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Anka und Bernd Nathan an ihrem Hochzeitstag 1940
© Eva Clarke

Bernhard Nathan * 1904

Haynstraße 15 (Hamburg-Nord, Eppendorf)

Bismarckhütte Arbeitslager

further stumbling stones in Haynstraße 15:
Gertrud Becher, Rosa Levy, Käthe Nathan, Benny "Benno" Nathan

Bernhard Herbert Nathan, born 7.8.1904 in Hamburg, resident in Prague since 1933, interned in the Theresienstadt ghetto from 1941 to 1944, deported to Auschwitz on 28.9.1944, murdered on 18.1.1945 during the evacuation of the Bismarckhütte subcamp

Haynstraße 15

The fact that there is a Stolperstein (stumbling block) for Bernhard (Bernd) Nathan in Eppendorf's Haynstraße is based on a mistake, because he most likely never lived there. However, his daughter Eva says:" From what my mother told me about my father, he would have been pleased to have lived in such an elegant street [...]. The most important consideration is that the Stolperstein exists in commemoration of my father having lived in Hamburg."


Bernd was a man who had a sense for the beautiful.
 His parents Selma (Sellie), née Hecht and the "Commis" (commercial clerk) Louis Nathan had married in Hamburg on 21 January 1903. At that time Selma lived with her parents Bernhard and Rosalie Hecht, née Perls in Billwärder Neuedeich 222. She was born on 21 January 1882 in Klein Chelm, district of Pless (Silesia, since 1922 Poland) and had nine brothers and one sister. For this sister - Martha Korngold - there is a Stolperstein in Leibnizstraße 57 in Berlin.


Louis Nathan (born 25.06.1878) also came from a large family with four brothers and two sisters. He was born and raised in Emmerich. In Hamburg he lived on Billhorner Röhrendamm 111 d.

His parents were the butcher Benjamin Nathan and Sophie, née Rozenberg.
After graduating from high school in Emmerich, Louis completed a commercial apprenticeship in Essen and was then employed by Hirsch & Co. in Hamburg. Hirsch & Co. are listed in the 1904 address book as "Modewaaren und Pelz-Confection" (fashion goods and furs). Later he worked as an agent for various Berlin companies.
 
Bernd was born in his parents' flat at Jenischstraße 30 in Hammerbrook. 
In November 1905 the small family moved to Kiel, where their daughter Margarete (Marga) was born on 9 March 1906. Within Kiel two changes of address took place. In 1908 the family was registered in Bonn, before returning to Hamburg in 1909. There their second son Rolf was born on 21 January 1909 at Heinrich-Hertz-Straße 77. This address was the residence of Selma's father Bernhard Hecht and of a G.E. Hecht. G.E. Hecht is also listed in the address book as the owner, him probably being Selma's brother Georg Eugen.


Bernd's childhood was marked by many changes of residence and thus by restlessness. This unsteadiness, which was probably due to Louis' professional activity, continued throughout the next few years. Selma Nathan's difficult-to-read registration cards show that she moved to (Berlin) Schöneberg in the summer of 1909, and in 1917 she was temporarily registered again at Heinrich-Hertz-Straße 77. As a pupil, Bernd had his own Hamburg registration card from 1915, because at that time he was again living with Hecht at Heinrich-Hertz-Straße 77. In 1916, when he was just 12 years old, he moved back and forth between Berlin and his maternal grandfather's house in Hamburg. From 1917 onwards, Berlin seems to have been the family's centre of life.

According to his daughter-in-law, Bernd's father Louis was awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class in the First World War. She told that he had been made war-blind by mustard gas, but had been a "womaniser" despite his impairment.


Around 1920, Louis took over the purchasing centre of the furniture factory of Richard Hecht, a brother of his wife, in Berlin.

According to a later statement by his son Rolf, he had to stop working in 1937. His marriage to "his elegant wife" Selma had been divorced in 1932.

