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Sonia Wechsler mit Tochter Esther und Sohn Max
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Sonia Wechsler (née Krupnick) * 1886

Hohe Weide 74 (Eimsbüttel, Harvestehude)

HIER WOHNTE
SONIA WECHSLER
GEB. KRUPNICK
JG. 1886
EINGEWIESEN 1935
HEILANSTALT LANGENHORN
"VERLEGT" 23.9.1940
BRANDENBURG
ERMORDET 23.9.1940
"AKTION T4"

Sonia (Sophie) Wechsler, née Krupnick, born 7/15/1886 in Nowoaleksandrowsk, (now again: Zarasal ) Lithuania, murdered at the killing institution in Brandenburg on the Havel

Stolperstein Hamburg-Eimsbüttel, Hohe Weide 74

Sonia Wechsler’s birth name was Sara-Scheyne Krupnick. In the few documents found in Hamburg, her first name is given as Sophie. But the members of her family always called her Sonja. By request of her grandson Itamar in Tel Aviv, the Stumbling Stone laid for her carries the first name Sonia. And that is what she will be called in this life story.

Sonia had a brother, Abraham, and two sisters whose names we do not know. Because there are hardly any written records of her, the story of Sonia Wechsler is mainly based on the oral reports of her descendants.

Sonia met Tobias Wechsler (then still Tuvija Zalmana d. Vekslers) around 1907 in Libau in the "General Jewish Workers’ Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia”, briefly "the Union”, where Tobias also was politically active. Libau is the former German name of the port city of Liepaja at the mouth of the river Lyva in western Latvia.

Tobias Wechsler, then a Russian citizen, was the son of a religious Jewish butcher. He was born on June 12, 1889 in Libau and had ten siblings. As a youth, he considered himself an atheist and socialist.

Sonia Krupnick had been born July 15, 1886 in Nowoaleksandrowsk (now Zarasal) as the youngest daughter of the Jewish estate manager Feivusch Krupnick. Nowoaleksandrowsk was a small town that at the time had a considerable proportion of Jews in its population. Until the independence of Lithuania in 1918, Nowoaleksandrowsk belonged to the Russian county of Kowno. It lies about 400 km east of Libau, where Sonia later settled. Both she and her husband were Russian nationals.

Sonia Krupnick had come to Libau to absolve an apprenticeship as a dressmaker. Around 1907, she met Tobias Wechsler, and married him in 1911. In Libau, the couple lived in comfortable circumstances. Tobias earned the family livelihood by doing the bookkeeping for small businesses. He was extremely talented in mathematics, and until today, his descendants recall that he handled figures like a computer. Running the household and taking care of the kids was Sonia’s part. All four Wechsler children were born in Libau: Jacob (Yaacov) on November 15, 1912; Abraham (Avraham) in August 15, 1915; Esther on July 2, 1917, and Max (Meir) on January 17, 1922. The family spoke Yiddish, but Tobias insisted that the children learn "high German”, and he translated the family members’ names into German: Tuvia = Tobias, Avraham = Abraham, Meir = Max, Yaacov = Jacob.

After the end of World War I, Tobias Wechsler went to Tübingen in Württemberg to study mathematics. In his application for matriculation, he gave his nationality as Russian. His wife Sonia and the three children born by then stayed in Libau, Kornstrasse 27.

At the end of the fall semester 1918/1919, Tobias returned to Libau. He wanted to continue his studies of mathematics at the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen, but was unable to do so, as he was drafted for short-term military service. He belonged to the group of former Russian citizens who had become stateless by a decree of the new Soviet government. In spite of this, he was drafted into the Latvian air force for a short period.

Tobias Wechsler was only able to travel west again at the end of 1922, after the birth of Max, his fourth child. A Nansen passport made this possible, a travel document created in 1922 by Fridtjof Nansen, the League of Nations’ high commissioner for refugee affairs as an ID document for stateless refugees and migrants. Tobias Wechsler travelled to Tübingen with his sons Jacob and Abraham to continue his studies; his matriculation was accepted in spite of the fact he had submitted it after the deadline.

