That was then. This is now.

 20 March 2012

Sometime in the 1990s, the German electronics company Siemens AG, or its US subsidiary Siemens Corporation, started to advertise using the slogan "That was then. This is now."   Hearing and seeing that slogan aggravated my aunt Eva Wulkan, geb. Falk (1911-2005) in Chicago because it reminded Eva of her mother's forced labor (Zwangsarbeit) in Berlin from 1941/1942 until her deportation to Auschwitz on 29 January 1943.  With its directive to think about Siemens' history, the slogan readily took Eva (and then me) back to the 1940s and Siemens' involvement in the Nazi war effort and its role in using Jewish forced labor.  Eva always said that her mother had been in forced labor for Siemens.

In May 2008, in Berlin, after visiting the deportation memorial at the Grunewald Station, I learned that Gertrud FALK, geb. RAPHAELSOHN (1886-ca.1943), my grandmother (mother of Eva and my father) was not deported from that location.  Rather, Transport 27 left from the Berlin-Moabit freight station under the Putitzbrücke.  (As I have since learned, Transport 27 arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau on 30 January 1943 at 10:58 am, after a 17½ hour journey.  Immediately upon arrival, 140 women and 140 men were separated and interned in the Camp, and 724 were murdered in the gas chambers of Birkenau.  We still do not know which group our grandmother was in, though I tend to assume she was part of the latter set.)

When the S-Bahn loop trains pass the area of the Putitzbrücke, you can see the huge "Siemensstadt" a bit further to the north.  This seemed to fit the family narrative with Gertrud in forced labor for Siemens and then deported from a location not far the Siemens factories.  That was then.

The first seed of doubt about the Siemens angle came a few years ago when I contacted Siemens to learn whether they had archival records regarding the people used for forced labor.  I learned they did have such records, but when they looked for information about Gertrud, her name did not appear in their records.  This was not conclusive, but it opened up the possibility that our family memory was not correct.

When my brother Don and I were in Berlin in late October 2011, we made great discoveries about Gertrud's mother, our great grandmother Ida RAPHAELSOHN, geb.  JACOBSOHN.  Learning where Ida was living when she died on 12 Feb 1939 - Duisburger Straße 8 (Wilmersdorf) (with her son Hugo and her youngest daughter Else), Don and I went by that address on the Saturday before our date with cousins Katja and Barbara in Berlin-Westend.  Fresh with our discoveries, we told Katja and Barbara all about it.  Katja mentioned that her archivist friend Sonja might be able to provide more details about our RAPHAELSOHN family members who had lived in Wilmersdorf.  I jotted down the names and last-known addresses of Hugo, Gertrud (FALK), Helene (JACOBY) and Else and left them with Katja.

Six weeks later, I received information from Sonja via Katja about Hugo, Helene and Else.  The new information included the fact that Helene and Else had been in forced labor for a company called Elektro Glimmer und Presswerke Scherb & Schwer KG in Weißensee.  The company manufactured capacitors and other 1940s electronic components. The plant at Lehderstraße 34/35 was just over 1 km west of the Weißensee cemetery.

There was no new information about Gertrud, since she had lived in Schöneberg, not in Wilmersdorf.  Nevertheless, I immediately wondered whether Gertrud had worked at the same place as her sisters.  There may have been something reassuring about the possibility that she was with, or relatively near, her sisters during this increasingly difficult period of forced labor.

Sonja was kind enough (among all her kindnesses) to forward my inquiry about Gertrud to her colleague Hannelore (another kind soul) who works with the Stolpersteine project in Berlin-Schöneberg.   This led to the easy decision to request a Stolperstein to be prepared and laid in the sidewalk outside Motzstraße 47, Gertrud's last address before she was deported.  And that unleashed the formidable research energy, skill and determination of Hannelore in the service of uncovering details about Gertrud's life in Berlin.  Just yesterday (19 March 2012), Hannelore's research led to this note:

I had now access to the records of your grandmother Gertrud in the so-called Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv.  Among the files there is the so-called "Vermögenserklärung" (Declaration of Property) your grandmother filled in.  Now we have full evidence that your grandmother was forced to compulsory labour in the same company like her sister Helene as you already supposed. She writes in the column "Last employment": "Scherb & Schwer Weissensee at a wage of 16,-- RM a week".