 Bernd's mother's family held tightly together.
 Margot Friedlander, a cousin of the Hecht family, who was deported to Theresienstadt in 1944 after several years in hiding in Berlin and who survived, writes about this in her memoir:
" The Hechts were a large, somewhat eccentric family with a pronounced penchant for the pleasant sides of life. [...] They were all "Lebeleute" [full of life and fun-loving people], generous and sociable". Two of Selma Nathan's brothers owned a country estate at Scharmützelsee, where the widespread family regularly spent holidays and vacations together.

And further: "When we moved to the forest estate at the beginning of summer with a carload of suitcases and our maid, it felt as if we would never have to go back to the city. There was no such thing as being bored at Scharmützelsee; after all, I had nine uncles and two aunts, and therefore plenty of cousins to play with, swim with and take boat trips with."


We know nothing about Bernd's school years and later education. Since he worked as a carpenter and architect cum interior designer, he will have completed a corresponding apprenticeship or degree.
In the 1931 edition of the Jewish Address Book of Berlin, Bernd is listed without a job title at Kaiserallee 56 in Wilmersdorf "bei Hecht". In September 1933 he moved to Prague.


There is an entry in the registry office register for 12 December 1933. Bernhard Herbert Nathan, architect, living in Berlin Schöneberg, Innsbrucker Straße 7, and Lillian Grete Lazarus, without profession, born on 15 June 1907 in Trier, living in Berlin Charlottenburg, Hardenbergplatz 2, appeared at the Berlin Schöneberg registry office for the "purpose of marriage". Lillian's father, the merchant Karl Lazarus, was one of the witnesses. Lillian's mother Bessie, née Adler, had been born in the USA and had a brother there. In 1919 she had visited him with Lillian and her older sister Edith. Bessie and Lillian also appear on a passenger list from December 1931, when they travelled from Hamburg to New York. The list shows that both held American citizenship since the previous year.


In the database of digitised documents of the Theresienstadt Memorial in the Czech Republic there are various documents with details of Bernd's life in the Czech capital. After a check on his person, the following was recorded in March 1935: Bernd Nathan, architect, film specialist, German citizen, had entered Czechoslovakia on 13 September 1933 "for existential reasons", he was not a refugee. This status explains why he was able to travel to Berlin for marriage in December 1933. It goes on to say: He is married, living in his own flat, and his wife is German. He is not employed here (i.e. in Prague) and lives on the support of both his parents from Berlin and his wife's parents from America. There is no evidence of political activity.

 Bernd tried to get a job as a film setter. In 1933, the Czech film industry was booming. Prague had the best-equipped studios in Europe at the time with the Barrandov Studios. But his application for a work permit as a specialist for the film industry was rejected in 1934, as was an application to buy, sell or rent film props in 1935. In August 1935 he was working as an architect with a work permit, but his earnings were not enough to support himself, so he continued to receive support from relatives (the Hechts?) and was not dependent on the Czechoslovak state, as noted in his letter to the Foreigners` Department.


Perhaps also because of the uncertain financial circumstances, the marriage with Lillian did not last. In a document from 1936, Bernd's marital status is given as divorced, living in a joint household with a Trude Sedlickova. He now earned his money by designing furniture. His income must have been sufficient by now, because in March 1937 the police raised no objection to extending his residence permit. Further documents indicate that Bernd applied for Czechoslovakian citizenship in 1938, but this was rejected. He also applied for a police certificate of good conduct on the grounds that he needed it for his emigration.

Lillian Nathan, née Lazarus, travelled with her American passport from Hamburg on the SS President Harding to Atlanta/Georgia in the USA in May 1937. The city became her new home. There she worked as a buyer for a department store and remarried in March 1948. In 1962 Lillian L.Wolf died at the age of 55, her grave is in the Crest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery. 

In 2015, a book titled "Born Survivors" was published in the UK. In it, the British writer Wendy Holden tells the stories of three women who survived the Auschwitz extermination camp despite being pregnant.

