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Moszek Sroka * 1889

Wilstorfer Straße 76 (Harburg, Harburg)

HIER WOHNTE
MOSZEK SROKA
JG. 1889
"POLENAKTION" 1938
BENTSCHEN / ZBASZYN
ERMORDET IM
BESETZTEN POLEN

further stumbling stones in Wilstorfer Straße 76:
Ester Sroka

Ester Sroka, née Figs, born on 8 Aug. 1900 in Zloczow, deported in connection with the expulsion of Polish Jews (Polen-Aktion) to Zbaszyn on 28 Oct. 1938, murdered in occupied Poland
Moszek Sroka, born on 29 Sept. 1889 in Zloczow, deported in connection with the expulsion of Polish Jews (Polen-Aktion) to Zbaszyn on 28 Oct. 1938, murdered in occupied Poland

Wilstorfer Strasse 76, Harburg-Altstadt quarter

Ester Sroka was born in the first year of the 20th century in the small town of Zloczew in the district of Sieradz as the eighth child of her Jewish parents Abram and Alta Feigen. The town in the industrial region of Lodz, with an almost exclusively Polish and Jewish population, where she spent her childhood and youth, belonged at that time to the part of the former Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania that was connected in personal union with the Russian Tsarist Empire after the third Polish partition. Russia's western expansion confronted the Tsarist Empire with problems that grew larger rather than smaller in the course of the 19th century and ultimately remained unsolved.
In all parts of the Tsarist Empire - but especially in the newly won territories - the Jews suffered increasingly after 1795, not only from the numerous anti-Jewish laws and decrees of the Tsars, which led to ever greater poverty. They were hit even harder by the growing latent and open hostility to Jews on the part of social forces - including the Russian nobility and the Russian Orthodox priesthood, as well as the Polish nobility and the Polish Catholic clergy - who were interested in preserving the status quo or in Poland's rebirth in all regions of the empire, including the newly annexed territories. Their hostility toward Jews also fell on fertile ground with the Russian and Polish industrial and agrarian proletariat.
In the last two decades of the 19th century and in the first two decades of the 20th century, several waves of pogroms shook the tsarist empire. The first pogrom wave of about 250 violent attacks on Jews and their institutions swept through the Tsarist Empire after the deadly assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, in which broad circles of the Russian population believed they recognized the workings of a supposed Jewish conspiracy. The result was a tightening of anti-Semitic legislation under Tsar Alexander III and a rapid increase in xenophobia in Russian society.
A second, even more bloody wave of pogroms of about 600 violent attacks on Jews and their institutions, also in many western regions of the Tsarist Empire, followed at the beginning of the 20th century. The increased readiness to use violence on the part of many participants was often also a reaction to the increasing activity of many social-revolutionary groups, some of which included Jews.
In view of these circumstances, more and more Eastern European Jews tried to escape this suffering and hardship. Their hopes for a better future were concentrated in Central and Western Europe and especially in the United States. Between 1881 and 1914, about 2 million Jews left Russia. In the first decade of the 20th century alone, over one and a half million Jews emigrated from Russia to the USA. More than a million of these emigrants were Jews, most of whom were fleeing the persecutions that were increasingly evident after 1881 in tsarist Russia, including the annexed Polish territories.

