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Sarina Wolff
© Yad Vashem

Sarina Wolff (née Blanaré) * 1884

Osterstraße 83 (Eimsbüttel, Eimsbüttel)

HIER WOHNTE
SARINA WOLFF
GEB. BLANARÉ
JG. 1884
DEPORTIERT 1942
THERESIENSTADT
ERMORDET IN
AUSCHWITZ

Sarina Wolff, née Blanaré, born on 23 Sept. 1884 in Berlin, deported on 15 July 1942 to Theresienstadt, further deported on 23 Jan. 1943 to Auschwitz, murdered there

Osterstrasse 83

Sarina Wolff came from a Berlin-based furrier family with many children and she married into a Hamburg family of furriers. Both families were Jewish and came from East Central Europe.

Hermann Blanaré, Sarina’s father, born around 1842 in Bodischau in Romania, had died in Berlin in 1892 at the age of 50. His widow Hanna or Anna, née Mekler, and Sarina’s siblings Toyve ("Favor”), also called Frieda, Rosa ( born in 1878), Fanny (born in 1882), and David (born in 1888) remained in Berlin, while Sarina and her brother Jacob (born in 1880) moved to Hamburg. Wilhelm (1876–1878) and Bertha (born in 1879) died early, and there are no further traces of Clara and Ernest.
The spelling of the family name alternated between Blanaré and Blanari – Sarina used Blanaré, Jacob Blanari (see www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de).

Sarina’s husband Leo Wolff, born on 16 Nov. 1892 in Hamburg, was eight years her junior. He was the second son of Joseph Wolff, born on 29 June 1851 in Gostyn, then Prussian Province of Posen (today in Poland), and his wife Pauline Wolff, née Salomon, born on 5 Mar. 1853 in Hamburg. Joseph Wolff, his wife and their son Theodor, born in 1885, were naturalized in Hamburg in 1886. The following year their only daughter, Rosa, was born. After a failed attempt to emigrate to Philadelphia in the USA, the family grew by the youngest son, Michael, born on 6 Feb. 1897. They belonged to the Hamburg German-Israelitic Community.

Joseph Wolff had set up his own business with a store selling ready-to-wear fur clothing at Grindelberg 74a. The company remained in family hands long after his death.

One year before his death on 24 Feb. 1907 at the age of 55, Joseph Wolff handed over his enterprise to his son-in-law Eduard Simonsohn, the husband of his daughter Rosa. Theodor, the oldest son, was meanwhile working as a collotype printer residing in London; Leo and Michael Wolff were still too young to succeed their father.

Rosa Wolff and Eduard Simonsohn had married in 1905. Eduard ran the business until 1910, when it passed into the hands of his mother-in-law Pauline Wolff, Joseph’s widow. In 1920, Leo Wolff became an independent member the Jewish Community and joined the liberal Temple Association (Tempelverband). In 1922, he joined the company founded by his father. Probably at the same time, he married Sarina Blanaré. Her brother Jacob, a master carpenter by trade, was already living with his family in Hamburg and manufacturing furniture, later producing pieces for his sister’s apartment as well.

Leo Wolff had until then worked as a sales representative residing at Grindelallee 39. In the meantime, the Joseph Wolff Company had not only undergone a change of management, but it had also abandoned fur manufacturing and switched to trade representations. Leo Wolff operated the business from his home, but by 1923, he was no longer earning taxable income. He moved to Henriettenstrasse 55/57 and opened an additional yard goods store there under his own name. In 1925, Jacob Blanari, Sarina Wolff’s brother, took over the "Handelsvertretung Joseph Wolff,” the commercial agency located at Wexpassage 1.

Sarina Wolff was 41 years old when she gave birth to her son Heinz-Manfred on 30 Sept. 1925. He would remain their only child. Leo Wolff became a sales representative again, moving with his family to Fruchtallee 95 and further on to Osterstrasse 83. He never again became liable to pay taxes for the Jewish Community, i.e., he only earned a very small income with his professional efforts.

