Search for Names, Places and Biographies

Dora, Frieda, Pinkas, Jakob Salo und Leo Ziegel (von links)
© Privatbesitz

Leo Ziegel * 1918

Jessenstraße 10a-16 (Altona, Altona-Altstadt)

HIER WOHNTE
LEO ZIEGEL
JG. 1918
´POLENAKTION`1938
ZURÜCKGEKEHRT 1939
1939 KZ FUHLSBÜTTEL
MEHRERE KZ
1945 KZ BERGEN-BELSEN
BEFREIT

further stumbling stones in Jessenstraße 10a-16:
Pinkas Ziegel, Dora Ziegel, Frieda Ziegel, Jakob Salo Ziegel

Pinkas Ziegel, born on 15.6.1888, in Lysiec (now Lysets, Ukraine), forcibly deported on 28.10.1938, across the German-Polish border near Zbąszyń (German: Bentschen), murdered

Dora Ziegel, née Wagner, born on 2.6.1890, in Skole (now Skole, Ukraine), forcibly deported in August 1939 across the German-Polish border, murdered

Leo Ziegel, born 20.10.1918, in Hamburg, imprisoned and forced to perform labor in several concentration camps from 1939 to 1945, survived

Frieda Staszewski, née Ziegel, born 20.5.1922, in Hamburg, Kindertransport to England in December 1938, survived

Jakob Salo Ziegel, born 7.10.1927, in Hamburg, Kindertransport to England on 14.6.1939, survived

Jessenstraße 10a-16 (formerly Funkstraße 2)

Pinkas Ziegel was born on June 15, 1888, in the Galician village of Lysiec (today Lysets, Ukraine) as the son of Jakob and Frumed Ziegel. We have no information about his parents' origins or ages. He had three siblings: Adolf, Regina, and Moshe.

Galicia belonged to Austria-Hungary at the time, so Pinkas was initially an Austrian citizen. The family was Jewish. We know nothing about his childhood and youth.

According to his grandchildren, Pinkas' parents urged him and his siblings to leave Galicia on the eve of World War I. Pinkas and his sister Regina went to Germany, specifically to Hanover, while his brother Adolf went to Austria. Pinkas' parents and his brother Moshe remained in Galicia and are believed to have perished in the Holocaust.

Adolf Ziegel lived in Vienna and worked in the judiciary, according to his relatives. After Austria's annexation to the German Reich in 1938, he was initially arrested. Then, with the help of his wife Gisela, he was released, fled with her via Italy to the USA in 1939, and died there in 1955. However, these details cannot be verified with certainty, nor can the further course of Regina Ziegel's life. She is said to have fled with her husband Berman Klein from Hanover to England, where she died in 1939.

Pinkas Ziegel lived at Burgstraße 9 in Hanover. We do not know how he earned his living there. Around 1913, he moved to Altona and was employed as a cantor in the Great Synagogue of the High German Israelite Community on Kleine Papagoyenstraße. He also earned money as a so-called product dealer (i.e., a dealer in scrap materials, such as rags, skins, and iron).
At that time, he was not yet registered in Altona, and we do not know whether he was already living there. When he married Dora/Dwora Wagner in 1913, he was listed in the Altona registry office as a "choir singer” residing on Burgstraße in Hanover.

His wife Dora was the sister of Wolf Rechtschaffen (see www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de). She was born on June 2, 1890, in Skole in Galicia (now Ukraine) and came to Germany with her parents Ephraim and Ester Rechtschaffen in 1902. The fact that Dora bore the birth name "Wagner” until her marriage was due to the fact that her parents were not yet legally married at the time of her birth (but possibly married according to Jewish rites); "Wagner” was her mother's maiden name.

Dora's family had lived in Altona since 1909, very close to the synagogue on Kleine Papagoyenstraße. That may be where Dora and Pinkas met. The couple initially lived on Bürgerstraße in Altona and moved to Funkstraße 2 in May 1915. They were to live there until their expulsion in 1938. The couple had three children: Leo, born on October 20, 1918, Frieda, born on May 20, 1922, and Jakob Salo, born on October 7, 1927.

They maintained close contact with Dora's family: Pinkas had business ties to the Rechtschaffens, his son Jakob Salo attended the same class at the Jewish school as his cousin Jakob Rechtschaffen, and the two were good friends.

The apartment on Funkstraße was not large, but it was sufficient for the family. They could afford a domestic helper—not least because mother Dora was very careful with money, as her descendants recounted. Daughter Frieda later told her children that, also for reasons of economy, she regularly walked the approximately three-kilometer distance to the Israelite Girls' School on Karolinenstraße.

All three children initially attended the Jewish community school at Palmaille No. 17. The sons also received additional instruction in Jewish rules of life at the synagogue. On Shabbat, Altona's Chief Rabbi of the High German Jewish Community, Joseph Carlebach, invited the children from the neighborhood to his home on Palmaille for the traditional herring dinner in the afternoon.