They gave birth to their children under unspeakable circumstances in the Mauthausen concentration camp or on the way there. Miraculously, all three newborns survived, as did their mothers. One of these three mothers was Anka Bergman, Bernd's second wife and mother of his daughter Eva. In the book Wendy Holden processed the interviews she had conducted with the former "babies" and the interviews the mothers had given to Spielberg's Shoah Foundation. We thus learn in detail about Bernd's life in the years 1940 to 1944.


Anka was born Anna Kauderova on 20 April 1917 into a comfortably-off Jewish family in Trebechovice pod Orebem, then still Austria-Hungary, now in the Czech Republic. Her father Stanislav Kauder was part owner of a leather factory. Anka was very athletic, received a good school education with lessons in German and other foreign languages, played the piano and loved parties. She was the first in her family to go to university, studying law at Charles University in Prague. According to her own account, however, the pretty and fun-loving young woman hardly spent any time studying, preferring instead to enjoy time with her friends. Although the effects of the Nazi dictatorship on the lives of the Jewish population in the German Reich and later in Austria were well known, Anka and her circle of friends ignored the threatening political conditions.

"We thought nothing would happen to us. We felt invincible" she said about this time.

After the German invasion in 1939, the deprivation of rights and the process of robbing the Jewish population also began in Czechoslovakia. Anka had to leave university. She began an apprenticeship as a milliner with one of her aunts, and her leisure activities now took place behind closed doors. In November 1939, through a cousin, she met the handsome Bernd, 13 years her senior. "With his captivating looks, Bernd was a natural ladies` man like his father and had a way about him that melted women`hearts" [quote Wendy Holden] "It was love at first sight. [...] We got to know each other and we clicked and … behaved like complete idiots." [quote Anka].
 Bernd was working at the time with his own workshop and employees in the Barrandov Film Studios, fitting out shops as a sideline. He also worked for Nazis who didn't know he was Jewish, furnishing bars, nightclubs and coffee houses for the German occupiers.


Within a year, on 15 May 1940, Bernd and Anka were married and living together in Bernd's flat. Devoted to the finer things in life, he had furnished it with furniture he had designed himself. "It was terribly romantic," Anka recalled. The loving couple passed up an opportunity to flee to Shanghai. In 2006, she explained in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung why they did not take the opportunity to emigrate: "But we had our friends here. And Bernd was earning wonderfully because the Germans were having their flats and coffee houses in Prague refurbished and were happy to entrust the work to a German architect. It was just stupid of us."


Meanwhile, the anti-Jewish measures were getting tougher. Bernd and Anka had to move into a smaller flat, and Bernd could no longer risk working for the Germans. Jews were obliged to wear the yellow star, and deportations began. There was no way to avoid Bernd's conscription to Theresienstadt. At the beginning of December 1941, he had to report to the run-down former garrison town to work as a carpenter in the "Aufbaukommando" (reconstruction squad), converting the buildings into what was supposed to be a " ghetto for respected and influential individuals".


A little later, Anka received orders to report to the assembly point for transport to Theresienstadt. Once there, she was accommodated in a room together with her friends. She was young, strong and healthy and at first felt like she was having an adventure despite the unspeakable conditions. Soon she made contact with Bernd, who was housed in a different barrack. In addition to his work as a carpenter - he also had to constantly make new bedsteads for the many new arrivals - he did duty as a ghetto guard, so there were opportunities for clandestine meetings. Anka was assigned a job at the food distribution department after overcoming scarlet fever and was thus able to support her relatives with a little extra food.

Over time, more and more transports arrived. Anka's family was among them in May 1942, Bernd's father in July 1942, and then Bernd's mother in January 1944. Blind Louis was accompanied by a helper, Selma by her second husband.
 Selma had fled to her relatives in the Netherlands at the end of 1939. According to Margot Friedlander, Selma`s brother Georg Eugen "had gone to Holland as a young man and had married a rich Jewish lady [...]. Georg had already had all his siblings come to Amsterdam." Like so many Jewish refugees, Selma was interned in the Dutch transit camp Westerbork in January 1942. Here, on 23 July 1942, she married Szaje Leib Trisker (born 4 October 1905 in Czortkow/Galicia), who had moved to the Netherlands from Berlin in 1935. According to Anka, Bernd found it embarrassing that his mother's husband was a year younger than himself.


