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Elsa Traub (née Markus) * 1883

Lüneburger Straße 2 (Harburg, Harburg)

HIER WOHNTE
ELSA TRAUB
GEB. MARKUS
JG. 1883
DEPORTIERT 1941
LODZ / LITZMANNSTADT
ERMORDET MAI 1942
CHELMNO / KULMHOF

further stumbling stones in Lüneburger Straße 2:
Max Marcus, Franziska Simon

Elsa Traub, née Markus, born on 20 Oct. 1883 in Harburg, deported to the Lodz Ghetto on 30 Oct. 1941, murdered in May 1942

Harburg-Altstadt quarter, Lüneburger Strasse 2 (formerly Wilstorfer Strasse 35)

Elsa Markus was born as the sixth child of the Jewish couple Julius and Rosa Markus, née Hirsch, at a time when Harburg was experiencing rapid economic and population growth. She was also born into a large family, to which her siblings Max, Hugo, Laura, Siegfried, Franziska, and Richard belonged. Her sister Laura and her brother Richard died early in childhood and they were buried in the Jewish Cemetery on Schwarzenberg.

Julius Markus owned a flourishing bedding store on Wilstorfer Strasse, the main shopping street of the Prussian industrial city of Harburg/Elbe, which still connects Lüneburger Strasse in Harburg’s historic downtown with Winsener Strasse in Wilstorf today, but has long since lost its former glory.

When Julius Markus died in 1925, worse times began for the Markus bedding and ready-to-wear clothing store on Wilstorfer Strasse. Initially, his widowed wife Rosa took over the management of the company, which was still largely unscathed by the global economic crisis at the beginning of the 1930s. However, when her son Max took up her inheritance after the death of his mother in 1935 and the Nazis were in power by then, he could no longer stop the downward trend. The non-Jewish clientele turned to other suppliers. In Aug. 1938, Max Markus had to sell the business and looked for a new home in Hamburg’s Grindel quarter.

His siblings also no longer lived in their hometown. His sister Elsa had married and moved to Cologne. Others emigrated. The Nazi Reich government’s ban on emigration dated 23 Oct. 1941 eventually ended this refugee movement.

Shortly thereafter, the deportations of Jewish men, women, and children to the East began. On 30 Oct. 1941, a special train with Elsa Traub and 1,010 other "full Jews” ("Volljuden”) left Cologne Central Station. One day later, it arrived in the once Polish town of Lodz, which had since been renamed Litzmannstadt and incorporated into the German Reich. Immediately after the occupation of Poland, the Nazis had erected a huge ghetto here, which was soon hopelessly overcrowded with new arrivals from the West. There the newcomers encountered a world that was completely alien to them. They met people who wore ragged clothes, who were marked by hunger and deprivation, and who spoke in a language they did not understand. Wherever they looked, they saw decayed and neglected wooden houses everywhere, and with every step they took, they were confronted with the stench of waste and feces that had not been disposed of.

Less than seven months later, the transition from the Nazis’ policy of deportation to extermination took place there in the Litzmannstadt (Lodz) Ghetto. In May 1942, 10,993 Jews, mainly those deported from Prague, Vienna, Luxembourg, and the Old Reich [Altreich, i.e., Germany within the 1937 borders] to the ghetto in the fall of 1941, were transported to the Chelmno/Kulmhof death camp and murdered there.

One of them was 57-year-old Elsa Traub. Her brothers Max, Siegfried, and Hugo Markus – with his wife Gretchen Markus, née Daltrop – as well as her sister Franziska Simon – with her husband Michaelis Simon – did not survive the Holocaust either (see www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de).

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

Stand: June 2020
© Klaus Möller

Quellen: Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 522-1, Jüdische Gemeinden, 992b; Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Hamburger jüdische Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, bearbeitet von Jürgen Sielemann unter Mitarbeit von Paul Flamme, Hamburg 1995; Gedenkbuch für die Opfer der Verfolgung der Juden unter der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft, Bundesarchiv Koblenz (Hrsg.), Koblenz 2006, S. 781; Yad Vashem, The Central Database of Shoa Victims´ Names: www.yadvashem.org; Harburger Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, Bezirksamt Harburg (Hrsg.), Harburg 2003; Barbara Günther, Margret Markert, Hans-Joachim Meyer, Klaus Möller, Stolpersteine in Hamburg-Harburg und Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg, Landeszentrale für politische Bildung, Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden (Hrsg.), Hamburg 2012; Maria Koser/Sabine Brunotte, Stolpersteine in Hamburg-Eppendorf und Hamburg-Hoheluft-Ost, Landeszentrale für politische Bildung, Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden (Hrsg.), Hamburg 2011; Eberhard Kändler/Gil Hüttenmeister, Der jüdische Friedhof Harburg, Hamburg 2004; Harburger Adressbücher; Mathias Heyl, Vielleicht steht die Synagoge noch. Jüdisches Leben in Harburg 1933–1945, Norderstedt 2009; Alfred Gottwaldt, Diana Schulle, Die `Judendeportationen´ aus dem Deutschen Reich 1941–1945, Wiesbaden 2005; Samuel Krakowski, Das Todeslager Chelmno/Kulmhof. Der Beginn der Endlösung, Göttingen 2007; Die Chronik des Gettos Lodz/Litzmannstadt, Sascha Feuchert, Erwin Leibfried, Jörg Riecke (Hrsg.), Göttingen 2007; Andrea Löw, Juden im Getto Litzmannstadt. Göttingen 2006; Deutsche Jüdinnen und Juden in Ghettos und Lagern (1941–1945), Lodz, Chelmno, Minsk, Riga, Auschwitz, Theresienstadt, Beate Meyer (Hrsg.), Hamburg 2017.