret list are Margot Frank and her sister Anne.

Josef Weiss himself died in Jerusalem in 1976, aged 83. The day of his death was 12 September, Hermann Kleeblatt’s birthday.

24 February 2014, edited and translated 6 June 2020

Please also read
On Adolf and Julia: Letter to George

Bald heads

23 April 2020 by John Löwenhardt Leave a Comment

A mysterious picture from the family archives. Of only one of the ten individuals the identity is known. At the back in German handwriting the words ‘Neuenahr, Summer 1924’. Second from the left is my grandfather Adolf Löwenhardt, obviously much younger than the bald heads. No doubt about it. The meeting took place in spa town Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, south of Bonn in Rhineland-Paltz.

What made fourty year old Adolf travel from Dortmund to Bad Neuenahr, unaccompanied by his wife Julia? Who were the five bald headed men who, mysteriously, did not differ in age very much? And the seated couple with, presumably, their daughter and son… who were they? I cannot recognize one face. Do you have any idea?

House arrest

9 April 2020 by John Löwenhardt 2 Comments

4-5 April 1945 <-> 4-5 April 2020

Seventy-five years since the liberation of my home town Almelo (The Netherlands) I write about the hiding of my parents and many other Jews in the town. For more than two and a half years they had to hide until Canadian troops came to liberate them.

At the moment when I am writing this, almost all European citizens are under house arrest in a more or less strict sense. In this unexpected pandemic, unheard of in modern times, the virus forces us to stay at home. With our partner and children or alone, we are locked up.

Our predicament raises questions about being in hiding during the Holocaust. I remember stories of Holocaust survivers about their liberation when finally, at last, they could talk aloud after having had to whisper for months and years on end. That was some sort of liberation! Can you imagine? Or of finally, at last, being able to put on their shoes after having to walk on their stockings for months and years on end. Can you imagine?

Today we can hope, we can fool ourselves, we can expect on the basis of hard facts – but we have no certainty whatsoever. The virus calls the shots. The virus reigns. During the Holocaust, Jews in the extermination camps watched the condensation lines in the sky and wondered whether someone would come to their help. Now, we watch a blue sky without any condensation line. When will it end? When will ‘normalcy’ return? [BTW: I am in favour of a large reduction in the number of condensation lines during ‘normalcy’]

But the differences outnumber this one similarity. Today’s house arrest is physical exclusively. Thanks to electronics we are in permanent relation to each other and to the world. This has its advantages but it can also be burdensome. Events take place that you rather not know, for the sake of your own mental wellbeing. A Mensch (good person) must not look away… but seeing everything is unbearable.

‘Then’ the average Jew in hiding had no knowledge of what happened day in day out in Auschwitz-Birkenau. There was a suspicion that it was not a healthy place to be, to say the least. But the cold blooded industrial destruction of human beings was beyond imagination. Now we are bombarded with real-time images, colourful and moving, of dying people and intolerable suffering.

And another difference: we spend our house arrest more or less comfortably in our own homes. We do not have to live with strangers of whom we are dependent. We do not need to fear treason. We are not being moved in the dead of night to a different home because our hiding place is in danger of being found out. In our own homes, we feel pretty safe. And – we have food and drink and plenty of toilet paper.