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Vera Starke * 1928

Grindelhof 43 (Eimsbüttel, Rotherbaum)

HIER WOHNTE
VERA STARKE
JG. 1928
DEPORTIERT 1943
AUSCHWITZ
ERMORDET

further stumbling stones in Grindelhof 43:
Artur Schickler, Ruth Starke, Sulamith Starke, Irene Starke

Ruth Bertha Starke, née Speyer, born on 8 July 1897 in Hamburg, deported to the Auschwitz extermination camp on 12 Feb. 1943, murdered
Irene Antoinette Starke, born on 14 Feb. 1937 in Hamburg, deported on 12 Feb. 1943 to the Auschwitz extermination camp, murdered
Sulamith Starke, born on 18 May 1924 in Hamburg, deported to the Auschwitz extermination camp on 12 Feb. 1943, murdered
Vera Else Dorothea Lea Starke, born on 19 Jan. 1928 in Hamburg, deported on 12 Feb. 1943 to Berlin, departed from there on 19 Feb. 1943 to the Auschwitz extermination camp, murdered on 8 Mar. 1943

Grindelhof 43

Ruth Starke’s husband Martin Starke was born in Harburg as the son of the Jewish couple Carl and Cerline Starke, née Blättner. After the eight-grade elementary school (Volksschule), he attended secondary school until the age of 14 and began an apprenticeship in the construction and artistic glass trade at the beginning of the First World War. From Jan. 1916 to May 1919, he was a soldier and returned from the war with an Order of Merit. This was followed by three years as a tracklayer at the Reich Railway Corporation (Reichsbahn), where he trained as a switchman. In 1922, he entered the business of his future father-in-law, who ran a state lottery collection. In the same year, Martin Starke married Ruth Bertha Speyer from Hamburg with whom he had three daughters: Sulamith was born in 1924, Vera in 1928, and Irene Antoinette in 1937. In 1935, his girlfriend Käthe Goldschmidt got an illegitimate son from him. Martin Starke was meanwhile active as an independent sales representative. Since the beginning of 1930, he worked as a goods distributor for Theodor Clasen in Hamburg. After the Nazis came to power, however, his wages were cut, and he himself was dismissed in May 1934 for belonging to the Social Democrat-oriented Banner of the Reich (Reichsbanner) and for "racial” reasons. At that time, the family lived in the "Jewish quarter” on Grindel; Martin Stark’s Jewish religious tax (Kultussteuer) file card with the Jewish Community indicated him as residing at various addresses, at Grindelhof 43, on Hartungstrasse, at Schlüterstrasse 80, and at Rutschbahn 26.

A Jew and political opponent of the "Third Reich,” he remained unemployed until Nov. 1935, when he took on a job as a caretaker in the administration building of the Hamburg Jewish Religious Organization (Jüdischer Religionsverband) at Beneckestrasse 2, where the Starke family moved into a basement apartment in mid-1935. Like many Jewish men, he was arrested in the night of the November Pogrom in 1938 and detained in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp from 10 Nov. 1938 until 8 Jan. 1939.

In Oct. 1941, the systematic deportation of Hamburg Jews to the East started. As a janitor and employee of the Jewish Community, Martin Starke was present at the large-scale deportations, playing a crucial organizational role in equipping the deportation trains with mattresses, buckets, pots for drinking and washing water, with hygiene articles and drugs, and he arranged for supplying the transports with food parcels.

On 4 Nov. 1942, he was denounced. According to the account of his son, he had left the "Jewish quarter” against regulations, stolen a motorbike, ridden into the Harburg hills, and shot some game there, as he had frequently done in the past to supply himself and friends with meat. In stores and dairy shops, he had also stolen groceries for his family and Jewish friends on occasion.

Until 4 Feb. 1943, Martin Starke was detained in the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp. From there, he was transported on 5 Feb. 1943 via Berlin, where he spent 16 days in quarantine, Breslau (today Wroclaw in Poland), Oppeln (today Opole in Poland), and Bromberg (today Bydgoszcz in Poland) to Auschwitz. As he had to learn from a fellow inmate, on 12 February, his family had been deported from the "Jews’ house” ("Judenhaus”) at Beneckestrasse 2 directly to the Auschwitz extermination camp. Immediately upon their arrival, his wife and his six-year old daughter Irene Antoinette had been "selected” for the gas chambers. Daughters Sulamith and Vera went by foot toward the Birkenau women’s camp. He made inquiries but would never see them again either.