This is now -- another puzzle piece found.  Siemens has culpability for its Nazi-era actions, but they are not directly implicated in crimes against my grandmother Gertrud.  That honor falls on Scherb & Schwer and its successors in interest, including Richard Jahre GmbH which acquired Scherb & Schwer in 1979.

*****

This trail could end here, but one thing always leads to another.   According to a website on the components used to make the Enigma machine ("Hellschreiber"), Scherb & Schwer was one of the contributing companies (even if "the prime manufacturer of the Hellschreiber was Siemens-Halske").  The firm Scherb & Schwer was the "Arjan" successor company to the formerly Jewish-owned company Jaroslaw's Erste Glimmer-Waren Fabrik.  Based on Berliner Adressbücher entries, Jaroslaws was founded by Dr. Benno JAROSLAW (b.ca.1873) before the First World War.

A new question:  Was this Dr. Benno JAROSLAW the same person as Benno JAROSLAW, son of David JAROSLAW and Friederike SCHREIBER (1842-1875)?  Friederike was a second cousin of Gertrud's husband Dr.med. Hermann FALK (1875-1932), my grandfather.

 1940 Berliner Adressbuch

1941 Berliner Adressbuch

The JACOBSOHN Search

Berlin 1939 / Berlin 2011

2 November 2011

Having inherited a great RAPHAELSOHN family tree from the work of Dr. Richard (Dick) PLOTZ, I had not worked much on my father's mother's family history.   From time to time, I would notice that the family of the mother of my grandmother Gertrud FALK geb. RAPHAELSOHN (1886-ca.1943) was almost unknown.   My great grandmother Ida RAPHAELSOHN, geb. JACOBSOHN was just a name and date, with no information about what she was like, or where she was from, or who her parents were.

I noticed this deficiency again last year when I happened to stumble upon some new information about Ida's husband's RAPHAELSOHN family.  That inspired me to write to the city archives in Allenstein, West Prussia, now Olzstyn, Poland on 18 Oct 2010.   I wrote to request a copy of Ida's death certificate, since I assumed she was living in Allenstein when she died on 12 Feb 1939.  On 6 Feb 2011,  I received a reply from the Olsztyn archive that told me that they did not have the German records from 1939, but that they should be in the archive of Berlin Standesamt I.   I immediately wrote to Standesamt I, but did not receive a reply (as of October 2011).

When Don's and my trip to Berlin and Silesia was getting close, I remembered my search for Ida's death certificate and I asked my cousin Inge in Berlin if she could confirm that Standesamt I was the right place to find Allenstein records from 1939.  She was able to confirm that, but she also learned that it can take 1-2 years to receive a reply to a written inquiry.  On the other hand, if you visit the office, you can leave with the results right away (more or less).  Unfortunately, since the office is only open on Mondays and Tuesdays, we had to decide whether to sacrifice some of our research time at the Centrum Judaicum for this cause.

We decided to do that.   As Inge recommended, we arrived early and got Nr. 4 from the pile of number cards on the table in the waiting area.  After about 30 minutes, we told the clerk what we wanted and filled out a form to request Ida's death certificate.   Two and a half hours later, the result was in.  A very nice man told us that they had not been able to find anything related to Ida RAPHAELSOHN, geb. JACOBSOHN.  They assured us that they looked on dates before and after the date we had given them.  We walked back to the Gesundbrunnen S-Bahn station to work our way back to Oranienburgerstrasse and the start of our research at the Centrum Judaicum.

That failure was very disappointing.  On the way to the Centrum Judaicum, I started to wonder whether Ida had moved to Berlin by the late 1930s, where her son Hugo and daughters Helene and Else were living by that time, and where their sister / my grandmother Gertrud also moved in 1940 (from Breslau).   I thought about asking the archivist at the Centrum Judaicum, but I did not want to be distracted from our research goal of finding (and copying) many, many Todesanziegen, Claassenstrasse Grabinschriften and Heiratsanzeigen.   For two and half days, we did that work, finding most of what we were looking for (and then some).

On Thursday afternoon, about 3:45, we called the archivist to let her know that we had finished our last set of copying -- they then needed to be stamped and counted, so that we could pay for the 1660 or so copies.   Moments later, after a brief discussion with Don "should we ask, or not, at that late date", I called again and said I had a question about how to find out if someone had died in Berlin in 1939.   The archivist returned and pulled a binder out from the same cabinet where we had been getting paper to re-stock the printers.  It contained a copy of the burial cards from the Weissensee Friedhof in Berlin, one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe.  After being shown how to use the microfiche function on the machine we have used for 8 years to review microfilms, I quickly found Ida's burial card.