After his father Louis had given up his job in his brother-in-law's company in Berlin in 1937 at the latest, he moved to Hamburg, lived there at various addresses as a subtenant and apparently led a meagre life. On the Jewish Community's cultural tax card, under "Remarks" it says:" No assets, lives on [welfare] support as well as the children." In July 1942 he was deported to Theresienstadt. He survived being seriously ill and returned to Hamburg after liberation. In 1946 he moved to live with his youngest son and daughter-in-law in the Netherlands, where he died in October 1956.

Anka and Bernd Nathan managed to meet secretly, as already mentioned, and in 1943 Anka became pregnant. On 13 January 1944, she gave birth to a son named Jiri (Czech for Georg). He died of pneumonia two months later, on 10 April 1944.
 Margot Friedlander had also been deported from Berlin to Theresienstadt in the meantime.
 When Margot "saw Bernd and Anka again, in June, they were among the "most privileged" residents of the camp. They lived together and had built a shed in their accommodation to separate themselves a little from the other inhabitants." Because they were "young, strong and able to work, they remained exempt for three years" from further transport to an extermination camp.

Margot also found her "Aunt Selli" (i.e. Selma) again in the ghetto and describes the encounter as follows: "When she saw me, she started to cry. "Bernd is here," I said, hoping that would comfort her. But she didn't stop crying. She cried out of joy to see her son again, and out of despair that she had found him again here, of all places, in a place without hope."
Anka's parents were already deported to Auschwitz in 1943, Selma's husband at the end of September 1944, she herself a few days later. The date of her death is given as 6 October 1944. Margot Friedlander survived. She was honoured multiple times for her services to educational work as a contemporary witness. In January 2023, she - now 101 years old - received the German "Bundesverdienstkreuz erster Klasse" (Federal Cross of Merit, First Class).

In autumn 1944, Bernd received the deportation order to Auschwitz after all. Not knowing what this meant, Anka, like other women, volunteered to accompany her husband. But she was not assigned to the same transport and was never to see him again. Anka was - at an early stage - pregnant again. On arrival at Auschwitz, she was classified as fit for work. If her infant son had still been alive and with her, it would have meant her immediate death in the gas chamber. Although she was severely malnourished, Anka had to do forced labour in a weapons` factory in Freiberg near Dresden. Amazingly, her pregnancy remained undiscovered.


In the last weeks of the war, the Nazis evacuated the arms factory. The forced labourers were loaded into coal wagons, some of which were open top. The journey lasted many days in terrible cold and without food. In her book, Wendy Holden describes this martyrdom in all its gruesome detail. The train finally reached the Austrian concentration camp Mauthausen. There, on 29 April 1945, Anka Nathanova, completely emaciated and without help, gave birth to her daughter Eva who weighed just 1360 grams. A few days later, the Mauthausen concentration camp was liberated by American troops. It is hard to believe, but Eva and her mother survived, and Anka eventually returned to Prague with the child.

Bernd Nathan was in Bismarckhütte, a subcamp of the Auschwitz death camp, in the winter of 1944/1945. This had been put into operation on 1 September 1944; about 200 prisoners had to produce weapons and build armoured vehicles there. 
According to a fellow prisoner, Bernd was shot just one week before the camp was liberated during the evacuation on 18 January 1945. 
He was 40 years old. He never knew that his wife was pregnant.

