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Edith Schloss * 1925

Kroosweg 1 (Harburg, Harburg)

HIER WOHNTE
EDITH SCHLOSS
JG. 1925
DEPORTIERT 1941
MINSK
ERMORDET

further stumbling stones in Kroosweg 1:
Minna Meyer, Alfred Schloss, Feodore Schloss, Werner Schloss

Minna Meyer, née Kaiser, born on 29 Oct. 1864 in Vöhl, deported on 8 Nov. 1941 to Minsk, date of death unknown
Alfred Schloss, born on 28 Sept. 1890 in Harburg, deported on 8 Nov. 1941 to Minsk, date of death unknown
Edith Schloss, born on 12 May 1925 in Harburg, deported on 8 Nov. 1941 to Minsk, date of death unknown
Feodore Schloss, née Meyer, born on 30 Oct. 1890 in Hannoversch-Münden, deported on 8 Nov. 1941 to Minsk, date of death unknown
Werner Schloss, born on 25 Apr. 1921 in Harburg, deported on 8 Nov. 1941 to Minsk, date of death unknown

District of Harburg-Altstadt, Kroosweg 1

Although Alfred Schloss commuted every morning to Hamburg, where he worked for the Becker Company on Katharinenstrasse as an authorized signatory, during all these years he liked to return to his native city of Harburg in the evenings. He lived there with his wife Feodore and the two children Werner and Edith, initially at Eissendorfer Strasse 34 and from 1934 onward at Mühlenstrasse 18 (today Schlossmühlendamm).

The children Werner and Edith Schloss attended the two Harburg secondary schools, where after 1933 they did not feel as comfortable at school anymore as in their early days due to the anti-Jewish attitudes of some teachers and also a number of students. That anti-Jewish hostilities even emerged in their immediate environment and that perfectly ordinary neighbors participated in them is shown by the following remorseful report of a Harburg resident who lived in their close neighborhood as a child and who one day hurled abuse at one of their friends or relatives, without knowing how much that hurt him. "All of a sudden, I saw an older man on the other side of the street approaching the house where the Jews lived. I knew that he was also one of them. This was a great opportunity! To be sure, my heart was pounding – he was an adult, after all – but I shouted at him, as loud as I could, ‘Itzig, Itzig [an anti-Semitic collective name for Jews], Jew-pig!’ I forgot the rest of this diatribe. I only remember that afterward a young man put his hand on my shoulder, saying, ‘There is no need for you to do that. They are humans as well!’ That really got to me. I had intended to play a joke, to prove my courage – and all I had done was vent my spleen. Without understanding this properly, I felt ashamed and guilty.”

The fact that the threat to all family members was more dangerous than they thought became part of their experience after the November Pogrom of 9/10 Nov. 1938, when the Nazis in Harburg also showed their true colors. In this context, Alfred Schloss was arrested like many others and committed to the Fuhlsbüttel police prison without an arrest warrant. His next stop was the Sachsenhausen concentration camp from which he was released again on 14 Dec. 1938. The exact circumstances of his relatively quick release are not known. Fact is though that in the meantime he had lost his job with the Becker Company. Being Jewish, he had no chances to get any new employment.

Under these circumstances, he was also no longer able to hold on to the apartment on Mühlenstrasse. The search for more affordable accommodation was probably not easy. Despite all of the difficulties, Alfred Schloss did manage to find a new place in Harburg one more time – at Karlstrasse 1 (today Kroosweg) near the devastated synagogue – for his family and the 75-year-old mother-in-law Minna Meyer. At this location, the parents and their children lived in a world of their own, without any contact to the neighbors, which in turn meant they gave rise to all sorts of speculations – particularly negative ones. The former neighbor from childhood days mentioned earlier also vividly remembers the house in which the family lived: "The curtains in this small house stayed drawn from then on, and the roller blinds never rattled up anymore. The house made a gloomy, uninviting impression. What was happening behind these walls? The occupants ventured outside only in the dark, and they were always in a hurry.”