The First World War brought profound changes for the Eastern European Jews, especially in those areas where the dream of Poland's rebirth had never died. Both the Central Powers and Tsarist Russia, and later its allies, tried to win over the Polish population by promising to found a new Polish state.
The global conflagration, which ended with the armistice between the Central Powers and their opponents on the basis of the 14-point program of American President Wilson on November 11, 1918, was also the birth of a new Polish state.
Shortly afterwards, several pogroms occurred in this newly founded state as well. The Polish Jews were often accused of supporting the Bolsheviks, who had already brought large parts of Russia under their control and were continuing their advance toward Poland.
At the insistence of Jewish organizations that the civic equality of Jews in Poland and their protection from state violence be ensured, the Polish government felt compelled at the Paris Peace Negotiations in 1919 to conclude an agreement on the protection of minorities that applied to Jews, Ukrainians, Germans, and Lithuanians. It guaranteed the aforementioned minorities the right to preserve their individuality, including the right for children and young people to attend public schools where instruction was given in their mother tongue.
Among those who left their homeland before World War I or shortly thereafter were all members of the Feigen family from Zloczew in the Sieradz district. Their flight from further persecution ended for most of them in the USA. Alta and Abram Feigen and their youngest daughter Malka (Mildred) were the last to reach Ellis Island, the gateway to the 'New World', on December 9, 1920. For their two married daughters Frieda Gelbart, née Feigen, and Ester Sroka, née Feigen, Altona and Harburg became their new home.
Frieda and Jakob Gelbart reached Altona before the First World War. In the summer of 1913, they were already among the residents of a house in Große Mühlenstraße (today Amundsenstraße). When exactly Ester and Moszek Sroka arrived in Harburg on the other bank of the Elbe is not known with absolute certainty. At the beginning of the 1920s at the latest, they found a new home in Harburg. In 1921, Moszek Sroka worked at this location as a self-employed tailor, as can be seen from the documents of the Harburg Chamber of Crafts. In the register of craftsmen he is listed as the owner of a tailor shop.
Many of Harburg’s long-established Jewish families were quite well off financially and socially, whereas the immigrants included numerous Jews who lived from small-scale trade and mostly socialized within their circles.
There were also differences in religious orientation. The new Community members were more traditionally religious, sticking especially to kosher meals and other Jewish customs, which were usually less intensively cultivated among the city’s long-established Jewish families.

On June 14, 1922, Ester and Moszek Sroka were delighted with the happy birth of their son Heinrich. According to the Harburg directory, the family resided for a short time at Schlossstrasse 38, and then for several years at Lämmertwiete 1. At the beginning of the 1930s, they moved to Neue Strasse 6 and from there to a one-bedroom-room apartment with kitchen on the second floor of an apartment building at Wilstorfer Strasse 76. Moszek Sroka used a retail unit on the ground floor only as an exhibition room. He had no employees for the workshop or for selling his own products.

Moszek Sroka initially belonged to the Harburg-Wilhelmsburg Synagogue Community (Synagogengemeinde) as a member and from 1938 to the Hamburg German-Israelitic Community, after the three once Prussian communities of Altona, Wandsbek, and Harburg-Wilhelmsburg had lost their independence. His income was so low that he did not have to pay any Jewish religious tax (Kultussteuer).

His son Heinrich Sroka attended the Jewish Talmud Tora School in the Grindel quarter of Hamburg-Eimsbüttel starting on 1 Apr. 1930. He wanted to become a civil engineer later. But before he succeeded in obtaining the necessary school-leaving certificate, he and his parents as well as about 17,000 other Jewish men, women and children were arrested in many places of the German Reich on 28 Oct. 1938 and deported to the German-Polish border near Neu Bentschen and Konitz in the dead of night.

The background to this operation by the Reich government was a revision of the Polish passport regulations, which called on all Poles who had lived abroad for more than five years to have their passports extended by 31 Oct. 1938 if they were still interested in Polish citizenship. However, the applications of Jews were processed only very hesitantly and were often turned down. Those affected lost their Polish citizenship and became stateless. The Nazi Reich government, in turn, anxious regarding the place of abode of thousands of former Polish Jewish stateless persons, announced on 26 Oct. 1938 a ban on residence for all Jews of Polish origin living in Germany who did not possess a valid passport, and prepared a mass deportation of these persons.

