Search for Names, Places and Biographies

Ilse Lazarus
© Yad Vashem

Ilse Lazarus * 1926

Försterweg 43 (Eimsbüttel, Stellingen)

1943 Theresienstadt
1944 Auschwitz ermordet

further stumbling stones in Försterweg 43:
Salomon Falck, Lina Falck, Hilde Falck, Ruth Falck, Gerta Lazarus

Gerta Lazarus, née Jakobs, born 19 Mar. 1900 in Stapelmoor, deported 23 June 1943 to Theresienstadt, 23 Oct. 1944 to Auschwitz-Birkenau
Ilse Lazarus, born 29 Aug. 1926 in Oldenburg, deported 23 June 1942 to Theresienstadt, 23 Oct. 1944 to Auschwitz-Birkenau

Försterweg 43

The Jewish cattle-dealer Samuel Lazarus (*13 Oct. 1887 in Stapelmoor in East Frisia, present-day Weener), was a Dutch citizen. His parents, both born in the Netherlands, were Salomon and Sophie (de Levie) Lazarus. At the outbreak of the First World War, in which the Netherlands remained neutral, Samuel Lazarus volunteered to serve in the Imperial German Army, and became a German citizen. As he had experience with horses, he was assigned to the cavalry unit of the Oldenburg 19th Dragoneer Regiment. He received a severe head wound while fighting in Russia. He was awarded the Iron Cross First and Second Class and the Silver Wound Badge.

He returned from service on 23 November 1918 and settled in Oldenburg, where relatives from his mother’s side of the family lived. They worked in the cattle and butcher businesses. Samuel Lazarus married his cousin Gerta Jakobs in May 1922. She was also originally from Stapelmoor. They had three children, all of whom were born in Oldenburg: Jan (*1923), Claus (*1925, died in infancy), and Ilse (*1926), who was born deaf. In 1922 Samuel and Gerta Lazarus bought a house at Damm 30. In 1927 Samuel’s younger brother Paul (*18 Oct. 1908 in Stapelmoor) moved in with them. Paul worked in Samuel’s company, Samuel Lazarus Cattle Trading, as a cattle and horse dealer. The company had a 90-year lease on a field for its cattle herds near the beach resort. Simon’s unmarried sister Rosa Lazarus (*11 Dec. 1893) had run his household since 1920. The eldest brother Simon (*23 June 1886 in Stapelmoor) had also moved to Oldenburg in 1920. He bought a house at Ziegelhofstraße 87, and also had a cattle company. The Lazarus family observed the Sabbath and attended the Oldenburg Synagogue.

After the Nazis came to power in 1933, the family’s financial situation became increasingly perilous. In April of that year there were boycotts in Oldenburg of shops and businesses owned by Jews. Two SA-men stood in front of the family’s home, holding a sign saying "Germans, don’t buy from Jews!” In 1935, Samuel and Gerta withdrew their son Jan from the public boys’ school and enrolled him at a private school in order to shield him from harassment and to ensure he was given fair grades that were not racially biased. Even so, Jan Lazarus later saw his math tutor on the street yelling "Jude verrecke!” (Jew, drop dead!).

Samuel Lazarus’ younger brother Paul, who had a non-Jewish girlfriend and thus received threats from the Gestapo, left Germany in 1935 for Winschoten in Holland. The family had been warned by Franz Reyersback (*1880), who later died in the Oranienburg Concentration Camp, on 14 December 1936. In September 1938, Samuel’s elder brother Simon also left the country – he moved to Hoogeveen, Holland. Rosa, who, unlike her brothers, was not a Dutch citizen, fled to Bellingwolde, a Dutch border-town, her parents’ hometown.

Jan Lazarus was forced to leave his high school in Oldenburg in 1936, on order of the Nazi authorities. According to a Gestapo report, 225 Jews were livng in Oldenburg in September 1937. The local public authorities used professional and financial discriminatory measures to force the Jewish residents to leave the city. The Decree on the Registration of all Jewish Property (April 1938) and the Decree on the Registration and Identification of Jewish Tradesmen (June 1938) formed the basis for the plundering and "Aryanization” of Jewish businesses. Samuel Lazarus’ trade concession was withdrawn in October 1938, and from that point onwards the family had to support itself with its savings. The Nazi state seized the entire revenue from the sale of the house at Damm 30 as an "atonement.” The family moved in with Gerta’s brother at Donnerschweer Straße 120.