Carlebach's daughter Miriam wrote: "[...] The herring for the so-called ‘Herring Schiur’ was served on glass plates and the accompanying schnapps was passed around in small glass cups. This ‘Herring Schiur’, an Eastern Jewish custom, took place on Shabbat afternoon [...] – with Hasidic solo singing by Cantor Ziegel and short Torah words from Rabbi Duckesz – and with herring on glass plates." (For more on Eduard Duckesz, see www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de)

And Pinkas Ziegel sang in the synagogue: "restrained” on "normal” days, contemporary witnesses recall, with great gesture on holidays.

Dora Ziegel ran the household, while Pinkas, according to his tax records from the Jewish community, earned a good living as a merchant and employee of the Hamburg Synagogue Association until the end of the 1920s. Even the global economic crisis that began in 1929 did not affect the family of five too badly. Pinkas Ziegel traveled for his brothers-in-law's metal trading company, Rechtschaffen, whose business activities were abruptly terminated in 1933 by the new National Socialist rulers.

Pinkas Ziegel retained his job as cantor, but even that was made difficult for him by the Nazis. The reason was his lack of German citizenship. With the collapse of Austria-Hungary at the end of World War I, Pinkas Ziegel's birthplace had fallen to Poland. The Austrian had become a Pole. And as a Pole, he needed a certificate, i.e. a permission (Befreiungsschein) from the employment office to work in Hamburg from 1933 onwards.

Because he did not receive it at first, Chief Rabbi Carlebach personally intervened on his behalf in November 1933: "I would like to warmly endorse the application of Mr. Paul Ziegel, Altona, Funkstr. 2, for a work permit. Mr. Ziegel's vocal talent is exceptionally good, so that his performance in our large synagogue, which has no organ, is able to fill the space and regulate the congregational singing in the most felicitous manner. Before Mr. Ziegel was appointed to this position, our congregation attempted to find an equivalent replacement by advertising the position, but without success. It would therefore be a serious blow to the devotion and dignity of our worship services if Mr. Ziegel were prohibited from working."

Carlebach's intervention was successful: from then on, Pinkas Ziegel received a six-month extension of his work permit from the Nordmark State Employment Office until his expulsion in 1938. In 1938, he earned a gross monthly salary of RM 282.58, which was about twice as much as a worker.

At the end of March 1938, the Polish parliament passed a law threatening to revoke the Polish citizenship of all Poles who had been living abroad for more than five years. The background to this was Poland's concern about a mass return of Jews who were being persecuted in the German Reich. For Pinkas and Dora Ziegel, this law meant statelessness.

The Nazi state, which had set itself the goal of expelling the Jewish population, reacted quickly to the Polish law. At the end of October 1938, on the orders of Heinrich Himmler, 17,000 people of Polish nationality living in the Reich were unexpectedly arrested and deported to Poland. In Hamburg, this affected about 1,000 people, including Pinkas Ziegel and his eldest son Leo. Dora and the two younger children remained behind in Hamburg.

Father and son Ziegel were arrested in Altona and were only allowed to take food for two days and a few personal belongings with them. They were then taken by train to Zbaszyn in Poland and registered by the Polish authorities. Since they no longer had any relatives in Poland to whom they could go, they were interned in Zbaszyn. Together with at times more than 8,000 fellow sufferers, they spent the winter there under catastrophic hygienic conditions, even though the American aid organization American Distribution Committee, or JOINT for short, supported the camp.

In Germany, the Nazis had once again increased pressure on the Jewish population with the pogrom night of November 9, 1938. This, and the expulsion of her husband and eldest son, may have encouraged Dora Ziegel to seek a way for her two younger children, Frieda and Jakob Salo, to escape. She managed to place them both on Kindertransports to England. Frieda Ziegel arrived in London in December 1938, and her brother Jakob Salo was able to leave Germany in July 1939.

In July 1939, Pinkas and Leo Ziegel were allowed to return from Poland to Hamburg for a short time, under Gestapo supervision, to clear out their household in Funkstraße. According to witnesses who testified after the war, Pinkas and Dora Ziegel desperately tried to find a country to emigrate to in August. At the same time, the couple cleared out their apartment on Funkstraße with the help of the Altona-based moving company Bartels. Although they had obtained permission from the foreign exchange office to transport their furniture and household goods to Poland or England, they still did not have a specific destination in mind.
And there was not enough time to find one: at the end of August 1939, a few days before the German invasion of Poland, the couple was arrested by the Gestapo and finally expelled to Poland. They had to leave their furniture and clothing behind at the shipping company in Altona.

In Poland, all traces of Pinkas and Dora Ziegel are lost.

