Search for Names, Places and Biographies

Augusta Szpigiel
© Privatbesitz

Augusta Szpigiel * 1907

Rutschbahn 11 (Eimsbüttel, Rotherbaum)

1941 Lodz

further stumbling stones in Rutschbahn 11:
Ilse Dotsch, Malka Goldberg, Hanna Heimann, Gerson Jacobsen, Regine Jacobsen, Ludwig Jacobsen, Klara (Clara) Jacobsen, Beer Lambig, Pescha Lambig, Senta Lambig, Samuel Lambig, Leo Lambig, Manuel Staub, Gerson Stoppelman

Augusta Szpigiel, born 3 May 1907, deported 25 Oct. 1941 to Lodz, survived

Rutschbahn 11

The Stumbling Stone for Augusta Szpigiel was laid on the assumption that she had been killed in the Shoah. However biographical research has proven that she survived.

Augusta was born on 3 May 1907 in Lodz as the daughter of Paul and Dora. She had four siblings: Leon, Max, Sara and Victor.
Her mother Dora, born on 18 Mar. 1885, and her father Paul, born on 3 May 1885, both came from Lodz. Their son Leon was born on 20 Aug. 1908. We know nothing about his life. Max, born on 3 July 1912 in Mainz, completed commercial training and worked as a commercial clerk. Sara, born on 5 May 1914 in Darmstadt, was a vendor by trade. She married Julius Rothman in 1936 and gave birth to their daughter Marion in 1937. Victor, born on 5 Nov. 1916 in Holzminden, worked in the hair dressing trade.

There is some uncertainty regarding the name Szpigiel. While all official documents before the war show the name Augusta Szpigiel, as is also on the Stumbling Stone, she is called Gusta Spiegel on the culture tax card of the Jewish Community. Also after the war she was exclusively known as Gusta Spiegel. The situation was similar for her mother. Several pre-war sources show her as Dwojra-Debora (at times also Dwojra-Liba) Szpigiel. Only the culture tax cards of her relatives note her as Dora Spiegel. After the war, her husband and children only called her Dora. Augusta’s father’s first name was Paul. After the war, he went by the first name Sol (also Saul). In a letter to the Restitution Office, he noted that his first name was Sol, but he used to be called Paul.

Different dates are given for Augusta’s birth: All documents belonging to the Jewish Community and the authorities show her as having been born on 3 May 1907 in Lodz, yet she herself after the war gave her birthday as 3 May 1910 and Hamburg as her place of birth. The first date and place are likely the correct ones since Augusta’s family did not move to Hamburg until 1918.

At some point after Augusta’s birth in Lodz, the Szpigiel’s immigrated to Germany, in any event, and evidently changed their place of residence several times before settling in Hamburg. From 1920 to 1938 the family lived at Marktstraße 13, House 5, where Paul, a carpenter by trade, also worked. Augusta and her sister Sara attended the Israelite Daughters’ School of Hamburg. Augusta’s brothers Victor, Max and probably Leon also attended the Talmud Torah School in Hamburg’s Grindel District. In her free time back then, Augusta like to go to the cinema and meetings at the lodge house which was one of the centers of Jewish life in Hamburg. From 21 Aug. 1933 until 29 Oct. 1938, Augusta worked as an office clerk at the Hamburg company Treetex GmbH, a manufacturer of wood fiber building panels. She received a monthly salary of 200 RM. According to her own statement, she was able to live well from her income.
Leon had left Germany in 1927 and headed for the USA. In 1938 Victor also immigrated there with his family and Paul Spiegel. He was no longer able to work in Germany as a Jew and hoped to be able to earning a living in America, to better provide for his family.

