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Charlotte Stempel (née Fischer) * 1881

Brunsstraße 10 (Harburg, Harburg)

HIER WOHNTE
CHARLOTTE
STEMPEL
GEB. FISCHER
JG 1881
DEPORTIERT 1942
ERMORDET IN
AUSCHWITZ

further stumbling stones in Brunsstraße 10:
Leo Stempel

Leo (Lemel) Stempel, born on 13 Mar. 1904 in Zolynia, deported to Poland
Charlotte (Scheindel) Stempel, née Fischer, born on 1 Apr. 1881 in Niemirow, deported on 11 July 1942 to Auschwitz

Harburg district, Brunsstrasse 10

At the time Charlotte was born as the child of Jewish parents in her birthplace on the Bug River, some people living there may have entertained moderate hopes that better times were dawning after the murder of Russian Czar Alexander II, but these hopes vanished quickly. Unimpressed, his successor continued the unrelenting policy of Russification practiced in the previous years. The use of the Polish language continued to be outlawed in public and in church. This decree was by no means the only measure by which Alexander III tried to consolidate his rule in the "Vistula Land” ("Vistula Government General”), as this westernmost part of the Russian Empire was officially called henceforth.

At the age of 21, young Charlotte married the secondary raw materials trader (Produktenhändler) Karl (Kalman) Stempel (born on 7 Aug. 1879), also Jewish and two years her senior. On 10 Oct. 1902, their daughter Frieda (Chinke Malke) was born in Niemirow. Soon afterward, the young family, like many others who no longer wished to live in poverty and distress, left their home on the Bug River and moved to Zolynia in Galicia, which Karl Stempel’s family called home. This place was under Austrian rule and its inhabitants did not have to suffer as much as their fellow [Polish] people under Russian rule in the Vistula Land. There Leo (Lemel) Stempel’s path through life began.

However, the young couple’s stay in Galicia did not last for long. Possibly, it will remain unclear for good just what prompted the family to look for another home and how in this way they ended up in Harburg eventually. It is established that they were not the only ones finding work and a new home in what was then a Prussian industrial city on the Elbe River.

In addition to many people from rural areas of the German Reich, the immigrants also included numerous men and women from Eastern Europe, and among them was a disproportionately high number of Jews. Their relations with the old-established families of the Harburg Synagogue Community (Synagogengemeinde) were not always free of tensions. Generally, these families, having resided in Harburg for quite some time, were well-off and intent on adaptating to mainstream society. In matters of faith, they were far more liberal than the "Eastern European Jews” ("Ostjuden”) with their decidedly orthodox leanings, who consistently held on to their Jewish traditions and rites and often worked in retail and petty trading. Another difference was that the old-established Jewish families considered themselves to be Germans and held German citizenship for the most part, whereas most of the Eastern European immigrants were stateless and had only limited political rights in Prussia. However, despite many a difference, the members of the Harburg Synagogue Community stuck together, to which the increasing anti-Semitism within Harburg society after 1918 may have contributed to a considerable extent. Karl Stempel also knew all too well that within its means, the Community indiscriminately helped anyone in distress.

In Harburg, the family grew: On 22 Aug. 1909, daughter Regina was born. However, in the years of privation during the First World War and the ensuing transformation of the German Kaiserreich into a democracy, the path of the family of five toward the hoped-for better future turned out to be more difficult than expected at first. Karl Stempel was not always able to provide adequately for his wife and children with his second-hand goods trade. Since rent arrears accrued repeatedly, the family was evicted by legal means twice from their respective apartments on Lasallestrasse and Wilstorfer Strasse. After that, they had to crowd together in a much too confined one-room apartment on Brunsstrasse for several years. In this place, too, Karl Stempel often let his landlady wait for the rent payments due. Later, the welfare office granted him a rent subsidy.

In 1929, his earnings were so small that he had to apply to the Harburg welfare office for public support, of which he made use only temporarily at first – but from 1932 onward for an indefinite period. After 1933, the situation for him as for all recipients of public welfare assistance became even more difficult. After he had tried his luck as a hawker now and then, he was forced to give this line of work up in 1935 because the Harburg municipal council revoked the necessary work permit. Under strict conditions, one more time the family drew public welfare assistance, which was cut correspondingly in light of the two daughters’ gainful employment. This did not change very much when Regina Stempel emigrated to the USA in 1936.

The financial difficulties grew to be even greater when Karl Stempel became seriously ill in 1937, having to undergo treatment at the Israelite Hospital in Hamburg. When he passed away in Apr. 1937, his wife was unable to pay the hospital bills and the fees charged by the funeral parlor from her own resources but only with the assistance from the Jewish Community and the Harburg welfare authority. Shortly before the Second World War, her oldest daughter Frieda succeeded, at the last minute, in fleeing to Great Britain.

This path was barred for Charlotte Stempel and her 30-year-old son. How could they have raised the funds necessary for emigration and for the required entry visa? It is no longer possible to clarify when Leo Stempel was deported to Poland and how his life ended there.
His mother relocated her place of residence – probably under compulsion – from Harburg to Altona after the outbreak of World War II. On 11 July 1942, she was deported from the Hannoversche Bahnhof train station in Hamburg Harbor to the Auschwitz extermination camp and murdered there.


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

Stand: April 2018
© Klaus Möller

Quellen: Hamburger jüdische Opfer des Nationalsozialismus. Gedenkbuch, Jürgen Sielemann, Paul Flamme (Hrsg.), Hamburg 1995; Staatsarchiv Hamburg, AfW 351-11, 4893;Yad Vashem. The Central Database of Shoa Victims´ Names: www.yadvashem.org; Gedenkbuch. Opfer der Verfolgung der Juden unter der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft in Deutschland 1933–1945, Bundesarchiv (Hrsg.), Koblenz 2006; Matthias Heyl, `Vielleicht steht die Synagoge noch!´ – Jüdisches Leben in Harburg 1933–1945, Norderstedt 2009.