Their son Leo, who had survived several Nazi concentration camps (see below), initially assumed after the end of the war that the two had possibly come via Warsaw to Stanislawow (today Ivano-Frankivsk/Ukraine) and were murdered there by the SS in 1941 (Pinkas) and 1942 (Dora). At least, that is what Leo wrote in the entries he made for his parents in the International Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem and in the memorial book of the Federal Archives of the Federal Republic of Germany.

However, as there was no evidence to support this and in order to pave the way for possible compensation, Leo had his parents officially declared dead by the Altona District Court in 1956. The judges set May 9, 1945, as the date of death for Dora and Pinkas Ziegel.

As mentioned above, Leo Ziegel had been deported to the Polish border with his father.
Like his siblings, he had initially attended the Jewish community school in Altona. His parents had wanted him to study at university, so in 1929 they had sent him to the Talmud Torah School in Hamburg, which charged tuition fees. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Jewish youth were first hindered and then denied access to universities.

Leo therefore began vocational training to increase his chances of finding employment if he emigrated. He left school in 1935. Unable to find an apprenticeship as a locksmith, he completed a so-called pre-apprenticeship in locksmithing with the Jewish community in Hamburg. In January 1936, he began working as a volunteer at the Lachenmayer coppersmithing company in Hamburg. Being a volunteer meant that he received no training, could not obtain a journeyman's certificate, and was not paid. As a Jew, he was also forbidden from attending vocational school.

Leo worked at Lachenmayer for two years, but was financed by his parents. In 1938, he finished his apprenticeship and tried in vain to find work as a coppersmith. Even occasional sales jobs at his uncle Wolf Rechtschaffen's metal trading company brought in very little money.

He first came into contact with the Gestapo after being brought to Zbaszyn. Although he was able to return to Hamburg with his father for a short time to liquidate their household, he was unable to find a way to emigrate during this period. He had submitted an application to the British Embassy, but did not receive the papers in time before the war began on September 1, 1939.

In September 1939, Leo was arrested again, along with several thousand other Polish Jews. The reason was that they were now considered "enemy aliens.” In the spring of 1940, he was transferred from the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. There, the young man initially had to work under extreme conditions in the brick factory and was often ill. Later, he was employed as a blacksmith in the camp's factories. Leo remained in Sachsenhausen for two and a half years, then in the fall of 1942 he was transferred to forced labor at the IG Farben Buna-Monowitz concentration camp, part of the Auschwitz camp complex.

Despite the worst conditions, he survived this period until January 1945, when he had to march to the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp near Nordhausen. Here he toiled for three months in the underground rocket production facility that had been relocated there from Peenemünde. Under the pressure of the advancing Allies, a final transfer took place, this time to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which was hopelessly overcrowded towards the end of the war and where typhus was rampant. Leo survived this stage too, albeit extremely emaciated, traumatized, and seriously ill. At the beginning of May 1945, he was liberated by American soldiers in Bergen-Belsen.

Back in Hamburg, Leo Ziegel tried to get back on his feet. In 1946, he married Ada Gartenbank, and their son Uri was born in October. At the end of 1947, he finally received permission to open a metal business, but it was not successful. Then he found work with the Jewish community and pursued his emigration to the USA.

In September 1949, the time had come: Leo Ziegel, his heavily pregnant wife Ada, and their son Uri left Germany and moved to New York. Their daughter Doris was born there in October. Leo initially worked as an ironer in a tie factory, later returning to the metal trade. Their daughter Annette was born in August 1953.

From New York, Leo Ziegel began to fight for compensation for his family's fate from the authorities in Hamburg. In March 1952, he applied to the Altona District Court to have his parents, Pinkas and Dora Ziegel, officially declared dead (see above). This cleared the legal path for further compensation claims. In the following years, Leo fought for compensation for his parents' imprisonment (1958), payments for his father's lost career opportunities (1963), and the family's lost household goods (1970).

Leo Ziegel also filed compensation claims for his own suffering, for his deportation in 1938 and for years of forced labor, which were not approved until the 1960s. In 1966, he was also awarded compensation for being barred from education under the Nazis.

In the same year, Leo Ziegel's pension application in Germany was also approved: experts certified that he had suffered a 25 percent reduction in earning capacity as a result of the persecution he had endured. He was now 48 years old and suffered from a variety of physical and psychosomatic complaints as a result of his time in concentration camps.

Leo Ziegel lived with his family in Queens, New York. Together with his cousin Manfred Rechtschaffen, who had also emigrated to the USA, he ran the Brooklyn-based company "R&Z Metal Corp.” until the 1990s. His wife Ada died in December 1985, and a little over a year later he married Elisabeth Srollvits, who was born in Budapest in 1923. Leo Ziegel, who was considered very devout within the family, died on April 4, 2014, in New York.