Initially Dora was to remain in Germany. She had to give up their apartment on Marktstraße, so Augusta moved to a small, two-room apartment at General-Litzmann-Straße no. 19 (today part of Stresemannstraße) with her mother, her sister Sara and her sister’s small family. At that point in time, Max lived with his wife in their own apartment in Hamburg. On 29 Oct. 1938, Augusta and all of her family members remaining in Hamburg were deported over the course of so-called Operation Poland. They spent several months in the border town Bentschen (Zbąszyń). During "Operation Poland” a total of 17,000 Polish Jews were expelled from the German Reich and taken to the Polish border between 27 and 29 Oct. 1938. Beforehand the Polish government had revoked the citizenship of all Poles who had lived abroad for more than five years as they feared a flood of returning Jewish emigrants. That affected individuals whose passport had not been renewed by the Polish consulate, and Jews were generally denied a renewal. The German Reich initiated the deportations, Poland sealed off the border as a consequence, and the people affected were forced to hold out for months, in some instances, in emergency housing. Augusta and her family members also spent several months in the border town Bentschen (Zbąszyń). At first they had to get by for 48 hours after their arrival without any food. Then, however, they were luckier than others for they were able to rent a room with the money their relatives had sent them from the USA. Augusta’s private belongings were all sent in eight suitcases from Hamburg to Poland in Dec. 1938. They also held the property of Sara and her husband, like a milk pump, children’s coats and men’s shirts. Allegedly Augusta’s entire salary for the months of Nov. and Dec. 1938 was withheld to pay for the shipment.

In July 1939, Augusta and her two siblings, including Julius and Marion, returned to Hamburg. Their mother Dora went back to Poland and was once again at the mercy of the National Socialists’ policies regarding Jews the after the outbreak of World War II on 1 Sept. 1939. She did not survive and was retroactively declared dead as of 8 May 1945.

During their time in Poland, Augusta’s former employer Treetex had paid her an outstanding bonus of 500 RM, placed in a blocked account at the Hamburg Commerce and Private Bank. "I herewith kindly request the release of 50 RM for my weekly living expenses.” Augusta wrote this letter and regularly wrote similar ones to the Foreign Currency Office following her return to Hamburg so as to access this money. During the next three months, she changed her residence each month. From July to Aug. 1939 she lived at Ratsmühlendamm 58 as a tenant of Käthe Wolffheim, from Aug. to Sept. at Heinrich-Barth-Straße 8 with Wenkel and from the end of Sept. at Rappstraße 18 with Heim. She had shared the apartment on Heinrich-Barth-Straße with her brother Max. Her last residence before her deportation was at Rutschbahn 11 where she lived das a tenant of Ludwig Jacobsen.

When her financial means were exhausted, Augusta received welfare support from the Jewish Community from Nov. 1939. While she was still in Poland, her former manager at Treetex had contacted her and tried to make it possible for her to immigrate to England. However, when the necessary papers arrived, those efforts went up in smoke due to the outbreak of war. In 1940, according to her own testimony, she was made to work as a forced laborer, for no wages or food, harvesting for the "Kühne Pickle Factory Altona". Max and Sara’s husband Julius Rothman were detained at Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp in Sept. 1939, shortly after war broke out. After their release in Mar. 1940, Max and Sara left Germany for good with their spouses and headed for the United States. Augusta was the only one to remain in Hamburg.

On 25 Oct. 1941, Augusta was taken to Lodz in the first mass deportation to leave Hamburg. On that day, 1034 Jews from Hamburg were transported to the ghetto in Lodz which, at that time, had been renamed "Litzmannstadt” by the National Socialists. No foreign Jews were meant to be included on that transport, however that did not apply to stateless or Polish Jews, of whom Augusta was one. After the transport arrived the following day, on 26 Oct. 1941, she was initially housed in a school with many other deportees. She was subsequently taken in by an aunt who lived in Lodz, probably at Sulzfelder Straße Nr. 17, apartment 2 since that address was noted on Augusta’s registration in Lodz. Hildegard Glück (see her entry) and her young son Bernhard were also taken in at that address after also having been deported from Hamburg on 25 Oct. 1941.