Samuel Lazarus was arrested on 9 November 1938, in the wake of the Reich-wide November Pogrom, and put into "protective custody” in the Oldenburg prison. He was released two days later. Jan Lazarus was also arrested and put on a freight train to Oldenburg. Since he was not yet 15, he was not sent to a concentration camp, but was released.
Beginning in November 1939, regional Nazi party functionaries started planning the "deportation of all Jews” from the north-western region of the Reich. With reference to the border-zone decree of 2 September 1939 and the espionage danger that Jews in the border region supposedly represented, the authorities in the administrative districts of Aurich and Norden and the mayors of Emden and Leer attempted to have all Jews in the region deported to the Lublin district in Poland, which was occupied by the Wehrmacht. Representatives from the Reich Association of Jews in Germany were able to negotiate a "placement of the Jews in the interior of the Reich.”

On 7 May 1940, Samuel and Gerta Lazarus moved to Sonsbeck in the Rhineland, near the Dutch border, where one of Gerta’s sisters lived. But the sister’s family was also in danger of deportation, so Samuel and Gerta moved to Hamburg on 20 May 1940.

On 15 November 1938, the 15-year-old Jan Lazarus left on a children’s transport from Holland to England. Since he was only allowed to take one small suitcase with him, he had to wear his new suit, jacket, and coat over each other. The SA inspected the train and the luggage of the 120-130 children in Weener.

Ilse Lazarus was probably still at the Israelitic Institute for the Deaf-Mute in Berlin-Weißensee (Parkstraße 22-23) in 1940-41. In 1941 she returned home to her parents. After several state-decreed name changes, the revocation of its status as a legal entity, a forced merger and a relocation, the Institute, like all Jewish schools in Berlin, was closed down.

In Hamburg, Samuel and Gerta lived in rented rooms on Moltkestraße 55 in Hoheluft-West. The apartment belonged to Hugo Leon (*16 June 1871 in Hanover). He and the Lazarus family were later forced to move to a "Jews’ house” at Große Bergstraße 108 in Altona. Leon was deported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto on 19 July 1942.

They were once again forced to move to Försterweg 43 in Stellingen. At the Jewish cemetery there, there was a synagogue and burial hall with a residence for the cemetery caretaker. The building was owned by the Jewish Community, and was used by the Nazis as a "Jews’ house,” where Jews were quartered prior to their deportation. Lina Falck, née Heimann, and her two children also lived here (see biography: Falck). By this time, Jews’ civil rights were so restricted that choosing their own place of residence was out of the question. Samuel Lazarus and Fritz Benscher (*1904 in Hamburg), whose family leather importing business had been "Aryanized,” made coffins for the Jewish Community. Again and again, the Lazarus family’s names were on the lists of those to be deported, but every time Samuel Lazarus managed to convince Walter Wohlers, an officer at the Hamburg Gestapo’s Department for Jewish Affairs, to strike their names from the list. Lazarus would personally go to his office, wearing his medals from the First World War, and Wohlers would call Max Plaut at the Jewish Religious Association and instruct him to remove the names from the list. The family were thus able to avoid thirteen transports, on which about 5500 people were deported.

On 23 June 1943, however, the Lazarus family and 106 others were deported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto. It was generally the case that, in addition to aides from the Jewish Community, tax agents and all members of the Hamburg Gestapo’s Department of Jewish Affairs were present at the assembly points for the deportations. Thus Samuel Lazarus and Walter Wohlers met once again. The "evacuation” to the Theresienstadt Ghetto was reserved for persons over 65 and decorated veterans of the First World War. In Nazi jargon, Theresienstadt was called a "ghetto for the elderly” or a "preferential camp.”

Fifteen months later, the 18-year-old Ilse Lazarus was selected during a roll call to be transferred to another concentration camp. When she turned back to her parents, after walking a few meters, her mother ran to her. The train ended at the Auschwitz Extermination Camp.