His eldest daughter Doris married Irwin Greenberg and moved to Israel. Her younger sister Annette married Jakob Wiesel and remained in New York.

As mentioned above, the parents had been able to bring their children Frieda and Jakob Salo Ziegel to safety in Great Britain.

Frieda Ziegel was 16 years old when she landed in Harwich near London in December 1938. In Altona, she had first attended the Israelite Community School in Palmaille, and later the Israelite Girls' School in Karolinenstraße in Hamburg. In London, the young woman stayed at a hostel for Jewish girls in Willesden Green, worked as a secretary, and trained as a milliner. Frieda had distant relatives in London, and through a cousin she met Sali Staszewski in the early 1940s.

Sali was born in 1922, like her. His family came from Frankfurt am Main and had managed to officially move to London shortly before the war began. The background to this was a request made to the government by the British manufacturing family Bechler. The Bechlers manufactured women's handbags and wanted to bring the Staszewski family to London to strengthen their company. The British government approved the application, issued visas, and the German government accepted the emigration and allowed the family to leave. Sali now worked for the Bechler company.

On August 18, 1943, Frieda and Sali were married in the Great Synagogue on Grove Street in London's East End. The couple had three children: Hanni, born in 1944, Paul, born in 1952, and Michael, born in 1955.

At the end of the 1940s, the couple started their own business and founded the company "Sasta Travel Goods,” also in the East End. Sali managed production and sales, while Frieda took care of the bookkeeping. Initially, as with Bechlers, they manufactured women's handbags, later adding suitcases. Even after Sali's death in 1977, the company continued to exist until 1982.
Frieda Staszewski outlived her husband by more than 40 years. She died on August 26, 2018, in London.

Jakob Salo Ziegel was just under twelve years old when his Kindertransport, numbered 7978, reached London on July 14, 1939. The boy was taken in by a family who, like him, had fled Germany. However, not least because of their own problems, they were unable to care for Jakob Salo intensively.

Jakob Salo had attended the Jewish community school in Altona from 1933 to 1937 and then transferred to the Talmud Torah School. In England, however, he was initially barred from attending secondary school because he spoke very little English and was too old to be admitted to the entrance exam under the regulations in force at the time. Therefore the 12-year-old had to go back to elementary school for two years.

In 1942, with the help of his sister and other supporters, he made the leap to an affordable private school, where he graduated the following year. Now, the 16-year-old only needed to pass one exam to get into university, but he could not afford the tuition fees or living expenses. Therefore Jakob Salo first worked as an office clerk for two years before returning to private school to obtain his university entrance qualification. In 1948, equipped with a scholarship, he began studying law in London, but still had to work as a private tutor and office clerk until he graduated in 1952. Jakob Salo then left England and moved to Canada to work as a lawyer. He initially worked in Vancouver.

In 1960, he applied to the Office for Reparations in Hamburg for compensation for his lost education. However, as he had missed the deadline specified in the Federal Compensation Act (April 1, 1958), his application was rejected. Two further attempts to apply in subsequent years were also unsuccessful.

From 1962 to 1975, Jacob Ziegel taught at the universities of Saskatchewan, Montreal (McGill University), and York (Osgoode Hall Law School). He then moved to the University of Toronto, where he headed the law faculty until his retirement in 1993. His area of expertise was commercial law, particularly consumer rights. Over the years, Jacob Ziegel published several seminal works, edited a series of legal writings, and was a member of the Canadian Law Commission.
His marriage to scientist and author Adrienne Kolb from Cape Town remained childless. Jacob Ziegel died, highly honored, on December 13, 2023.

Stand: March 2026
© Christoph Macherauch

Quellen: 1; 5; 8; Ina S. Lorenz (Hg): Die Hamburger Juden im NS-Staat 1933 bis 1938/39, Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2016 (Band III und Band IV) Polen: zbaszyn1938.pl; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Oral history interviews of the Brad Zarin Collection, collections.ushmm.org; USC Shoah Foudation: Visual History Archive, Interviews 3510 und 3499; Interview Jacob Rechtschaffen "Werkstatt der Erinnerung", FZH/WdE600; Miriam Gillis-Carlebach: "Jedes Kind ist mein Einziges", Verlag Dölling und Galitz, Hamburg 2000, S. 102; Gespräch mit dem Enkel P.S. vom 18.6.2025; Schriftliche Auskünfte von P.S. in E-Mails vom 10. und 19. Dezember 2025, sowie schriftliche Unterlagen der Familie; StaH 351-11_12049; StaH 351-11_56197; StaH 351-11_56198; Star 351-11_48648; StaH 351-11_56067; StaH 314-15_7656; StaH 314-15_5648; StaH 424-111_6892; StaH 213-13_28223; StaH 332-5_6016.
Zur Nummerierung häufig genutzter Quellen siehe Link "Recherche und Quellen".