For the time being, Sonia stayed in Libau with her daughter Esther and Baby Max. A grocery store she had opened flourished, so the family lived comfortably. Sonia Wechsler and her kids lived "in the most beautiful houses of Libau”, as relatives later reported.

After the end of the winter semester 1922/23, Tobias Wechsler and his sons settled in the town of Wolffenbüttel on the edge of the Harz mountains.

From Easter 1923. Abraham and Jacob attended schools in Wolffenbüttel for a few months. Jacob, the elder, suffered because his classmates teased him about the special "high German” the boys had been taught by their father.

In summer of 1923, Sonia, Esther and Max came to join Tobias, Jacob and Abraham in Germany. The reunited family spent the summer months in Bad Harzburg.

Tobias and his sons had already left Württemberg when the German consulate in Libau contacted the Württemberg district authorities in Tübingen, asking "why Wechsler and his family, whose residence permit for Bad Harzburg expires on October 10, did not leave Germany at the end of the winter semester (March 10), and instead wants to settle in Germany permanently. I most respectfully request to oppose such intentions.”

From Bad Harzburg, the Wechsler family moved to Hamburg, where they found two rooms in the Hohenfelde district, Hohenfelder Allee 7, with widow Simon. The cramped quarters, of course, were no long-term solution. At the beginning of the 1920, new small apartments were built in the street called Hohe Weide in the Eimsbüttel district, where the Wechsler family in 1927 finally found an apartment of their own, on the ground floor of no. 74.

Tobias Wechsler continued his studies in Hamburg, From April 23, 1923 until August 15, 1927, he was enrolled in mathematics, physics and English. In spite of his extraordinary talent, however, he ended his studies without earning a degree. We do not know why he no longer had the status as a degree student after that. From the winter semester 1928/29 through the summer semester of 1931, he followed lectures as a guest student.

Sonia earned most of the family livelihood by her needlework, while Tobias continued his studies and took any odd job he could get, e.g. giving private lessons to pupils.

The death of Tobias’ father back in Libau caused a dramatic change of personality in his son. Tobias, the socialist and atheist, felt guilt for having abandoned his parents’ traditional Jewish life and turned his back on his beloved father. Tobias now returned to Judaism, became deeply religious and tried to infuse his new conviction in his whole family – with only partial success.

Jacob, his eldest son, resisted. He wanted to become a painter. The Hamburg art school in Lerchenfeld had already accepted him as a twelve-year-old in 1925 for a short-term junior course. And when Jacob, at the age of 17 in summer of 1930, seriously wanted to become a painter against the will of his father and was accepted as a student by Professor Arthur Illies at the Lerchenfeld Art School, the tension between father and son increased to such an extent that Jacob moved out and took a room at Oberaltenallee 87, near the art school.

He now lived in the family of Anna Roch, daughter of Nathan Roch, a cigar dealer from the town of Buczacz in the Ukraine. Jakob Wechsler was able to study at the art school from the summer semester of 1930 to the winter semester of 1932/1933.

His brother Abraham Wechsler attended the Talmud Tora Schule in the Grindel quarter from 1923 to 1933. He earned a junior highschool degree and began an apprenticeship as a bookseller at the renowned Glogau bookshop at Neuer Wall 50. When he wanted to take the finishing exam in 1934 after only two years of apprenticeship, he was not admitted in Hamburg because he was Jewish. He was, however, accepted in Bremen and passed the exam.

Max, the youngest of the three Wechsler brothers, attended the Talmud Tora Schule from 1928 to 1935.

Esther Wechsler had come to Hamburg at the age of five. Sher went to elementary school for four years and then attended the Israelitic School for Girls in Karolinenstrasse until the summer of 1933. Esther later said she had loved school and been a good pupil. Her last teacher in ninth grade was Fräulein Liebstein. Esther wanted to become a teacher, too, and was active in the Zionist-socialist Jung-Jüdischer Wanderbund and the religious Zionist youth movement.

