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Hannah Josephs als Schulkind
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Hannah Josephs * 1923

Hudtwalckerstraße 28 (Hudtwalkertwiete 4) (Hamburg-Nord, Winterhude)

HIER WOHNTE
HANNAH JOSEPHS
JG. 1923
DEPORTIERT 1941
MINSK
ERMORDET

further stumbling stones in Hudtwalckerstraße 28 (Hudtwalkertwiete 4):
Benjamin Martin Josephs, Gidel Julie Josephs

Hannah Josephs, born 21.3.1923 in Hamburg, deported to Minsk on 8.11.1941

Hudtwalckerstraße 28 (Hudtwalckertwiete 4) (Winterhude)

Hannah Josephs was born in Hamburg in 1923. This was the year of the great devaluation of money (inflation) in Germany. Hannah's father Martin Josephs owned a store for work clothes in the Winterhude district. Presumably Hannah was enrolled in school in 1929, in which school we do not know.

With the National Socialists' seizure of power in 1933, their fanatical hatred of Jews now also dominated the schools. More and more students and teachers came to class in uniform. Boys under the age of 14 wore the uniforms of the "Jungvolk" of the Hitler Youth (HJ), girls wore the uniforms of the "Jungmädel" of the Bund deutscher Mädel (BdM). At some elementary schools, half of all boys and a quarter of all girls wore them in May 1935. Jewish schoolgirls like Hannah were still allowed to attend state schools; they were only forbidden to do so when Hannah had already left. But already in Hannah's school days, the atmosphere was often so aggressive against Jewish schoolgirls that many of them "voluntarily" transferred to the Jewish Talmud Torah School.

A year after Hannah started school, the family moved out of the house where her father's business was located. The new apartment was nearby, at Hudtwalckerstrasse 35. In the house next door, No. 37, lived her cousins Alfred and Eva and, of course, their parents, Aunt Frieda and Uncle Max Oppenheimer, who had formerly been employed at a bank. Now he worked at the Jewish Community.

Hannah's father's business also suffered under the Nazis. In their uniforms, they tried to prevent customers from entering the store. Some customers came only in the dark, so as not to be recognized. Others stayed away altogether. The income dropped. Nevertheless, the father had to pay higher taxes than before because he was Jewish. For a while, the family was still able to live off their savings, but they had to cut back more and more.

In 1936, Hannah's family moved into a newly built apartment at Hudtwalckertwiete 4. This was diagonally opposite her old apartment and, like it, was on the second floor. Two years after the move, Hannah's father had to close his store. For more than 20 years he had sold work clothes there, as well as bedding and curtains. Now the National Socialist government forbade him (like all Jewish store owners) to continue his small business at Alsterdorfer Straße 20 because he was Jewish. Hannah's parents still tried to find a subtenant for a room who would pay them some rent.

Other Jews in the neighborhood also had to close their businesses: Mr. Hirsch his soap shop at Hudtwalckerstrasse 28, Mr. Calmon his shoe store at Alsterdorfer Strasse 14/16, and also the dye works at Alsterdorfer Strasse 19.

When Hannah left school, as a Jew she was only allowed to start an apprenticeship in the company of a Jewish owner. But because the Jewish stores and companies had to close completely in 1938/1939, she could not learn a trade.

More and more new regulations were issued against Jews in Germany. Now they were only allowed to shop in a certain store on Grindelallee, which was quite far away, especially since they were not allowed to use public transportation. In the evenings, Jews were forbidden to leave their apartments. For a long time Hannah could no longer go to the open-air swimming pool in the Stadtparksee or to the "Badeanstalt Görnestraße" (Kellinghusenbad) or to a non-Jewish sports club. She was only allowed to meet with Jewish friends. And much more.

Hannah had to be very careful that she obeyed all the prohibitions, otherwise she or her parents would be punished.

Sometimes the non-Jewish neighbors also looked closely and reported a Jew who had broken a rule. There was a police station nearby at 177 Sierich Street. But Hannah and her parents were even more afraid of the National Socialists, who had an office near the police station at Eppendorfer Stieg 10 on the corner of Barmbeker Straße.

When Hannah turned 17, her family had to move away from Winterhude. No Jews were now allowed to live in the Hudtwalckertwiete. In the Eppendorf district at Haynstraße 5, her parents got a room; almost only Jews now lived there. Hannah herself did not live with them, but in rooms of the Jewish Community at Beneckestraße 6. She now helped in the Jewish Hospital.

Since it was impossible to see from the outside who was a Jew and who was a non-Jew, the National Socialists ordered in September 1941 that all Jews older than 6 years had to sew a yellow star made of cloth on their clothing. Now everyone could see from a distance that Hannah was a Jew.

Hannah, along with her parents and about a thousand other people, was deported to the Belarusian city of Minsk on November 8, 1941. The train took two days to get there. Minsk had been conquered by the German soldiers, destroying almost half of the city's buildings. In one part of the city, an area had been fenced off, to which first all White Russian Jews had to move, and then - in a separate part - also the German Jews, who were deported there.

When Hannah and her parents arrived there, winter had already begun, there was far too little food, not enough living space, hardly any heating material and no medicine if someone got sick. How and when Hannah died, no one wrote down. So many Jews died there during that time. The guards in the Minsk ghetto only wrote down the number of dead, they didn't care about the names.

Translation by Beate Meyer

Stand: March 2022
© Björn Eggert

Quellen: Staatsarchiv Hamburg (StaH) 314-15 (Oberfinanzpräsident), R 1939/2487 (Sicherungsanordnung gegen Martin Josephs); StaH 522-1 (Jüdische Gemeinden), 992b (Kultussteuerkartei der Deutsch-Israelitischen Gemeinde Hamburg), Hannah Josephs, Martin Benjamin Josephs, Max Siegfried Oppenheimer; Frank Bajohr, "Arisierung" in Hamburg. Die Verdrängung der jüdischen Unternehmer 1933-1945, Hamburg 1998 (Tabelle: S. 351 Brandt & Wolk oHG, S. 351 Edgar Calmon, S. 360 Hermann Hirsch); Ursel Hochmutz/ Hans-Peter de Lorent, Hamburg: Schule unterm Hakenkreuz, Hamburg 1985, S. 41 u. 42 (Schule Alsterdorfer Str. 39); Ina Lorenz/ Jörg Berkemann, Die Hamburger Juden im NS-Staat 1933 bis 1938/39, Göttingen 2016, Band I, S. 232 (staatl. Schulen, 1938), S. 607-609 (öffentl. Badeanstalten), S. 609 (öffentl. Bücherhalle), Band II, S. 767-769 (Sportverein), Band IV, S. 719-721 ("Arierparagraph" in Sportvereinen, 1933), Band V, S. 248-249 (Kellinghusenbad), S. 654 (öffentl. Verkehrsmittel, 1938), S. 711-712 (Einkaufsverbot für Beamte in jüdischen Geschäften, 1937); www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de (Martin Josephs, Julie Josephs geb. Goldberg, Harriet Perlmann).