Search for Names, Places and Biographies

Rebecca Rotter ca. 1918
© Sammlung Matthias Heyl

Rebecca Rotter (née Maidanek) * 1876

Mergellstraße 11 (Harburg, Harburg)

HIER WOHNTE
REBECCA ROTTER
GEB. MAIDANEK
JG. 1876
ABGESCHOBEN 1938
RICHTUNG POLEN
ZBASZYN
ERMORDET

Rebecca Rotter, née Maidanek, born on 25 Dec. 1876 in Unter-Wikow, expelled on 28 Oct. 1938 to Zbaszyn, date of death unknown

Mergellstrasse 11 (District of Harburg-Altstadt)

When Rebecca Rotter was born and raised in a Jewish family, her home, Bukovina (Buchenland), was the easternmost province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The inhabitants of her hometown included Jews, Romanians, Poles, Ukrainians, Slovaks, and Germans that had been settled there a century earlier. After the First World War, Unter-Wikow became part of Romania and was named Vicovu de Jos.

With her husband Simon Rotter (born on 16 Oct. 1870) and their first three children – two sons and one daughter – Rebecca spent several more years in her native region, before the family left Bukovina at the beginning of the twentieth century. The third son, Max Rotter, was born as the late arrival on 13 May 1915, 13 years after the birth of his second brother, in Harburg, where the family initially lived on Hermannstrasse (today Salzburger Häuser). Later, Max Rotter learned from his parents that the open and hidden anti-Semitism in the old homeland had been one of the reasons for their departure to another country. Other relatives, too, such as Max Rotter’s uncle Karl Maidanek and his family (see corresponding entry), as well as his aunt Anna Apteker and her family (see corresponding entry) found a new home in Harburg.

For Rebecca and Simon Rotter, the new beginning abroad was not easy. For years, they wandered the streets of Harburg and Wilhelmsburg as small traders and hawkers with a handcart, offering their goods for sale and earning the money necessary to support the family. Rebecca Rotter often had to cover the route on her own because her husband was frequently ill. The situation improved only when the children subsequently contributed to the family’s livelihood with their incomes.

The family "was religious but not ultra-religious,” as Max Rotter remembers his childhood and youth in Harburg. The family members attended services at the Harburg Synagogue, where Simon Rotter was a shammes, caretaker of the synagogue, for many years. They also frequented the prayer room of the orthodox Eastern European Jews on Wilstorfer Strasse. Despite their deeply felt devoutness, the parents – and especially the children – got along well with their non-Jewish neighbors. The three sons and their sister had Christian friends and, just like other adolescents, they were members in Harburg sports clubs. One of the brothers married a Christian woman, something his father had not particularly liked at first, though it resulted in the family soon observing not only the Jewish but also the Christian holidays.

The children in turn were passionate adherents of Zionism. Max Rotter was among the spokespersons of the Zionist youth group within the Harburg Community. When the three brothers, all of whom were employed at the Karstadt Department Store – in Barmbek, Wandsbek, and Leipzig – were dismissed by management soon after Hitler’s appointment to Reich Chancellor, they successively emigrated within a short period to Palestine, where their sister had already gone with her Czech husband before.

Max Rotter was the last one of the three brothers to leave Germany in the spring of 1934, at the age of 19. He went with a heavy heart because he knew that his mother and his ill father had little reason to look hopefully toward the future. By that time, they had moved into a different apartment at Beethovenstrasse 11 (today Mergellstrasse). Half a year later – in Oct. 1934 – the father died of a heart attack. His grave is located in the Jewish Cemetery in Harburg. The fact that his mother, having sacrificed herself for the family over many years, had to manage all by herself caused Max Rotter deep worries in light of the growing anti-Semitic persecution in Nazi Germany.

In June 1935, Rebecca Rotter moved to Grindelallee 40 in Hamburg, joining the local German-Israelitic Community. On 28 Oct. 1938, she was picked up, like about 1,000 other Jewish residents of Hamburg, from home and transported only a few hours later by train to the German-Polish border, where everyone had to get out to be expelled to the neighboring country.

Many expellees remained there in the entirely overcrowded Polish border town of Zbaszyn for weeks and often months; others tried to return to Germany from there for at least a few days, to seek refuge in other countries, or to find accommodation with relatives in Poland.

On the eve of the German invasion of Poland, Rebecca Rotter reached distant relatives in Stanislawow (German: Stanislau, today: Ivano-Frankivsk), a city with more than 40,000 Jewish residents in the East of Poland. Seventeen days later, this area was occupied by the Red Army based on the secret protocol to the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact).

Nearly two years later, on 26 July 1941, the German Wehrmacht entered the now Ukrainian city after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. On 1 Aug. 1941, the German military administration declared Galicia the 5th District of the General Government (Generalgouvernement), subsequently setting up ghettos in many places – including Stanislawow – to which the Jewish population was resettled. A letter Rebecca Rotter wrote to her son Max from this ghetto, handing it to the Red Cross for mail delivery, was her last sign of life.

With living conditions in the Stanislau Ghetto so dreadful, chances of survival were almost zero, as shown by the story of a little girl that managed to flee this hell with her parents: "Living conditions in the ghetto were horrible and marked by cold, hunger, and disease. I did not have enough to eat, nothing warm to wear, and I was in great fear. … Every day passed in mortal fear. The ghetto occupants, especially the children, died of starvation and deprivation. The weak and sick were transported in groups to the site of the Jewish Cemetery, where ditches had been dug. Then they were shot there. … Life in the ghetto became more difficult from day to day. On a daily basis, the Germans herded large groups of people together and shot them. … My parents realized that we, too, would not have any chance unless we managed to get out of the ghetto.”

The worst massacre in the Stanislau Ghetto, on 12 Oct. 1941, cost nearly 12,000 Jewish men, women, and children their lives. They were forced to assemble on the market square and were then driven to the Jewish Cemetery, where they had to undress and climb into the previously excavated mass graves, before being shot one after the other by police officers. In the year 1942, further killing operations were reported from the Stanislau Ghetto. On 23 Feb. 1943, German security forces murdered the last occupants of the ghetto before disbanding it.

For a long time, Max Rotter and his siblings hoped in vain to get a second sign of life of their mother from the Stanislau Ghetto. On 31 Oct. 1963, the Hamburg District Court (Amtsgericht) declared Rebecca Rotter dead as of 8 May 1945.

Later, Max Rotter had the name of his mother added to his father’s gravestone in the Harburg Jewish Cemetery.


Translator: Erwin Fink
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: October 2018
© Klaus Möller

Quellen: 1; 4; 5; 8; StaH, 351-11 AfW, Abl. 2008/1, 130515 Rotter, Max; Heyl (Hrsg.), Harburger Opfer; Heyl, Synagoge; Interview mit Max Rotter, Hamburg 1988, in: Heyl, Synagoge, CD-ROM, Hamburg 1999; Zabarko, "Überlebt", S. 51; Kändler/Hüttenmeister, Friedhof, S. 237; Freundlich, Stanislau; Der Stanislau-Pro­zess 1966, in: http://www.nachkriegssjustiz.at/prozesse/geschworeneng/ermittlung_stanislau.php (eingesehen am 7.3.2010); Nazi Occupation, in: http://wapediia.mobi/en/Ivano_Frankovsk (eingesehen am 17.3.2010).
Zur Nummerierung häufig genutzter Quellen siehe Link "Recherche und Quellen".