They lived in very close quarters in the apartment, such that Augusta, Hildegard and Bernhard likely had to sleep together in one bed. They also suffered from starvation. In a letter that Hildegard Glück had written to the "Department for Settlers – Deportation Board” in spring 1942 in which she requested to be exempted from "resettlement”, she identified Augusta as her cousin. (In an interview for the USC Shoah Foundation, Augusta described Hildegard Glück as a close friend).

Augusta found work in the ghetto as an office clerk in the kitchen administration and later as a correspondence clerk in the department for labor deployment. Both departments belonged to the "Organization of the Eldest of the Jews in Litzmannstadt”, the so-called "Jewish Council” or the Jewish self-administration of the ghetto which was responsible for assigning housing, distributing food, healthcare and maintaining public order. The council employed 7,316 people in July 1941. Work there was certain to have been highly sought after because it meant larger food rations, and later even temporary protection from further deportation. Perhaps that was why Augusta survived until the ghetto was dissolved, as she later reported: "So I found a job there and given that I had a job there I was treated a little bit better.”

When she lost that job in 1944, she was then subject to the deportations that left Lodz in cattle cars, heading to Auschwitz. Deportees were crammed in under the worst conditions, Augusta reported: "If you see that in a film, you cry!" Her time in Auschwitz was the darkest chapter of Augusta’s life. After the liberation, she could hardly remember anything that had happened in the camp. "I don’t remember anymore and I tell you the truth […] The time in Auschwitz, about Auschwitz is for me totally dead. From the time I left Lodz till I left Auschwitz I […]". She remembered that her clothes had been taken away from her, and for days she had to walk around naked until she received prisoner clothing. Her worst experience was when she herself was taken into the gas chamber. Nothing happened there for some time, and after about half an hour, she and the other prisoners were taken out again. Presumably it was thanks to a technical fault, or something like it, that she survived. Afterwards she was unable to reconstruct how long she had been at Auschwitz altogether.

When female workers were needed at the flax factory in Merzdorf concentration camp, a subcamp of Groß-Rosen concentration camp, she was forced to embark on a long foot march with other women to get there. For Augusta, the camp in Merzdorf was not as bad as Auschwitz. Yet six weeks before the end of the war, Augusta broke her leg in Merzdorf. Since she was no longer able to do physical labor, she again worked as a translator, as she had in Lodz Ghetto. That work and the camp’s liberation by the Red Army early in May 1945 saved her life. That marked the end of a painful odyssey for Augusta, lasting many years.

Shortly after the end of the war, she was taken to the hospital in nearby Waldenburg for her broken leg. It was there that she met her future husband Abe Branizki, a shoe maker who had been liberated from Dachau concentration camp shortly beforehand. Initially the two were not allowed to leave Waldenburg in the Polish-occupied territory. It was not until 1946 that they were able to leave for Czechoslovakia. In order to accomplish this, they each, independently of one another, pretended to have a spouse in Prague. That same year they were finally able to journey onward to Windsheim, Bavaria. They remained there for three years in a camp for displaced persons. They lived in housing with three other families.

Through the "Displaced Persons Act", enacted by the American President Harry S. Truman in 1948, Augusta and Abe also received the opportunity to immigrate to the USA, which they did in 1949. At the same time, they changed their last names from Branizki to Brown. They moved to the New York borough of Brooklyn where Augusta’s siblings also lived. Her father Paul had moved to Toronto where his brothers resided.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Augusta tried to receive restitution for her mother’s persecution. In accordance with the family’s wishes, the entire amount was given to Augusta since she was most heavily affected by the National Socialists’ persecution measures. However the legal battle with the Restitution Office dragged on for decades. It ended in 1972 when Augusta and her relatives stopped replying to ever new written requirements.

In the meantime, Augusta worked in an office for 18 years because her husband Abe’s income was not enough to make ends meet. Years later she visited Hamburg one more time and went to the square where the Bornplatz Synagogue had once stood, today’s Joseph-Carlebach-Platz. Her family had always attended the synagogue. While Augusta suffered from nightmares due to her experiences during the National Socialist period, she nevertheless tried to keep her memories of the Holocaust alive by telling her nieces and nephews about them and through the interview, previously mentioned, which she gave to the Shoah Foundation.