To the Restitution Office (Amt für Wiedergutmachung), Martin Starke reported only tersely about mistreatments in Auschwitz, such as "blows with a stick, hanging from a post, standing cell [Stehbunker], doghouse [Hundehütte], blows to the body, slaps in the face on a daily basis, and much more.” He gives a more detailed description of the "hell” that was Auschwitz in a 1947 account for friends and acquaintances in South America. He survived forced labor in different work detachments, "worse than slave labor in the darkest days of slavery,” forced to help build the crematoria and camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau. "At that place, you almost believed that God does not exist, one cannot imagine anything more evil.”

As a secret eyewitness, he experienced a mass shooting in the winter of 1944 when one transport followed upon another. Prisoners had been forced to dig long ditches outside the camp. "Then the horror unfolded. From the roof of the crematorium, where I worked with two comrades, I saw what was burned indelibly into my memory. Men, women, and children had to undress in the icy cold and were chased with leather whips into the ditches and shot by SS men using machine guns. Just as the people fell, dead or injured, they were tossed into the pits and covered with the hard clods of earth. When everything was over, the ground above the buried rose and fell. Very many were still alive.”

Martin Starke survived forced labor in Buna, the labor camp of the IG-Farben Works, survived the air raids of the Russians, and barely evaded his execution after a failed escape attempt because he had saved the life of an SS-Untersturmführer [SS rank equivalent to second lieutenant] during an air raid. He also survived the punishment battalion in the Polish Fürstengrube (today Wesola) mine, the death march to Gleiwitz (today Gliwice in Poland) after the evacuation of the camp on 17 Feb. 1945 and the subsequent two-week odyssey in the middle of winter on open coal cars through Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia all the way to Berlin, the transport to Flossenbürg near Bayreuth, the labor detachment in Lower Bavarian Plattling, and another death march toward Austria, until he was liberated near the Austrian border by the Americans.

"Free!!! But I only comprehended it much later. We were given cigarettes – a delight missed for so long. Along with the troops, medical staff had arrived. The sick, including me, were loaded on cars and – driven to paradise. On a meadow in the snow, a large tent had been set up. Clean beds covered with white sheets stood there. Gasoline stoves radiated cozy warmth, we were addressed with the polite formal salutation [‘Sie’]. The dirty, louse-ridden prison clothes drop. A naked, helpless human being is being placed in a lukewarm bath, a rubber tub, by delicately holding hands, bathed like a baby, gently rubbed down, clad with a towel, and placed in a bed with white sheets. A doctor comes by, a minor prick hardly felt, and immediately everything sinks into a mist. I do not know how long I slept, so relaxed and relieved, for the first time in years. The first food I received after waking up was a slice of roasted white bread. We were allowed to eat only slowly. Slowly, every bite had to be chewed. Then we were weighed. I weighed 35 kilograms [some 77 lbs] in relation to 1.85 meters [6 ft 1 in] in height. No one who has not seen that will believe it. In the first days, we slept, slept all the time. In this way, we, the last ones of Buna, won back our freedom and gradually our lives as well.”

After the stay in the military hospital of the US unit, the march back to Hamburg followed, where Martin Starke arrived in mid-June 1945. Starting in 1947, he lived in Gross Flottbek, working as an employee for various authorities and eventually at the Altona District Office for the Blankenese Housing Department. In 1948 and 1949, he served as a witness in the criminal proceedings against Gestapo officers, also testifying at the Auschwitz trial in Dortmund. In 1950, he married Käthe Goldschmidt, who had survived the Theresienstadt Ghetto and lived with her, their common son born in 1935, Pit Goldschmidt, and his sister-in-law Erna Goldschmidt at Grottenstrasse 9 in Othmarschen. He was suffering from heart problems, an effect of the 44-month imprisonment in the concentration camps. On 11 Mar. 1957, he died at the age of 58.

Translator: Erwin Fink
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

© Birgit Gewehr

Quellen: 1; 4; StaH 351-11 Amt für Wiedergutmachung, 22550 (Starke, Martin); Starke: Bericht, S. 124ff.; Gespräch mit Pit Goldschmidt, 7.10.2007.
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