After the start of the war, Alfred Schloss looked in vain for ways to emigrate to the USA with his family as long as it was still possible. Based on a communication by the Hamburg Chief Finance Administrator (Oberfinanzpräsident), on 18 Dec. 1939, the Harburg tax office informed the Harburg Gestapo of the plans of "the commercial clerk Alfred Israel Schloss, currently unemployed … to go abroad, more specifically to the United States of America … with his wife Feodore Sara Schloss … and two underage children.” It remains unclear why these efforts failed. By Oct. 1941 at the latest, when the Reich government proclaimed a general ban on emigration for all Jews, the family had to bury their last hope for fleeing Germany.

Immediately afterward, Alfred Schloss received the order from the Gestapo by registered mail to make all arrangements toward the "evacuation” of his family from Hamburg to the east on Saturday, 8 Nov. 1941. The assembly point for everyone scheduled for this transport was the [former] Provincial Masonic Lodge of Lower Saxony on Moorweidenstrasse in Hamburg.

Two female residents of Harburg later remembered the last times they saw Edith and Feodore Schloss: One afternoon, the 16-year-old Edith Schloss showed up in Bornemann drugstore on am Sand in Harburg, encountering their a former fellow student doing her apprenticeship at that company. Instead of a happy reunion, the meeting turned into a sad farewell when Edith Schloss asked for an inkbottle she needed to mark her linen because of the imminent deportation. Her former classmate and subsequent sponsor of the Stolperstein in her memory ends her notes with the following conclusion, "I knew that I would not see her again. I was privileged to live more than 80 years, and Edith only reached the age of 16. They killed and cheated her out of her life.”

Just prior the deportation, Feodore Schloss called one last time on her former hairdresser, where she had not been in the past months for financial reasons, having been among her most loyal customers before. Moreover, by this time Jews were also banned from enlisting the services of "Aryan” hairdressers. She entered the salon during lunch break, only after all other customers had left, and had her hair bobbed, as Henny Gr. related later. "At her request, we did this at lunchtime when the shop was closed. She [Feodore Schloss] bid my mother farewell and said, ‘We will not see each other again.’ – ‘But Mrs. Schloss,’ replied my mother, at that time we did not know yet, …, but she said, ‘Oh yes, oh yes!’ She had a kind of premonition, and that is the way it turned out, they did not return.”

Minna Meyer initially had not received an "evacuation order.” As noted at the end of the deportation list, she "voluntarily” joined the transport leaving the Hanseatic city on 8 Nov. 1941. Probably this step is an indicator of her mental despair, for how at her advanced age could she have managed in this hostile environment, had she been forced to do without the help of her daughter and her family?

No sooner than the five tenants of the apartment at Karlstrasse 1 had left their last home and handed in the key to the apartment at the closest police station as was required, the new occupants immediately took possession of the vacated rooms, as Claus G. recalls: "From one day to the next, the small Jews’ house presented itself in an entirely new way. Suddenly, the windows were open, everything looked bright and clean. New colors, new wallpaper, new drapes: what a pleasant and inviting sight! This house really had nothing to conceal anymore. In the first moment, my hopes were raised. In my childlike foolishness I talked myself into believing that the Jews intended to hide no more but live together with us quite normally. But they were gone, never to be seen again, and I felt as if I had driven them away.”

The train took three days for the journey from Hamburg to Minsk. Upon arrival, all persons on the transport had to spend an entire night in freezing temperatures in the unheated train cars, before being driven to the city’s ghetto the next morning. There they moved into a dilapidated building still littered with the corpses of numerous Belarusian Jews murdered shortly before.

This gruesome killing operation would not be an isolated case. Such "purges” recurred with mounting frequency over the weeks and months to come. The dark premonitions that Feodore Schloss had been unable to hide when bidding farewell in Harburg now became a gloomy reality. No further details are known about the dates of death of the five deportees from Karlstrasse 1 and the exact circumstances of their deaths.


Translator: Erwin Fink

Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: October 2017
© Klaus Möller

Quellen: 1; 2 (FVg 2169 Alfred Schloss); 4; 5; 8; 9; Heyl (Hrsg.), Harburger Opfer; Heyl, Synagoge, S. 191ff.; Schriftliche Mitteilung der Gedenkstätte und des Museums Sachsenhausen vom 3.3.2011; Günther, Unvergesslich, S. 73ff.; Schriftliche Mitteilung von Johanna Buchholz an den Verfasser vom 11.7.2006.
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