Never Forget Your Name. Alwin Meyer
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lived in highly impoverished circumstances. His mother Paula was divorced and worked writing addresses on envelopes in which advertisements were sent out. She later married Walter Loewenstein, who worked as a chemist in the perfume section of a large department store. They sublet an apartment at Oranienburger Strasse 87. The building still stands today.
As a boy, Jürgen lived with his grandparents Berthold and Agathe Sochaczewer at Gipsstrasse 18, then Kaiserstrasse 43. When the Nazis evicted them from this apartment,69 they moved to Grenadierstrasse 4a (now Almstadtstrasse 49) in the Scheunenviertel in the centre of Berlin.
Grenadierstrasse was inhabited above all by Jews from Poland. Most of them were small tradesmen, tailors or shoemakers. There were small rooms everywhere which served as synagogues. The people dressed differently from us and spoke Yiddish, which I barely understood. The Jews in the Scheunenviertel were unimaginably poor. People at the time said that the Jews were to blame for everything and that all Jews were rich. This was in blatant contradiction to the social situation in which my family and others lived in the Scheunenviertel.
‘The Wuthe toy shop’, says Jürgen Löwenstein, ‘was at Gipsstrasse 18, the Loser und Wolf cigar shop on the corner of Rosenthaler Strasse.’ The Bio cinema was on Hackescher Markt. You had to climb a stairway. There was a cinema called the Imperial in Hackesche Höfe, the Babylon near Bülowplatz (now Rosa-Luxemburg-Strasse 30), the Imperial at the former U-Bahn Schönhauser Tor (now Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz), three others in Münz- and Memhardstrasse, and two in Neue Schönhauser Strasse. He also vividly recalls the Lehmann lending library in Kaiserstrasse and the WILPA (Wilhelm Pappelbaum) ice cream shop ‘on the left-hand side of Rosenthaler Strasse at the beginning of Hackesche Höfe’.
In 1923, under the pseudonym Linke Poot, the doctor and writer Alfred Döblin described the street where Jürgen Loewenstein lived from 1938 in a newspaper article entitled ‘Östlich um den Alexanderplatz’ [To the East on Alexanderplatz]: ‘Left (into) Grenadierstrasse. The street is always busy. The Damm is full of people, coming in and out of old twisted houses.… The few shops have Hebrew inscriptions; I see first names, Schaja, Uscher, Chanaine. In the display windows a Jewish play is advertised: “Jüdele der Blinde, five acts by Joseph Lateiner”. Jewish butchers, craftsmen’s workshops, bookshops.’70
Jürgen attended an Evangelical kindergarten, then the Jewish boys’ school at Kaiserstrasse 29/30 (now Jacobystrasse) and the Jewish middle school at Grosse Hamburger Strasse 27, still standing and now the site of the Jewish Moses Mendelsohn secondary school.
Wolfgang Wermuth’s father Siegmund was born in Lübben in the Spreewald. The ‘Jewish street’ in this town was first recorded in the annals in 1525. After being expelled several times in previous centuries, in the mid nineteenth century a few Jewish families were allowed to settle permanently in Lübben. The community had a small synagogue with a schoolroom, a mikvah – the ritual bath for spiritual and bodily cleansing before Shabbat – and a cemetery outside the town. The synagogue was burnt down by the Nazis in November 1938, the Jewish cemetery destroyed and the gravestones used for road-building.71
Wolf Wermuth, Wolfgang’s grandfather, was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Weissensee, Berlin. This important Jewish site was ceremoniously opened on 9 September 1880 – 4 Tishri 5641 according to the Jewish calendar. Today, it is the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe. Major artists, scientists, doctors and industrialists are buried there: Micha Josef Bin Gorion (writer), Samuel Fischer (bookseller and publisher), Adolf Jandorf (founder in 1907 of KaDeWe, the largest German department store), Lina Morgenstern (social worker and writer), Ferdinand Strassmann (head of the Berlin health service) and Lesser Ury (painter and graphic artist).72
Wolfgang Wermuth’s mother was from Berlin. His maternal grandfather arrived from Poland in 1892, and around 1910 became a ‘privileged honorary citizen with German nationality because he was supplier of timepieces to the imperial court’.
