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Aron Marcus ca. 1931
© Sammlung Matthias Heyl

Aron Marcus * 1922

Rieckhoffstraße 1 (Harburg, Harburg)

1941 Lodz
ermordet

further stumbling stones in Rieckhoffstraße 1:
Marie Marcus, Salomon Marcus

Aron Marcus, born on 16 Dec. 1922 in Harburg, deported to Lodz on 25 Oct. 1941, date of death unknown
Marie Marcus, née Gross, born on 28 Jan. 1885 in Oswiecim, deported to Lodz on 25 Oct. 1941, date of death unknown
Salomon Marcus, born on 27 June 1874 in Cracow, deported to Lodz on 25 Oct. 1941, date of death unknown

District of Harburg-Altstadt, Rieckhoffstrasse 1

In the second half of the nineteenth century, when Pesel Gross gave birth to her daughter Marie (Miriam) in what was then the small Austro-Hungarian town of Oswiecim near Cracow, she could not have guessed that under the name of Auschwitz this place would one day become the sad symbol for the genocide of European Jews, which would cost her daughter’s life as well.

It is not known how Marie reached Harburg from her home and when she married her husband Salomon Marcus, who had grown up in Cracow, the capital of the former Polish Kingdom. His father was the well-known rabbi Reb Aron Marcus.

In Harburg, Salomon Marcus was able to purchase an apartment house at Konradstrasse 1a (today: Rieckhoffstrasse), where he lived with his wife and the three children Necha (born on 15 May 1912), Ester (born on 28 Aug. 1915), and Aron (16 Dec. 1922). The Harburg Synagogue Community valued his services as a kosher butcher. All orthodox Jewish men and women living in the city who did not want to live without kosher food were able to have their chickens slaughtered in accordance with Jewish rites. For kosher butchering, he used the slaughterhouse facilities of a non-Jewish colleague. Even before 1933, he probably did not meet with approval from all quarters of Harburg with this type of slaughtering. For years, anti-Semites and animal rights activists had championed a ban on kosher butchering, something the Nazis were deft at using toward their own interests after 1933. Starting on 1 May 1933, the tightened "Law on Butchering Animals” came into effect, according to which warm-blooded animals had to be anesthetized prior to the beginning of blood extraction. Intentional or negligent infractions were punished with a fine or imprisonment up to six months. This ban entailed noticeable work-related disadvantages for Salomon Marcus.

His family life changed as well when the two sisters Necha and Ester Marcus went abroad in 1933 in order to begin a new life there in freedom.

The parents and Aron Marcus were among the few Harburg Jews who at the start of World War II still lived in this district and had not emigrated or migrated to Hamburg – or other German cities. It is not known whether they had any plans to follow the example of the daughters or, respectively, sisters.

Surely, a change of address to Hamburg was out of the question for them as long as they continued to be able to live in their own four walls on Konradstrasse without too many major restrictions. The rental income amounting to 130 RM (reichsmark), the 71.10 RM in benefits from the Jewish Religious Organization (Jüdischer Religionsverband), and a pension of 79.90 RM that Salomon Marcus received from the Reich Insurance Company [for Workers] (Reichsversicherungsanstalt [für Arbeiter]) at first enabled the small family to secure a reasonably bearable living.

In Apr. 1941, a licensed Harburg house and mortgage broker took on the administration of the property at Konradstrasse 1a by order of the Nazi authorities. A few months later, the house, whose owner had been deported by then, was confiscated to the benefit of the German Reich, and the remaining assets of the Marcus family were transferred to the Reich treasury based on the "11th Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Law” dated 25 Nov. 1941.

As was required, Salomon Marcus had been forced to hand in the front-door and apartment keys at the closest police office, before setting out, along with his wife, on his way to the collection point for the first transport of Hamburg Jews to the East on 25 Oct. 1941. One day later, the train with the two spouses and more than 1,000 other persons reached the city of Lodz in the "Reichsgau Wartheland” (Warthegau). In the city’s ghetto, the new arrivals spent the first days – sometimes weeks – in mass accommodation.

Six days later, Aron Marcus arrived at the same place on a Berlin deportation train; he had changed his residence from Harburg to the Reich capital (it is unclear when and why). Another question that can no longer be answered is whether he met up with his parents in the ghetto, something rather improbable since he was assigned to a labor detachment outside the sealed-off residential district already on 5 November.

On 10 Jan. 1942, a room was found for Salomon and Marie Marcus in an apartment at Rauchgasse 32, which they had to leave again, however, as early as 12 Mar. 1942 to change to another one – without use of a kitchen – located in the immediate vicinity. At that point, all traces of them disappear.

One cannot say anything about their subsequent fate, nor about their son’s either. Three Pages of Testimony that Ester Yatuv, née Marcus, submitted to the Israeli memorial site at Yad Vashem for her parents and brother in 1956 keep alive the memory of these three persons from Harburg.


Translator: Erwin Fink

Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: October 2017
© Klaus Möller

Quellen: 1; 2 (R 1940/851); 4; 5; 8; Heyl (Hrsg.) Harburger Opfer; Heyl, Synagoge, S. 62f.; http://www1. uni-hamburg.de/rz3a035/Litzmannstadt.html (eingesehen am 1.11.2009); Aron, Jews.
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