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Hedwig Mamsohn (née Neufeld) * 1890

Schloßmühlendamm 18 (Harburg, Harburg)

HIER WOHNTE
HEDWIG MAMSOHN
GEB. NEUFELD
JG. 1890
DEPORTIERT 1942
IZBICA
ERMORDET IN
SOBIBOR

Hedwig Rosa Mamsohn, née Neufeld, born 19 Sept. 1890 in Harburg, deported 24 May 1942 from Frankfurt to Izbica and then to Sobibor

Schlossmühlendamm 16 (formerly: Mühlenstraße 18)

Hedwig Rosa was the fifth child of the Jewish merchant and real estate broker Max Neufeld (4 Sept. 1851 – 24 Sept. 1925) and his wife Jenny, née Pintus (4 Sept 1859 – 28 De. 1940). The year she was born, the Harburg Synagogue had approximately 300 members; that was 0.6 percent of the city’s entire population (about 48,000 residents). For many years Max Neufeld was the first superintendant of the community and, like all other representatives of that religious and social minority and most of its members, he was mindful of creating understanding between Jews and their non-Jewish surroundings. Max Neufeld was buried at Harburg’s Jewish Cemetery. His son Erich (born on 11 Oct. 1891) died as a soldier on 11 May 1916 on the western front at Carvin.

His daughter Hedwig also lost her husband Moritz Isaak, with whom she lived her first years of marriage in Remscheid, in that war. He died on 29 Nov. 1916 on the front in the Carpathians. His son Heinz Hermann Isaak, born before WWI on 27 July 1914, grew up without a father.

Several years later Hedwig Isaak remarried. On 16 March 1920 she gave her second husband Martin Mamsohn (*5.4.1886) her word of consent in Remscheid. From this marriage came her son Erich Willy Mamsohn, born on 25 June 1921. In 1925 the family moved to Eberfeld. There Martin Mamsohn worked as a department manager for menswear at the 'Kaufhaus Tietz', where his wife had also found employment. Since 1927 she worked here as a saleswoman and instructor. Until her dismissal in spring 1933 she was able to increase her salary by 50%, which is certainly an indication of her efficiency.

The appointment of Adolf Hitler as Reich Chancellor also changed the life of the Mamsohn family in a fateful way. As a student, Erich Willy Mamsohn had already suffered from the anti-Semitic hostility of his teachers and fellow students in the spring of 1933. He was beaten up and confronted with malice that became more and more unbearable. One morning, unwelcome classmates had hung a sign on the classroom door saying "Jews are not allowed to enter". No wonder that he quickly lost the desire to continue attending school and his parents desperately sought alternatives.

It must have been difficult for them to entrust their twelve-year-old son to an Italian children's home. However, he soon had to leave, as his parents could no longer afford the costs of the home. Erich Mamsohn thereupon began a training course for agricultural workers in Chiavari to prepare for emigration to Palestine. In 1938, at the age of 17, he arrived in the country with a youth transport, which was to become the new home for many Jews. In the following three years Uri, as he called himself now, worked on a kibbutz near Rosh Pina in Galliläa and improved his knowledge of Hebrew on the side. In 1941 he joined the British army.

Four years before him, his half-brother Heinz Hermann had already emigrated to the country where the Zionists wanted to found a Jewish state as soon as possible. After completing his studies, which he had begun in Germany, he earned his living there for many years as a history and Hebrew teacher. In his new home country he had also given up his German name and from then on called himself Chanan Jizchaki.

Martin and Hedwig Mamsohn lost their jobs at the Wuppertal 'Kaufhaus Tietz' department store as early as 1933. In the following weeks and months both spouses tried in vain to find an equivalent replacement. Their marriage also suffered increasingly from these failures. On 13 July 1937 they were officially divorced.

Hedwig Mamsohn then moved to Kaiserslautern, where her sister Gertrud Cohn (*29 March 1883) had lived for a long time. In 1911 she and her husband Heinrich Cohn, who had died in the meantime, took over the 'Kaufhaus Schweriner' in the center of this city and together with him she managed the company safely and successfully through all crises until 1933. Then the decline had begun, which ended in May 1936 with the 'Aryanization' of the company. For Gertrud Cohn, after this low blow, there was only one goal left: to leave Germany as quickly as possible and emigrate to the USA, where her son had meanwhile found a new home. In the face of many bureaucratic obstacles and harassment, however, these efforts took longer than expected and dragged on for years. On 20 February 1940 she was finally able to leave for the USA via Genoa.

Hedwig Mamsohn, too, no longer believed in better times in Germany, but concentrated fully on seeing her two sons again in Palestine and starting a new life there. But even her plans could not be realized quickly for financial and political reasons. To bridge the time until emigration, she first took a job as a kindergarten teacher in a kindergarten in Kaiserslautern. When the kindergarten was dissolved after some time, she was pleased to receive an offer from a Jewish widower, who had also had to part with his company after 1933, to work for him as a domestic helper. It soon became apparent that this bridging, initially agreed upon for only a few weeks, would take longer than expected. When her employer moved to Wiesbaden, presumably in the summer of 1938, Hedwig Mamsohn followed him there. He moved into an apartment in a house at Bahnhofstrasse 25 in Wiesbaden.

Here, too, Hedwig Mamsohn continued to pursue her emigration plans. In June 1939, she submitted a comprehensive list of moves to the foreign exchange office in Frankfurt, which was now responsible for her. All the furniture was already packed and ready to be sent to the removal company Rettenmayer and was to be checked here for transport. The list contained a total of 320 items, including small items such as two nutcrackers or four beer glass coasters. The fact that the emigration in the summer of 1939 did not succeed seems to have been due not to the Nazi authorities this time, but rather to the restrictive entry policy of the British for Palestine.

