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Erna Jilovsky (née Bergmann) * 1886
Husumer Straße 7 (Hamburg-Nord, Hoheluft-Ost)
1941 Lodz
ermordet am 27.5.1944
further stumbling stones in Husumer Straße 7:
Richard Jilovsky
Erna Jilovsky, born on 27 Mar. 1886 in Auscha (today Ustek, Czech Republic), née Bergmann, deported on 25 Oct. 1941 to Lodz, died there on 27 May 1944
Richard Jilovsky, born on 20 Feb. 1881 in Liboch (today Libechow, Czech Republic), deported on 25 Oct. 1941 to Lodz, died there on 11 Dec. 1943
Husumer Strasse 7
When Fritz Jilovsky and his future wife Erna Bergmann were born, their homeland, Bohemia, still belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Liboch, located close to Prague on the Elbe River, was a village with just under 1000 inhabitants; Auscha, located near Leitmeritz in northern Bohemia, having received its town charter in 1361, was a prosperous and picture-perfect town with a population of about 2,400. It was – and continues to be to some extent – the center of hop-growing in Bohemia. Of the eight Jewish families living in a separate quarter of Auscha around 1800, four were active in the hops business, among them the Josef Bergmann family, and one of Josef’s daughters was Erna.
Richard Jilovsky also worked in the hops trade and thus met the daughter of his business partner. They were married in 1905. He was 24 and she was 19. He had long ago established a partial base in Hamburg, which was in those days, among other things, a rather significant brewery location with a great demand for hops. He settled there with Erna. The first of three sons, Otto Jonath Georg, was already born in Hamburg, in 1906. In 1914, Felix followed, and in 1918, Fritz Josef.
The family was well off financially, and Richard Jilovsky was successful in the Scheibel Company located at Spitaler Strasse 11 (Barkhof), which specialized in trading hops and brewery products. In 1921, he was given power of attorney. To a considerable extent, the company prospered because of Jilovsky’s efforts, opening in 1921 a branch in Saaz (Zatek), another hop-growing region in northern Bohemia, located approx. 80 kilometers (50 miles) from Auscha. Then, a few years later (in 1924), Jilovsky became a co-owner of the company himself with a share of 30 percent. The enterprise continued to expand; the year 1925 saw the establishment of a branch in Nuremberg, a city located in a favorable place for supplying hops to the numerous breweries in northern Bavaria and Franconia.
As the company books as well as the Jewish religious tax (Kultussteuer) file cards of the Jewish Community reveal, Jilovsky reached an annual income of more than 20,000 RM (reichsmark) several times, and for 1938 the entry even indicates 27,000 RM.
A good education had been planned for the three sons. The two older ones still had a chance to obtain such schooling: They attended secondary school and completed training to become merchants. The youngest, Fritz, however, was forced to leave secondary school because of Nazi laws in 1934 at the age of 15, a profound turning point in the family’s history. One after the other, the sons fled Germany. Otto went to Copenhagen, Felix to Barcelona, and, the last one to do so, Fritz escaped to London in 1938.
The year 1938, so successful for Jilovsky in terms of business, at the same time turned out to be his last one as an entrepreneur. On 3 December, Jewish men and women were banned from engaging in any commercial activity.
The couple had to give up the spacious and elegantly furnished apartment on Husumer Strasse and moved as subtenants to Hansastrasse 65, on the ground floor, where friends, the married couple Lambert and Else Leopold (née Perutz) lived already.
In 1938 and 1939, when they went to London to visit their son Fritz, who was now doing his commercial apprenticeship, they did not think of staying there. In Bohemia, they had grown up amidst German culture and were closely connected to it ever since. Germany was their home. They certainly deemed further difficulties under the Nazi regime possible, but deportations and systematic murder were inconceivable to them. Thus, they returned to Germany.
With the first deportation train leaving Hamburg on 25 Oct. 1941, Richard and Erna Jilovsky were forcibly transported to the Lodz Ghetto. Comprised of 1,034 people, it was the largest transport that departed the city. Of that number, 1,016 died or were murdered.
One fact should not go unmentioned in this connection: The night before the two couples definitively left the apartment on Hansastrasse, a courageous woman, the Hamburg teacher Elisabeth Flügge, stood by the Jilovskys and Leopolds until the early morning, assisting with preparation of the obligatory lists of household effects, packing the suitcases, and was simply there to support the friends in these painful hours.
In Lodz, the Jilovskys were quartered together with eight additional persons in apartment no. 33 at Hohensteinerstrasse 43. The "apartment” consisted of one room and had no kitchen. Richard’s identity card (Legitimationskarte), issued by the ghetto’s employment office, identified him as an office worker in the "separation section” ("Trennabteilung”) – in this place, the meager belongings of the deceased and murdered persons, such as clothes and shoes, were sorted. Erna was registered as a merchant.
On the "deregistration” ("Abmeldung”) form, Richard Jilovsky’s date of death is indicated as 11 Dec. 1943. Erna died a few months later, on 27 May 1944. He had reached the age of 62, she the age of 58.
In the 1950s, the community of joint heirs comprised of the three brothers, who by then had settled in Israel, initiated "restitution proceedings” ("Wiedergutmachungsverfahren”). According to the judgment, restitution amounting to 150 DM (deutschmarks) was awarded per full month of "restriction of freedom and, respectively, deprivation of freedom suffered by the testator and testatrix, respectively,” calculated starting with the introduction of the "Jews’ star” on 15 Sept. 1941. At 43 months per testator with 6,450 DM each, the overall sum was 12,900 DM, which was to be transferred to the heirs’ accounts.
Translator: Erwin Fink
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.
Stand: October 2016
© Johannes Grossmann
Quellen: 1; 2; 4; 5; 8; AfW 200281 Jilovsky, Richard; Geschichte der Juden in Auscha: www.hugogold. com/bohemia/auscha.pdf, (eingesehen am 10.2.2009); Handelsregister des Amtsgerichts Hamburg, Abteilung A, 4726; AB 1927; Archiwum Panstwowe, Lodz (Getto-Archiv), Melderegister PL-39-278-1011-9495, 9496,9499, 9500, 508, 509; persönliche Auskünfte von Fritz Jilovsky, (mehrere Telefongespräche im Februar 2009); Elisabeth Flügge: Briefe an ihre Tochter Maria, Oktober 1941.
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