Augusta Szpigiel died on 17 April 2004 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida at the age of 96.


Translator: Suzanne von Engelhardt
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: January 2019
© Fabian Boehlke

Quellen: Brown, Gusta – Interview 3538 – Visual History Archive – USC Shoah Foundation. The Institute for Visual History and Education © (1995) – Internet: http://www.vha.fu-berlin.de (Abrufdatum: 16.07.2014); Gedenkbuch des Bundesarchivs – Internet: http://www.bundesarchiv.de/gedenkbuch/de980961 (Zuletzt eingesehen am 21.07.2014); StaH 314-15_R1939/2865, Oberfinanzpräsident (Devisenstelle und Vermögensverwertungsstelle), Augusta Szpigiel; StaH 351-11_7756, Amt für Wiedergutmachung, Gusta Brown, geb. Spiegel; Profil von Gusta Spiegel bei geni.com, eingestellt von Charles Lebow am 15.12.2008 – Internet:http://www.geni.com/people/Gusta-Spiegel/6000000002100452415 (Zuletzt eingesehen am 21.07.2014); StaH 522-1, Jüdische Gemeinden, 922b, Kultussteuerkarte der Deutsch-Israelitischen Gemeinde, Gusta Spiegel; Archiwum Lodzi, pl_39_278_1011_31898, Der aelteste der Juden in Litzmannstadt, Anmeldung Augusta Szpigiel; Statistik des Holocaust, Deportationsliste Hamburg nach Litzmannstadt am 25.10.41 – Internet: http://www.statistik-des-holocaust.de/OT411025-38.jpg (Zuletzt eingesehen am 21.07.2014); StaH 522-1, Jüdische Gemeinden, 922b, Kultussteuerkarte der Deutsch-Israelitischen Gemeinde, Paul Spiegel; StaH 351-11_7755, Amt für Wiedergutmachung, Dora Spiegel; StaH 351-11_39604, Amt für Wiedergutmachung, Sara Rothman; StaH 522-1, Jüdische Gemeinden, 922b, Kultussteuerkarte der Deutsch-Israelitischen Gemeinde, Sara Spiegel; StaH 314-15_R1939/2893, Oberfinanzpräsident (Devisenstelle und Vermögensverwertungsstelle), Max Spiegel; StaH 351-11_37586, Amt für Wiedergutmachung, Max Spiegel; StaH 522-1, Jüdische Gemeinden, 922b, Kultussteuerkarte der Deutsch-Israelitischen Gemeinde, Max Spiegel; StaH 351-11_41777, Amt für Wiedergutmachung, Victor Spiegel; StaH 522-1, Jüdische Gemeinden, 922b, Kultussteuerkarte der Deutsch-Israelitischen Gemeinde, Victor Spiegel; Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg, Hamburger Adressbücher (HAB) 1920–1938; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Brief von Hildegard Glück an die Abteilung für Ausgesiedelte – Ausweisungs-Kommission vom 12.04.1942; Freund, Florian; Perz, Bertrand; Stuhlpfarrer, Karl: Das Getto in Litzmannstadt (Łódź), in: Jüdisches Museum Frankfurt am Main (Hg.): "Unser einziger Weg ist Arbeit". Das Getto in Łódź 1940–1944, Frankfurt am Main, Wien 1990; Löw, Andrea: Juden im Getto Litzmannstadt. Lebensbedingungen, Selbstwahrnehmung, Verhalten, Göttingen 2006; Meyer, Beate: Die Deportation der Hamburger Juden 1941–1945, in: Meyer, Beate (Hg.): Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der Hamburger Juden 1933–1945. Geschichte. Zeugnis. Erinnerung, Hamburg ² 2007; Meyer, Beate: Ausweisung polnischer Juden (1938), in: Benz, Wolfgang (Hg.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus. Judenfeindschaft in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Band 4: Ereignisse, Dekrete, Kontroversen), Berlin 2011.