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Knabe Domaracka * 1944

Randowstraße gegenüber Nr. 14 (am Gedenkstein) (Altona, Lurup)

HIER GEBOREN
KNABE DOMARACKA
GEB. 4.12.1944
MUTTER IN ZWANGSARBEIT
KZ-AUSSENLAGER EIDELSTEDT
NACH DER GEBURT
ERMORDET

further stumbling stones in Randowstraße gegenüber Nr. 14 (am Gedenkstein):
Knabe Dub, Alice Dubova, Julianna Malinowska, Marianne Taus

The boy with the surname Domaracka, born on 4.12.1944 in Hamburg, murdered as a newborn

Memorial stone opposite Randowstraße 14 (today Hamburg-Lurup)
Former Eidelstedt subcamp - Friedrichshulder Weg

The boy with the surname Domaracka was born in Hamburg on December 4, 1944. He was not given a first name.

His mother Ruzena Domaracka, née Herszkovicz, born on June 11, 1918 in Iza/Carpathia, was first deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto in 1944 and then to the Auschwitz concentration camp together with her husband, both of whom were Jewish.

Due to a selection for a labour assignment on 17 June 1944, Ruzena Domaracka and her sister-in-law Hilde Lewkowitz were assigned to a group of Jewish Czechoslovakian and Hungarian women who were taken to Hamburg for forced labour in July 1944. She was three months pregnant. Her husband remained in Auschwitz and was murdered.

The women were first sent to the Dessauer Ufer camp to work in the port area, then on September 13, 1944 to the Hamburg-Wedel women's camp. On September 27, 1944, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and the highest Jewish holiday, they were transferred to the satellite camp Eidelstedt of the Neuengamme concentration camp, right next to the goods station, today Friedrichshulder Weg. They had to do hard labour: clearing bomb rubble, building dykes, hauling cement and bricks and erecting makeshift buildings for bombed-out Hamburg residents. Their camp commander was the notorious SS man Walter Kümmel, who is said to have always carried a rubber whip with him and beat the women.

Ruzena Domaracka, also known as "Rose" or "Rozi", was able to conceal her pregnancy in Auschwitz and for a while in Hamburg, constantly fearing that she would be transferred back if her condition became known. (It is possible that during her stay in the Dessauer Ufer camp, she had witnessed the two Jewish Czech women Ruth Huppert and Berta Reich being sent back to a concentration camp three days after their arrival because of their pregnancies).

Shortly before she gave birth, Ruzena Domaracka and the forced labourer Alice Dubova (see www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de), who was also heavily pregnant, were ordered to stay in the camp: The people of Hamburg were not to take offence at the fact that heavily pregnant women were doing hard labour.

On December 3, 1944, Ruzena Domaracka went into labour, which lasted for 24 hours. On the evening of December 4, 1944, she gave birth to a healthy boy with black hair in the camp with the help of the "camp doctor" Ruzena Zimmerova and the "prisoner nurse" Luise Haarburger (alias Wassermann, her self-chosen code name).
A short time later, an SS woman who was part of the guards and guarded the forced labourers on their way to work showed the newly delivered woman her dead child, which the guard had placed in a cardboard box. Ruzena's friend Cecilia Wassermann later told her that the camp commandant Kümmel had drowned the child.

Former forced labourers who testified in May 1981 as witnesses in an investigation before the Hamburg District Court against the camp commander and SS man Kümmel, who was accused of murdering two newborn children, reported that Kümmel had taken the newborns to the washroom in a bundle of newspaper or rags and drowned them under a jet of water or in a bucket of water. He then threw the bundle into a rubbish bin and spoke of a stillbirth.

The birth and death of both boys are not recorded in the Hamburg death register.

Ruzena Domaracka, who emigrated to Israel after the war, testified in 1982 as a witness in the trial against Walter Kümmel: "It was clear to me from the beginning that the child would be killed." "I stayed in the labour camp for 10 days after the birth ... After that, he made me do the hardest work. Although I could hardly walk, I had to carry heavy cement slabs and sacks of cement."

Far too late after the war, charges were brought against Kümmel. His involvement in the killing of the newborns was only categorised by the court as accessory to murder, despite the testimony of former forced labourers. Kümmel could not be proven to have had base motives - and the offence had been time-barred since 1960. Kümmel was acquitted in 1982.

In a television programme about the Eidelstedt camp, Kümmel himself commented on the accusations, saying that there had been no possibility of accommodating the children in the Eidelstedt camp, literally: "That's why they insisted that they should be killed, the children. That was a secret order!"

Companies profiting from forced labour:
City of Hamburg
Saar-Bauindustrie AG Saarlautern, Hamburg branch, Schauenburgerstraße 15
Large company for all building construction and civil engineering, concrete and reinforced concrete construction, mining and metallurgical buildings.


Stand: February 2025
© Margot Löhr

Quellen: StaH 213-12, 0003 Band 001–011 Staatsanwaltschaft Landgericht, Fotoarchiv 741-4, A 81/3–81/5; Hédi Fried, Nachschlag für eine Gestorbene. Ein Leben in Auschwitz und danach, Hamburg 1995; Hédi Fried, Fragmente meines Lebens, Lizenzausgabe für die Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Hamburg 2014; Ruth Elias, die Hoffnung erhielt mich am Leben, München 1988. http://www.zwangsarbeit-in-hamburg.de, eingesehen 17.2.2016; https://www.hamburg.de/clp/dabeigewesene-suche/clp1/ns-dabeigewesene/onepage.php?BIOID=102&qN=Kümmel, eingesehen 16.7.2017; Fernsehsendung NDR III am 6.5.1982, "KZ gleich nebenan" von Barbara Schönfeld.