His grandmother came from Altenkirchen in the Westerwald, where her family had lived for around 300 years. Her ancestors were thus among the earliest Jews to live there. The first are said to have settled in Altenkirchen at the end of the sixteenth century. In 1852, there were eighty-six Jews living there, and the highest population was reached in 1908 with 260 Jews. Here, too, the synagogue was burned to the ground in the night of 9–10 November 1938, Jewish houses and businesses were demolished, and some years later all of the remaining Jewish inhabitants deported.73
Wolfgang Wermuth’s father Siegmund was co-owner of an antiques business in Berlin and had a share in a silent movie theatre ‘which was unfortunately put out of business in 1928 by talkies’. This was a great blow for the Wermuths since it meant a considerable reduction in the family’s income. They had to give up the apartment at Duisburger Strasse 13 and move to Sybelstrasse 29 in Charlottenburg. Both buildings are still standing.
There were twelve large synagogues in Berlin in the 1920s, with an average of 2,000 seats, as well as over seventy smaller Jewish prayer houses. At the time, Berlin had more synagogues than any other city in Europe.74 Over the centuries, it had developed into the hub of Jewish life in Germany. From the first mention of Jewish traders in a certificate authorizing the guild of wool weavers at the end of the twelfth century,75 it became one of the most important centres of Jewish architects, scholars, writers, composers, painters, politicians and scientists on our planet.
Many innovations in the first three decades of the twentieth century were due to Berlin Jews: Max Reinhardt with his theatre productions; Arnold Schönberg with his twelve-tone music; Max Liebermann with his paintings and illustrations; Alfred Döblin with his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz; Theodor Wolff as editor-in-chief of the Berliner Tagesblatt with its articles criticizing Germany’s war policy during the First World War; and Paul Ehrlich, Nobel Prize-winner in Medicine and co-founder of modern chemotherapy.76
In 1933, there were 160,000 Jews living in Berlin, out of a total of almost 500,000 in the whole of Germany. A good 50 per cent of the Jewish population lived in one of the ten largest German cities with over 100,000 inhabitants. The others lived and worked in other cities and, to a lesser extent, in small towns, villages and rural districts.77 Jewish women and men worked in mid-1933 in Germany in trade and transport (61.3 per cent), handicrafts and industry (23.1 per cent), public service and professions (12.5 per cent), farming and forestry (1.7 per cent) and domestic service (1.4 per cent).78
The Wermuth family participated in the life of the Jewish community, going to the synagogue and observing the holidays.
My mother was very liberal, more than my father, who came from an orthodox family. Shabbat was a day of rest, but that didn’t mean there was no work. We observed the High Holidays and the minor festivals. We acknowledged the religion, but it didn’t play a dominant role in daily life. We were aware of our identity and never denied it.
Janek (Manela) Mandelbaum Ships from all over the world docked in the port. Sailors of all skin colours could be seen in the streets. Lots of languages could be heard. The international flair was part of his life from early childhood. Janek Mandelbaum lived in the Polish port of Gdynia with his father Majloch, his mother Cyrla (née Testyler), his sister Ita, who was three years older, and his brother Jakob, five years younger. In the 1930s, Gdynia was a large city with over 100,000 inhabitants. The family also looked forward to the frequent visits to the nearby Free City of Danzig/Gdańsk, a partially autonomous and independent free city with Polish harbour rights under the protection of the League of Nations.
Majloch Mandelbaum was co-owner of the Ocean fish conserve factory, which offered employment to a large number of workers. Business flourished and the products were sold throughout Europe. ‘We weren’t rich, but we were comfortably off.’ This enabled them to live in one of the better parts of Gdynia. The 110-square-metre apartment was comparatively big for the time, and had large windows. The family occupied an entire floor.
The beach was 10 minutes away, and Cyrla Mandelbaum often spent entire summer days there with the children. Janek’s father joined them during his lunch break: ‘He would often buy us hand-made waffles filled with sweet cream. They