For Sonia Wechsler, the stress and burden of the endless worries about her family, the family conflicts and the isolation due to her lacking knowledge of the German language must have been enormous. According to her family, all this, plus the anxiety caused by the reports of anti-Semitic violence by the Nazi storm troopers, led to mental illness. Sonia Wechsler was temporarily admitted to the Friedrichsberg state mental hospital in the second half of 1930 and again at the turn of 1930/1931. In 1934, she was again hospitalized there.

Tobias Wechsler realized the perils in store for his stateless family after the Nazis’ rise to power at a very early stage and thus started preparing their emigration to Palestine shortly after January 1933. Fortunately, a cousin, one of the few Jewish high-ranking officials of the British Mandate Administration, was able to help in procuring the necessary documents.

However, persons with a mental handicap or disease were excluded from getting an entry visa. Thus, beginning in 1934, the members of the Wechsler family started out for Palestine individually and without Sonia.

When the Jewish Community of Hamburg registered her in the culture tax roll in 1935, Sonia Wechsler was already separated from her husband. In 1938 in Palestine, Tobias gave his status ad divorced.

Esther, aged 17, was the first of his children that Tobias sent off. She accompanied a group of children to Palestine via the Netherlands and only saw her siblings again a year later. She felt very lonesome during this time, worked in a kibbuz and was unable to complete her training, so that she took a job as "unqualified teacher” at a home for handicapped children in Jerusalem.

Abraham left Hamburg in 1935. He had no chance of working in his profession in Germany – as a bookseller, he would have had to be a member of the Reichsschriftumskammer, the Nazi culture authority, where Jews, of course, were not admitted. Abraham first went to Italy, where he prepared for his emigration to Palestine at the agricultural training camp in Ricavo di Castellina in Chianti in Siena province, Tuscany. This Hachshara camp in 1934 was the first to be founded for members of the religious pioneer movement originating in Germany, and it also gave military training. Abraham stayed there until 1936 and then embarked for Palestine aboard the steamer Galilea.

Tobias Wechsler left Hamburg for Palestine in 1935 with his youngest son Max. He had given up the family home in Hohe Weide and lived as a subtenant at Grindelhof 62 for a while. On March 27, 1935, Tobias and Max Wechsler sailed for Palestine from Trieste, Italy.

Jacob Wechsler, Sonia and Tobias’ eldest son, married Anna Roch on April 26, 1935. The couple joined the rest of the family in Palestine in the summer of that year. Max and Anna, too, had prepared for their new life at a Hachshara camp, in Wilhelmshöhe in Hamburg-Blankenese.

Sonia Wechsler remained in Hamburg alone. On December 28, 1934, she had been transferred from the Friedrichsberg mental hospital to the institution in Hamburg-Langenhorn. Half a year later, on June 13, 1935, she was admitted to the Emilienstift of the diaconal institution Anscharhöhe in Hamburg-Eppendorf. She was still there at the time of the general census in May 1939, and remained there until she was transferred back to the Langenhorn hospital on July 14, 1939. No more records exist about how she fared there during those years. It is not known whether there was still contact to the members of the family after their emigration.

However, Tobias Wechsler later said that he had had to make a payment to Hamburg in 1939. Presumably, the money had been demanded to pay for Sonia’s keep at the institution.

In spring and summer of 1940, the Berlin "Euthanasia” agency at Tiergartenstrasse 4 planned a special operation to eliminate all Jewish patients living in public and private mental hospitals in Germany. The agency had all Jewish patients of the institutions registered and then assembled in so-called collecting institutions. In northern Germany, this was the Hamburg-Langenhorn mental hospital. All institutions in Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg were ordered to transfer all of their Jewish patients there before September 18, 1940.