Hours earlier, they had been arrested at home or at work, driven to a nearby train station, and transported east in heavily guarded trains. The Hamburg transport, which included Heinrich Sroka and his parents as well as his aunt Frieda, his uncle Jakob and his cousin Josef Gelbart, left Altona station that same evening. Joseph Gelbart’s brother Bernhard (Dan) remembers the arrival of these people at their destination in moving words. "Thousands of people were crowded together at Zbaszyn station. Body to body, head to head, densely packed like a herd of cattle seeking refuge from an approaching storm. Only one day before, they had been living their lives as housewives, heads of families, and schoolchildren in peace and quiet. Then suddenly they were taken to the border by trains and at night were driven through the no-man’s-land with fixed bayonets. The weak stumbled, the sick fell. The poor desperately clasped a few belongings. Soon after they reached the station hall, the parents’ despair, the children’s hunger, and the suffering of the sick could no longer be suppressed. Soon even the Polish border guards could no longer control the sobbing and screaming that stormed against the dark walls of the station hall.”

The Polish government only allowed those who could prove that they had relatives in Poland who would take them in to continue their journey. All the others were first detained at the border and were then allowed to continue their march with some delay to the next town, the small Polish border village of Zbaszyn (Bentschen) with about 4,000 inhabitants. A large number of the displaced persons were accommodated in a former barracks and the associated stables, slept on simple straw beds, and suffered from the more than miserable sanitary conditions. The food supply also left much to be desired at the beginning, because the local authorities were not prepared in any way for this onslaught and were therefore completely overburdened. Moreover, the absolute isolation from the outside world was a major problem for the displaced persons in the first days after their arrival at this place.

In the course of time, the situation slowly improved. Some expellees, including Moszek Sroka, were allowed to leave for the German Reich at short notice in order to liquidate their household or business and settle their property affairs. However, the liquidation proceeds had to be transferred to a blocked account. As well, those who could present papers for emigration were allowed to leave the internment camp. Heinrich Sroka seized this opportunity in the spring of 1939 when, probably on the advice of his cousin Bernhard Gelbart, he decided to move to the hachshara center of the Hechalutz Movement in Grochow near Warsaw to begin agricultural training. It was an important prerequisite for the realization of his plan to emigrate to Palestine and begin a new life in a kibbutz.

Before the German Wehrmacht occupied the Polish capital at the end of Sept. 1939, many members of this training center managed to flee via Vilnius to Lithuania under the leadership of Bernhard Gelbart. Heinrich Sroka was also in this group. In spring 1941, the refugees arrived in Palestine from Lithuania before the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

Shortly before the final closure of the Zbaszyn internment camp, Ester and Moszek Sroka were able to leave this place and move to Zloczew. After the occupation of Poland by German troops in September 1939, they moved from there a few months later to Warsaw, where they stayed in Mila Street in the center of the city, which was sealed off from the other parts of the city by a wall from November 1940 onward. In the meantime, Frieda and Josef Gelbart had also found more than makeshift accommodation there.

The next phase of their martyrdom began in the winter of 1940/41. The more impenetrable the wall that separated the Jewish residential district in Warsaw from the other parts of the city became, the stronger the feeling grew among those imprisoned that they were now living in a prison without exits, and the more credible even the worst fears became. The brief references to reality in this "waiting room of death,” found in Josef Gelbart’s letters to his former employer and fatherly friend Hans Stockmar in Kaltenkirchen, suggest the misery and despair experienced by the occupants of this restricted area. In his letter dated 4 May 1942, he left no doubt about the poverty that was ubiquitous there and the exploitation of the imprisoned persons by profit-seeking entrepreneurs, pointing out that Ester and Moszek Sroka worked in a textile factory and could only buy a slice of dry bread from the wages for their 12 hours of work each day. They had "only what they wore on their bodies.”

In other respects, the living conditions were also unbearable. The power supply was just as inadequate as the sewage disposal, which Josef Gelbart outlined with the words, "There is no water, because everything is frozen, no sink, and everywhere the dirt accumulates. Oh, there is no shore in sight at all.” More than 100,000 men, women, and children contracted epidemic typhus between Apr. 1941 and May 1942. Growths and hunger edema also contributed to the high rate of illness among the ghetto occupants. The German authorities did not lift a finger in view of this misery and left the Jewish doctors and hospitals to their own devices in their efforts to contain the diseases. The weakening of the vitality of these "enemies of the German people” was entirely in their interest.