 Anka had to cope with the death of her husband and the loss of her entire family. Caring for her daughter was the only thing that kept her going at the time.
 Some time after the end of the war, she met an old acquaintance, Karel Bergman. The Czech gentleman (1902-1983) had fled to England in 1939 and worked as a translator in the Royal Air Force during the war. The two married and moved to Britain with Eva in 1948 to start a new life. On the way, Anka and Eva spent a month with her relatives in the Netherlands. Eva's grandfather Louis Nathan lived there with Bernd's brother Rolf and his family.


Like his father, Rolf was a merchant by trade. He moved to the Netherlands as early as 1928 and was able to flee to Switzerland in 1942. There he was interned and had to work in road construction. In September 1944, he joined the American army in France, which had already been liberated. He returned to the Netherlands in 1946.
 Marga, Bernd's sister, in 1931 had married the Berlin dentist Dr. Kurt Blum. She managed to escape to Australia with her husband and young son in the spring of 1939. Marga died in Australia in 1989.


Anka Bergman died in Great Britain in July 2013 at the age of 96. 
Eva, married name Clarke, has been involved in Holocaust education for many years. In 2019, she received the British Empire Medal for her efforts.

Stand: May 2023
© Sabine Brunotte

Quellen: Besonderen Dank an George Nathan, Atlanta /Georgia, für Recherche und Hilfe;
1, 5, 8; StaH 332-5_3010; StaH 351-11_4052; Meldekartei Hamburg Bernd Nathan, StaH 741-4 Fotoarchiv K 6655; Meldekartei Hamburg Selma bzw. Sally Nathan, StaH 741-4 Fotoarchiv K 6655; Landesamt für Bürger- und Ordnungsangelegenheiten Berlin (LABO) Entschädigungsbehörde, Akte Nr. 51660 Dr. Kurt Blum; schriftliche Auskunft Gedenkstätte Kamp Westerbork, E-Mail vom 08.02.2016; schriftliche Auskunft Herbert Schüürman, Emmerich 07.04.2016; schriftliche Auskunft Stadtarchiv Kiel, E-Mail vom 07.04. 2016; schriftliche Auskunft Stadtarchiv Bonn, E-Mail vom 16.02.2018; schriftliche Auskunft Standesamt Hamburg-Nord vom 10.05.2016; schriftliche Auskunft Stadtarchiv Trier, E-Mail vom 22.5.2018; schriftliche Auskünfte George Nathan, E-Mails vom 09.02.2016, 23.05.2018, 25.05.2018, 24.01.2023; schriftliche Auskünfte Eva Clarke, E-Mails vom 13.02.2018, 17.02.2018, 16.02.2023; Wendy Holden, Born Survivors, London 2015; Margot Friedlander mit Malin Schwerdtfeger, "Versuche, dein Leben zu machen" Als Jüdin versteckt in Berlin, Berlin 2008; Jüdisches Adressbuch für Gross-Berlin Ausgabe 1931, Nachdruck arani-Verlag, Berlin 1994; https://agora.sub.uni-hamburg.de Adressbuch Hamburg von 1904 u. 1917; Interview mit Anka Bergman in der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung vom 01.08.2006: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/gesellschaft/menschen/holocaust-das-ueberleben-ueberleben-1332147-p4.html?printPagedArticle=true#pageIndex_4, letzter Zugriff 02.04.2016; https://www.stolpersteine-berlin.de/de/leibnizstr/57/martha-korngold, letzter Zugriff 22.01.2023; https://www.holocaust.cz/de/opferdatenbank/opfer/110779-bernd-nathan/ letzter Zugriff 09.06.2018; https://www.holocaust.cz/en/database-of-victims/victim/97841-ida-kauderova/ letzter Zugriff 01.02.2023; https://filmlexikon.uni-kiel.de/doku.php/b:barrandovstudios-1788 letzter Zugriff 30.01.2023; https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Außenlager_des_KZ_Auschwitz_I_(Stammlager) letzter Zugriff 10.02.2023; www.ancestryinstitution.de/discoveryui-content/view190092677:2957 Heirat Blum 1931, letzter Zugriff 13.02.2023; https://Austcemindex.com, Zugriff 13.02.2023.
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