We again needed help to make a useable print of the burial card.  When that was done, the archivist noted that with the number from the burial card, she could check another set of materials for more information.  She did that, and we got copies of another document that gave Ida's birth place -- Liebstadt, Ostpreußen.  By now, it must have been 4 pm - closing time for researchers at the archive.   Still, I made a quick look in the catalogue of the Centrum Judaicum, looking to see what files they have related to the East Prussia town of Liebstadt (now called Miłakowo).   There were two, each related to a JACOBSOHN family.  The first one specifically mentioned that it contained a Stammbaum, a family tree.  I took photographs of the catalogue entries and thought we might have to wait until the next trip to see what they held.   Another call to the archivist (the researchers are in a room down the hall and on the other side of a locked door from the archivists and the archives), and she was willing to pull the microfilm with those two Liebstadt files.

Then came our great discovery -- a handwritten JACOBSOHN Stammbaum from 1893.   We quickly saw Ida JACOBSOHN at the bottom of the tree with her husband Louis RAPHAELSOHN, confirming we had the right JACOBSOHN family -- our family -- and the three of their children born already by 1893 (Else was only born in 1894).   We were amazed by our discovery.  We looked at the pages quickly, but our main goal was to get photocopies made before our time ran out.   We got it done.  We saw names (Widder / Victor, Moses, Caspar), but we did not have time to get the full picture of our new family line.

After paying our huge photocopy bill (over €500), we worked our way back to Charlottenburg.  We only had a couple hours before meeting a bunch of wonderful IMMERWAHR family cousins at Maximiians restaurant.  In that time, we had a chance to start to digest our new family tree -- new names and new places:

The next couple days were still busy with going places and meeting people in Berlin, but it was hard to make room for those experiences due to the continuing excitement from our unexpected discovery about the only part of the family tree that previously ended at the generation of a great grandparent - our little known great grandmother Ida.

Friday was going to be spent with cousins at the lectures and lunch and dinner related to the 100th anniversary of the Fritz Haber Institut (formerly, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut).  We planned to be there at 9:30, in Dahlem in southern Berlin.   The Weissensee Friedhof is in northern Berlin.   But we had to try to find Ida's gravestone.

The cemetery opens at 7:30 am, and we got there in the early morning darkness.  We took a first stab at finding Feld B-VII, Reihe 8, Grab 100147, but we could only guess from which side to start counting the rows.  As it would turn out, we were only one or two rows off.   We went to the office and the always helpful Herr Pohl provide us with a plan of Feld B-VII and instructions where to start counting to find row 8 and the 20th grave, no. 100147 -- and he told us there was a gravestone that had been placed in 1941.  We still missed it.  But after some "re-orientating", we worked our way back down row 8 to a space that first appeared to represent 5 missing graves fairly close together.  The middle one should have been no. 100147, but it was just a low mound of ivy.  Poking around at one corner, I found the edge of a stone, but no inscription.  I then poked around the middle of the stone, and also found no inscription.  Don started pulling the ivy off the grave.  Then, with one of Cookie's unused poop bags on my hand as a glove (a bag i had been carrying around in my pocket through Poland and Germany), I started to remove the earth under the ivy from the middle of the gravestone.  There, an inscription started to be visible.  While Don made a video using his iPod Touch, I cleaned off the gravestone.  We had found the grave of our great grandmother which had almost certainly not been seen by anyone in the family for close to 70 years.  (And we got to "the Fritz" only a few minutes late.)

The Sunday before all this, we had finally made a visit to Auschwitz, where all four of Ida's children were murdered.
On Tuesday, on the way to the Gesundbrunnen station, we passed through the Westhafen S-Bahn station, under the Putlitzbrücke, where Gertrud and Helene and Else were put on a train to Auschwitz (part of Transport 27).
The next Sunday, we flew home from Berlin to London to Chicago to Philadelphia on Gertrud's 125th birthday, 30 Oct 2011.
This trip had become a memorial to our grandmother Gertrud FALK, geb. RAPHAELSOHN (1886-ca.1943) and her mother Ida.