Josef Gelbart and his aunt Ester Sroka were not spared from illness either, as his letter dated 1 Feb. 1942 shows: "The New Year did not begin well for us at all. (...) A boil on my knee had paralyzed me. At the same time, the sister of my mother (from Harburg) is seriously bedridden with epidemic typhus. She has not been coherent for eight days (...).” Frieda Gelbart was also ill. She had already spent several weeks in bed before and then barely recovered from this weakening of her health when she fell ill again. Even her son was at the end of his tether. In May 1942, his letters hardly showed any courage or hope. He struggled with fate in the face of which he was powerless. For a long time, he had defied all assaults on his health, but by this time, he too lacked the strength to find a way out of the suffering, something his mother, aunt, and uncle had long been unable to do. In the last postcard that Hans Stockmar received from Warsaw, the words of his long-suffering friend sound almost like a farewell: "I am not doing well myself, I am very weak and abandoned by God and all. (...) It is a strange phenomenon that all doors close. The sun is shining and it is spring – here too – but mercy on him who weakens.” After that, Hans Stockmar waited in vain for another sign of life from Warsaw.

Others who were close to the four people expelled from Altona and Harburg do not know how their lives ended either. Are they among those who died of epidemic typhus in the Warsaw Ghetto, or are they among those who were the first to be transported to Treblinka two months later because they were ill and therefore unable to work?
The mass murder of the inhabitants of this largest ghetto on Polish soil began in July 1942. Treblinka served exclusively as an extermination camp with 10 gas chambers, which the Nazi builders had disguised as shower rooms. The gas consisted of carbon monoxide produced by diesel engines, which within 20 to 30 minutes led to the agonizing deaths of those trapped.

Ester and Moszek Sroka, Frieda, Jacob and Josef Gelbart are among the many victims of the Holocaust who have no grave.

Translator: Erwin Fink/ Changes: Beate Meyer
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: November 2020
© Klaus Möller

Quellen: Hamburger jüdische Opfer des Nationalsozialismus. Gedenkbuch, Jürgen Sielemann, Paul Flamme (Hrsg.), Hamburg 1995; 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; Staatsarchiv Hamburg 351-11_45269, 351-11_42162; Harburger Adressbücher; Beate Meyer (Hrsg.), Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der Hamburger Juden 1933 – 1945, Geschichte. Zeugnis. Erinnerung. Hamburg 2006; Barbara Just-Dahlmann, Simon, Stuttgart 1980; Hans-Hermann Groppe, Ursula Wöst, Über Hamburg in die Welt, Hamburg 2007; Konrad Plieninger, "Ach, es ist alles ohne Ufer ...", Briefe aus dem Warschauer Ghetto, Göppingen 2002; Stephan Stockmar, "Nur ziehen Sie Ihre Hand in diesen dunklen Stunden nicht zurück." Briefe aus dem Warschauer Ghetto. Hans Stockmar posthum als Gerechter unter den Völkern geehrt, in: Die Drei. Zeitschrift für Anthroposophie in Wissenschaft, Kunst und sozialem Leben, 11, 2002; Wolfgang Benz, Lexikon des Holocaust. München 2002; Dan Gelbart, Homeward Flight, in: Gerhard Paul, Miriam Gillis-Carlebach (Hrsg.), Menora und Hakenkreuz, Hamburg 1998; http://www.michael-lausberg.de, Das jüdische Leben in Russland, aufgerufen am 1.11.2020; http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Geschichte_der_Juden_in_ Russland, aufgerufen am 31. 10.2020. http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/Zbaszyn.html., aufgerufen am 29.10. 2020; http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hechaluz, aufgerufen am 2.11.2020; http://de.wikipedia /org/wiki/ Hachschara, aufgerufen am 2.11.2020.