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Marianne de Zwart (née von der Porten) * 1917

Bogenstraße 32 / Schule (Eimsbüttel, Harvestehude)

HIER LERNTE
MARIANNE
DE ZWART
GEB. VON DER PORTEN
JG. 1917
FLUCHT 1935 HOLLAND
INTERNIERT WESTERBORK
DEPORTIERT 1944
AUSCHWITZ, BERGEN-BELSEN
ERMORDET JAN. 1945

further stumbling stones in Bogenstraße 32 / Schule:
Marion Werner

Eva Marianne De Zwart-von der Porten, born on 19 May 1917, escaped to the Netherlands in 1935, deported to Auschwitz on 3 Sept. 1944, died in Bergen-Belsen in Jan. 1945

Mittelweg 118 (Rotherbaum)

Eva-Marianne was born in Hamburg on 19 May 1917, the youngest of three daughters of the von der Porten family. The roots of the von der Porten family – originally Knorr – can be traced back over several generations to the Netherlands, and from 1790, the name can be found in the Hamburg directory. The family had produced a number of successful doctors and merchants and Eva-Marianne’s father, Ernst von der Porten (see corresponding entry), was also a physician. On 26 Nov. 1911, he married Friederike Frieda Alexander von der Porten (see corresponding entry), née Jaffee, the daughter of a real estate agent, who was also born in Hamburg, on 2 Dec. 1882. She gave birth to the daughters Gerda Friederike (in 1912) and Hanna Irene (in 1914) before Eva-Marianne.

There is little information about Eva-Marianne’s childhood. She lived with her parents and sisters in the home of her maternal grandparents, Jacob Alexander and Lina Alexander-Jaffé, at Mittelweg 181, where her father ran his practice for general medicine and obstetrics. Religion probably did not play an important role in family life. Eva-Marianne attended the Gymnasium Klosterschule, a high school, where her sister Gerda graduated in 1931, but then changed to the nearby Helene-Lange-Oberrealschule [a secondary school without Latin], which she left in 1934. The school, which had once been attended by numerous Jewish children, was one of the first to exclude them from school, and in 1937, there were no Jewish schoolgirls there anymore.

In Sept. 1935, Eva-Marianne went to the Netherlands to study art. Until 1938, she attended the "Kunstnijverheidsschool” (College of Arts and Crafts). According to her letters, she enjoyed her studies. She first lived with a well-acquainted German-Jewish couple in Amsterdam before moving in with her sister Hanna Irene and her husband Hans Sigmund Cramer in 1938. However, Hanna Irene died in the same year during childbirth. Eva-Marianne initially stayed with Cramer, and at the end of 1938, her parents took her to Brussels, where they had emigrated by then. The main reason seems to have been less the increasingly difficult situation for Jews in Germany, but rather the tragic death of daughter Irene, which had hit her father particularly hard. Letters from Eva-Marianne testify to the fact that the parents were very depressed; they lived – according to the daughter – only in the past.

Probably Marianne was not happy about the change of location, because it meant the spatial separation from Dick Johannes de Zwart, whom she had met in 1936. Dick, born on 2 Sept. 1914 in the Dutch colony of East India, lived in Amsterdam since 1934. He studied with Eva-Marianne at the art school in the specialization course on "Art in Advertising and Photomontage.”
Marianne continued her studies in Brussels as well, where she enrolled at the Acádémie Royal des Beaux-Arts.

After the invasion of German troops in May 1940, the Belgians arrested all Germans living in the country, including the Jews. Eva-Marianne’s father Ernst was interned and deported to the St. Cyprien camp near Perpignan in southern France. After a failed suicide attempt, he was transferred to the nearby St. Jean Hospital. His wife followed him illegally to Perpignan in November. The couple committed suicide there. In 1938, Marianne had already reported in letters that her parents could not cope with a new beginning in a new country.

Marianne had married non-Jewish Dick on 20 July 1940 and followed him to the Netherlands in Nov. 1940. The couple moved to Naarden, a small town near Amsterdam, to join Dick’s parents. After marrying a Dutchman, Eva-Marianne was able to take on his citizenship, which made it easier for her to cross the border. In the summer of 1943, she went underground for a while in an unknown place.

On 4 May 1944, Eva-Marianne and her husband Dick were arrested in their apartment. Dick was soon released as an "Aryan.” According to Dick, he tried for two months to get his wife out of prison. He succeeded in getting as far as SS Hauptsturmführer [a rank equivalent to captain] Ferdinand aus den Fünten, but the deportation had already been decided.

According to files of the Amsterdam Jewish Council, Eva-Marianne arrived in the Westerbork camp on 6 June 1944, was registered there as a Dutch Jew and assigned to the penal barracks. On 3 Sept. 1944, she was among the deportees to Auschwitz. From there, she was transferred to Bergen-Belsen at the end of October. Eva-Marianne fell ill in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and was assigned to the "exemption block” ("Schonungsblock”). Fellow prisoners reported after the war that her condition worsened when the prisoners were transferred to the camp for Russian prisoners in Jan. 1945. Marianne was apathetic and in poor physical condition, which eventually led to her death.
The exact date of Marianne’s death is not known. Her death certificate merely attests that she died in Bergen-Belsen in Jan. 1945.

Marianne’s sister Gerda survived the war.


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

Stand: May 2019
© Nach Recherchen und einer englischen Textvorlage von Lucas Brujin/Niederlande. Deutsche Kurzfassung: Paula A. Oppermann