Samuel Lazarus’ name was on a transfer list about three months later. When his number was called out, he covered the number on his uniform and said in Low German: "De is all dood bleeven” (He’s already dead). His name was taken off the list, but now he no longer had an official bed in one of the barracks or food rations. He was able to hide near the kitchen midden and thus avoid starving to death for three months. When the Red Army liberated the camp on 8 May 1945, he weighed only 35kg (77 lbs.).
The exact dates of death for Gerta and Ilse Lazarus are not known. They were probably sent to the gas chambers immediately upon arrival in Auschwitz on 25 October 1944.

Simon Lazarus, his wife Margarethe (née de Taube, *3 April 1893 in Neustadt), his children Irmgard (*1924) and Curt (*1925), and his father-in-law Salomon de Taube (1858-1942?) emigrated to Hoogevenn, Holland in September 1938. All three were held in the Dutch internment camp Westerbork, and deported to the Sobibor Extermination Camp on 25 May 1943. They were probably murdered immediately upon arrival.

The 18-year-old Irmgard Lazarus was deported to the Auschwitz Extermination Camp on 19 February 1943. Salomon de Taube had been deported to Auschwitz on 26 October 1942.

Samuel Lazarus returned to Hamburg on 12 September 1945, where he lived at Rothenbaumchaussee 217. On 19 October 1945 he moved back to Oldenburg, where he rebuilt a cattle trading company, Lazarus & Son, which he ran with his son Jan until he was quite old. Samuel Lazarus died in 1982. His sister Rosa also returned to Oldenburg in 1945 and took care of her brother’s household.

After England entered the war, Jan Lazarus was interned on the Isle of Man as an "enemy alien.” When Germany occupied Paris in June 1940, Great Britain feared that it would be the next target of a German landing operation. In order to avoid any risk presented by possible German spies, all male German prisoners were sent to Canada or Australia. In Canada, Jan Lazarus joined the army, "semi-voluntarily.” In August 1944, he was in the rear guard of the Allied invasion of Normandy. In order to protect him should he be captured, his name was anglicized and his place of birth was given as Leeds in his documents. He worked as a translator for the British Army in France, and from May 1945 onwards in the British prisoner-of-war camps in England. His rank when he left the army was Staff Sergeant. When he learned that his father had survived, he returned to Oldenburg, but kept his anglicized name and British citizenship for the rest of his life.


Translator: Amy Lee
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: March 2017
© Björn Eggert

Quellen: 1; 4; 5; 7; 8; StaH 332-8 (Hauskartei), K 2517 (Försterweg 43); Stadtarchiv Oldenburg i. O., Meldekarteikarten, Signatur G Nr. 641/ L (Paul, Rosa, Samuel und Simon Lazarus); Herbert Reyer, Die Vertreibung der Juden aus Ostfriesland und Oldenburg im Frühjahr 1940, in: Hajo van Lengen (Hrsg.), Col­- lectanea Frisica, Beiträge zur historischen Landeskunde Ostfrieslands, Aurich 1995, S. 363–390;. Jörg Paulsen, Erinnerungsbuch – Ein Verzeichnis der von der nationalsozialistischen Judenverfolgung betroffenen Einwohner der Stadt Oldenburg 1933–1945, Bremen 2001, S.104, 105, 107, 178, 195; Enno Meyer, Die im Jahre 1933 in Oldenburg i. O. ansässigen jüdischen Familien, Oldenburger Jahrbuch Band 50, S. 36 (Reyersbach); www.joodsmonument.nl (Simon Lazarus); Recherchen von Jürgen Sielemann, 2007; Telefon-Interview mit I. L. (Oldenburg), März 2010; 2 Telefon-Interviews mit G. N. (Hamburg), April und Mai 2010; Filmwerkstatt Oldenburg, Dokumentarfilm "Jan vom Damm" (Jan Lazarus) von Farschid Ali Zahedi, 30 Minuten, 2001.
Zur Nummerierung häufig genutzter Quellen siehe Link "Recherche und Quellen".