Even after the beginning of the Second World War, Hedwig Mamsohn continued to stick to her emigration plans, although it became increasingly difficult to find a country of exile. The number of countries whose borders were still open diminished increasingly, and the National Socialist government of the Reich raised the hurdles for potential emigrants ever faster. Among the measures that served this goal was a tightening of the export ban, which also affected Hedwig Mamsohn.

On 4 December 1940, she was ordered by the Frankfurt Foreign Exchange Office to sell various items that were on the removal list before leaving the country, as they could no longer be exported. Among them were various items for washing, cleaning and toilet articles and a waste bin. She was also not allowed to take with her an electric sewing machine which had been given to her by a "relative" - presumably her sister Gertrud Cohn - in order to be able to build up her own existence in Palestine.

We do not know what ultimately caused Hedwig Mamsohn's emigration plans to fail. On 24 February 1941, she asked the Foreign Exchange Office in Frankfurt to be allowed to unseal the lift stored at the removal company, which she was immediately allowed to do. In May 1941, when she had probably finally given up her plans to get out of Germany, she applied for the money that she had previously deposited as 'showpiece money' at the 'Bank of Tempelgesellschaft' to be transferred back to her account at the 'Deutsche Bank' in Wiesbaden. Her wish to see her children again in a foreign country remained unfulfilled. Even correspondence with them became increasingly difficult. It was only possible via Switzerland, which was neutral, but slowed down so much that the endless waiting periods became ever more unbearable for Hedwig Mamsohn. Her final letter is dated 12 Aug. 1941.

On 24 May 1942, Hedwig Mamsohn belonged to the 27 Jews from Wiesbaden who were deported to Izbica in Poland along with 930 Jews from Frankfurt. Along the way, the train stopped in Lublin where 122 young men were taken out to work in the Majdanek concentration camp. The other train inmates continued the journey after they had been robbed of their remaining possessions. Izbica had a railway connection which is why it was chosen as a short-term holding camp and transit ghetto while the large extermination camps Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were being built.

No preparations had been made in Izbica to take in thousands of people. In 1941, roughly 7,000 Jews lived in this Polish place. Over the course of the year in 1942, they were joined by more than 16,000 Jews from the German Reich, Austria and the "Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia”. Most of the town’s residents were poor, they lived in primitive houses without sanitary facilities and had never seen paved roads. There were only two public toilets in the whole town. The new arrivals from the west were terribly shocked when they disembarked. They were initially housed in public buildings and very soon quartered with local people. In many houses ten or more families lived in the tightest space. No less catastrophic was the food supply since no reserves had been stocked. Many of the deported died of hunger or in sickbed since medical care was also lacking in every regard.

To relieve the situation, the German authorities soon began with the evacuation and killing of first Polish and then other Jews in increasing numbers. They were taken in large numbers to the extermination camps Belzec and Sobibor where they were killed immediately upon arrival, with carbon monoxide in rooms designated as showers. Their bodies were then buried in mass graves around the site.

Hedwig Rosa Mamsohn did not survive the Holocaust. On 8 Dec. 1952, at her son's request, she was declared dead as of 8 May 1945 by decision the district court.

Her sister Anna Weinstein (see www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de) was deported to Lodz on 25 Oct. 1941, her sister Käthchen Hirschfeld (see www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de) and her husband Isidor on 18 Nov. 1941 to Minsk. They also belong to the victims of the Shoah. The fate of her brother Paul (born 14 June 1885) could not be clarified until today.

Hedwig Mamsohn’s ex-husband Martin Mamsohn immigrated to Bolivia in 1939 and died on 18 May 1952 in La Paz.

Translator: Suzanne von Engelhardt/Changes Beate Meyer
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: June 2020
© Klaus Möller

Quellen: Hamburger jüdische Opfer des Nationalsozialismus. Gedenkbuch, Jürgen Sielemann, Paul Flamme (Hrsg.), Hamburg 1995; Gedenkbuch. Opfer der Verfolgung der Juden unter der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft in Deutschland 1933–1945, Bundesarchiv (Hrsg.), Koblenz 2006; Yad Vashem. The Central Database of Shoa Victims´ Names: www.yadvashem.org; Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg Staatsarchiv, 332-5. 12887-1050 Standesämter; Gedenkbuch für die NS-Opfer aus Wuppertal mit Exzerpt zu Briefnachlass von Hedwig Mamsohn, verfasst von Martin Kohler: http://www.gedenkbuch-wuppertal.de/person/mamsohn, eingesehen am 30.4.2015; https://moebus-flick.de/die-judenhaeuser-wiesbadens/ bahnhofstr-25/hedwig-rosa-mamsohn-geborene-neufeld, eingesehen am 7.6.2020; Harburger Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, Bezirksamt Harburg (Hrsg.), Hamburg-Harburg 2002; Alfred Gottwald, Diana Schulle, Die `Judendeportationen´ aus dem Deutschen Reich 1941–1945, Wiesbaden 2005; Robert Kuwalek, Die letzte Station vor der Vernichtung: das Durchgangsghetto in Izbica, in: Deutsche, Juden, Polen. Geschichte einer wechselvollen Beziehung im 20. Jahrhundert, Andrea Löw, Kerstin Robusch, Stefanie Walter (Hrsg.), Frankfurt am Main 2004; Eberhard Kändler, Gil Hüttenmeister, Der Jüdische Friedhof Harburg, Hamburg 2004, Matthias Heyl, `Vielleicht steht die Synagoge noch!´ – Jüdisches Leben in Harburg 1933–1945, Norderstedt 2009.