Sonia Wechsler belonged to the group of patients who had already been living Langenhorn for some time. On September 23, 1940, she and 135 other Jewish patients institutions in northern Germany were transported to Brandenburg on the Havel, where the transport arrived the same day. In the part of the former prison that had been converted into a gas murdering facility, the newly arrived patients were immediately herded into the gas chamber and murdered by carbon monoxide gas. Only Ilse Herta Zachmann temporarily escaped that fate (cf. there).

The new life of Tobias Wechsler and his four children in Palestine was overshadowed by the feeling of guilt for having left the wife and mother of his children behind in Germany. Legends about Sonia’s fate developed. One, that she died of a kidney ailment in 1934; another, that she had died of a lung disease. On the page of testimony Tobias Wechsler laid down at Yad Vashem in 1954, he wrote that Sonia had been deported in 1940 and died in German-occupied Poland in January 1941. Obviously, he had received one of the fake death certificates from the fictive German registrar’s office in Cholm supposedly documenting Sonia’s death on a fictive date.

The people murdered in Brandenburg, however, had never been in the town east of Lublin called Chelm in Polish, Cholm in German. The mental hospital there had ceased to exist after SS troops had murdered almost all its patients on January 12, 1940. And there had never been a German registrar’s office in Chelm. It was solely invented to cover up the murder operations, and recording fictive later dates of death served the purpose of demanding board fees for the already murdered patients.

Tobias Wechsler married again. After the death of his second wife in 1971, he lived in Jerusalem with his son Abraham, devoting his time and energy to religious issues until he died in 1985.

Sonia’s und Tobias’ grandson Itamar shad always felt there was a "dark cloud” lying over the family. After the death of his uncle Abraham, Itamar decided to discover the real story of his grandmother. From Hamburg, he received documents with information that could be joined to the facts of this family history he had already known.

On March 29, 1916, the Artist Gunter Demnig, the inventor and creator of the Stumbling Stones, laid such a stone at Hohe Weide 74 for Sonia Wechsler in Hamburg-Eimsbüttel, Hohe Weide 74. 24 members of her family were present, among them nine grandchildren of Sonia. They all shared the desire to see the places where their family had lived, and to commemorate the murdered members of their family there.

Translation by Peter Hubschmid
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: March 2020
© Ingo Wille

Quellen: 4; 5; 9; AB; StaH 133-1 III Staatsarchiv III, 3171-2/4 U.A. 4, Liste psychisch kranker jüdischer Patientinnen und Patienten der psychiatrischen Anstalt Langenhorn, die aufgrund nationalsozialistischer "Euthanasie"-Maßnahmen ermordet wurden, zusammengestellt von Peter von Rönn, Hamburg (Projektgruppe zur Erforschung des Schicksals psychisch Kranker in Langenhorn); 351-11 Amt für Wiedergutmachung 38187 Jacob Wechsler, 40573 Abraham Wechsler, 41895 Ester Cohen geb. Wechsler, 45205 Max Wechsler; 352-8/7 Staatskrankenanstalt Langenhorn Abl. 1/1995 Aufnahme-/Abgangsbuch Langenhorn 26.8.1939 bis 27.1.1941; UKE/IGEM, Archiv, Patienten-Karteikarte Sophie Wechsler der Staatskrankenanstalt Friedrichsberg; Universitätsarchiv Tübingen 258/20170. Böhme, Klaus/Lohalm, Uwe (Hrsg.), Wege in den Tod. Hamburgs Anstalt Langenhorn und die Euthanasie in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, Hamburg 1993, S. 70f. Bettin, Cristina M., Italian Jews from Emancipation to the Racial Laws, New York, 2010, S. 124. Telefonische Auskunft der Genossenschaft Kaifu-Nordland; von Itamar Wechsler zur Verfügung gestellte Dokumente und Fotos; https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allgemeiner_j%C3%BCdischer_Arbeiterbund (Zugriff 19. 12. 2015).
Viele Einzelheiten dieser Familiengeschichte sind Sonia Wechslers Enkelsohn, Itamar Wexler, zu verdanken, der bereitwillig jede Frage beantwortete und Dokumente sowie Fotos beisteuerte.
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