by guest author Sebastian Zimmer, Oranienburg, Germany
Salomon, born in 1873, was the first child of Pauline Lennhoff and Levi Löwenhardt. Later eight brothers and three sisters were born [see family tree]. On 28 August 1903 in Berlin-Schöneberg, Salomon married Selma Dobriner. They settled in Rixdorf, now Berlin-Neukölln. On 5 December 1904 their first child was born, daughter Edith.
From 1907 the family lived at Kleiststraße 3 in Berlin-Schöneberg. Here they ran a bedding shop. Gerda, their second child, was born on 30 March 1907, and the third daughter, Käthe, on 7 July 1908. Heinz, the fourth child and only son, was born on 12 July 1910.
During World War One, Salomon was a front soldier in an artillery regiment in Russia. I knew all this but wondered about his cause of death. Did he die as a result of wounds inflicted during WWI or had he been murdered during the Holocaust? And if he had died a natural death, where was he buried? In Germany? Or in Russia perhaps? Could I possibly hope to find his grave?
I had had a stroke of luck in making the right guess during my search for the grave of his daughter Gerda. So I wrote to the Weißensee Jewish Cemetery administration again, this time to inquire about Salomon Löwenhardt, her father. My assumption was that family members would be interred at the same cemetery. And I was right. Soon after, a letter arrived confirming that Salomon had been buried there. It gave me goosebumps, for I had hit a milestone in the Löwenhardt family history.
Finding the gravesite
From that moment on I had no rest. I felt a strong urge to find and see the grave. With my wife and children, I drove to Berlin-Weißensee. Upon arrival at the cemetery, it became clear that the grave fields were very large and that it would take us quite some time to locate the grave. And indeed, field S4 was huge and contained numerous graves, with tombstones toppled, illegible or overgrown. Some rows were difficult to pass since fallen trees blocked the way.
We searched row by row. I removed ivy from the tombstones so that we could read the inscriptions. Some of them I lifted and tried to place erect so as not to miss any name. For the time being, I kept clear from the rows with fallen trees.
I felt exhausted and paused. But most of all I felt at a loss and impatient at the same time. How difficult can it be, I told myself. In the meantime, my wife took care of the children. Later she told me that they stood at the grave for a while. Next to it was a huge tree with ivy and lianas where the children were playing joyfully. She said she had looked at the tombstone by moving some of the ivy to the side – but didn’t notice the right name. She was wondering about the very different shapes of the tombstones, and what size the one we were looking for would be. Would it have Hebrew lettering and Jewish symbols? Or would it be small and simple like Gerda Eischleb’s?
I asked my wife to join me. Again, we walked row upon row in order to be able to eliminate them. We reached the area where, according to the numerical code I had received, the grave had to be. My wife and the children would walk on one side of the tombstones, and I on the other. At the spot where they had been before, we removed thick layers of ivy and branches that would have been there for almost a hundred years. I was the first to read Salomon… and then Löwenhardt. Then I checked the year of birth and in a matter of seconds we understood that this was indeed the gravesite of my great-great-grandfather. I was speechless and surprised at the same time, surprised that we had indeed found him. Unbelievable. The tombstone was gigantic if compared with the one of my great-grandmother Gerda.
We looked more closely and noticed that the stone had no Hebrew text or Jewish symbols. On the soil at the bottom of the stone we then noticed an object that turned out to be dish-formed and quite heavy. Was it a flower dish perhaps that had stood on the grave? No, it had come from the top of the stone. With great difficulty, I lifted it and put it back. The tombstone was now complete – and even more imposing. It fitted the loving inscription In memory of my beloved husband, our good father.
The full name on the stone was Salomon Georg Loewenhardt. The second given name, Georg, we had noticed before in telephone books in relation to the bedding shop they had run in the Kleiststraße.
The children had been with us all the time and cheerfully asked whether we had really found great-great-grandfather Salomon. We were all exhausted and made our way home.
Oranienburg, 19 September 2021
Translated from German by John Löwenhardt