At the age of 45, Sarina Wolff became a widow. Her husband Leo had died at the age of only 36 on 18 Aug. 1929 in the Eppendorf General Hospital. His grave is located in the Ohlsdorf Jewish Cemetery on Ilandkoppel (M 1 – 230).

Sarina Wolff continued to reside on Osterstrasse with her son, who was not quite four years old. In order to make a living, she sold parts of her household goods and she was also supported by the welfare commission of the Jewish Community. She joined the Orthodox Synagogue Association (Synagogenverband).

At Easter 1931, Heinz-Manfred was enrolled in the Talmud Tora Realschule. When in 1938 the threatening situation of the Jews in the German Reich mounted, with two of his uncles imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in June, he left school after the November Pogrom. His uncle Theodor Wolff fled to Shanghai after his release from prison.

Sarina Wolff had meanwhile moved to Durchschnitt 1 in the Grindelviertel quarter. She wanted to keep her son safe and sent him, by then 13 years old, to Britain on a children transport (Kindertransport). It is not known whether they had word from each other after they parted on 1 Dec. 1938. Heinz-Manfred was temporarily placed in a children’s home after his arrival in London and he attended school again starting in Feb. 1939, but this school was then transferred to Abbots Langley in Hertfordshire due to the threat of German air raids. He finished his schooling at the village school there and trained in farming on an estate from 1940 to 1945.

Sarina Wolff, like all Jews in Germany at the time, was subject to the obligation to surrender precious metals and jewelry. She did not own any assets in the form of money or securities that could have been subjected to a "security order” ("Sicherungsanordnung”) by the Chief Finance Administrator (Oberfinanzpräsident). Her brother David emigrated from Berlin to Palestine with his wife Frieda, née Neumann. Nothing is known of Sarina’s own emigration plans, or of her family contacts.

When the "resettlement” ("Umsiedlung”) of Hamburg Jews "for development work in the East” ("zum Aufbau im Osten”) – as the deportations were euphemistically called – began in the fall of 1941, the first of Sarina Wolff’s relatives to leave Hamburg was her sister-in-law Rosa Förster, formerly Simonsohn, with her grandson Boris on 25 Oct. 1941. They were forced into the ghetto of "Litzmannstadt”/Lodz (see www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de). With the next transport, which went to the Minsk Ghetto on 8 Nov. 1941, Sarina Wolff’s brother Jacob Blanari and his wife Theophila (see www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de) were deported. Rosa Blanari, her sister residing in Berlin, was deported to the Riga Ghetto on 19 Jan. 1942.

The Gestapo summoned Sarina Wolff, who was still living at her residential address at Durchschnitt 1, for "evacuation” to the supposed "ghetto for the elderly” ("Altersgetto”) in Theresienstadt on 15 July 1942. Her sister-in-law Bella Wolff, the divorced wife of her brother-in-law Theodor (see www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de), followed her on the next transport on 19 July 1942. While Sarina was already being deported further to Auschwitz on 23 Jan. 1943, Bella did not suffer the same fate until 9 Oct. 1944. There, all traces of the two disappear.

Sarina’s son Heinz-Manfred Wolff joined the British Army as a professional soldier in 1945 and returned to Hamburg in this capacity. Of his relatives, he encountered merely his uncle Michael Wolff, his father’s younger brother. He learned of the fate of his mother and all the other deportees only much later. In 1952, he moved to Israel, where he helped to build the Beth Chever Kibbutz.

His uncle Theodor Wolff had fled to Shanghai and from there to the USA in 1946. He returned to Hamburg for good and, after 15 years of separation, married his former fiancée, whom he had not been able to marry because of the Nuremberg Laws (on race).

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

Stand: August 2021
© Hildegard Thevs

Quellen: 1, 4, 5 digital, 6, 7; Hamburger Adressbücher; StaHH 213-13 Wiedergutmachung, 12540; 351-11 Wiedergutmachung, 47764; Berliner Personenstandsregister; Central Datbase of Shoah Victims names, Page of testimony;
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