Deportation
»We come from Poland and know our destiny«

The plans for the first mass deportation were set, the deportation of Stettin Jews. SS-major group leader Reinhold Heydrich needed apartments for Baltendeutsche, Germans with “employment bound to sea”, in the seaport of Pommern. In the middle of February, he gave the order that thousand Jews whose apartments were needed due to war-economic reasons, had to make way. Leave their homes. A cloak and dagger operation.
Barely six month after the German raid in Poland, they (more than 800) were requested to resettle to the “Generalgouvernement for Poland’s occupied territories”. In the evening of February 12th 1940, all of the affected houses and apartments were violently opened by two SA-men each. They searched the rooms and told the alarmed inhabitants that had to leave Stettin before dawn. The German bureaucrats did fussy work. Before the depart, they kept an account of all valuables, savings books, safe keys, silver as well as silverware. It was the same with the housekeeping money, the little money that was still left to Jewish citizens. The bereft people were only allowed to keep 50 Reichsmark, the travelling expenses for the train journey which was going to take several days. A train journey to no man’s land.

In Pölitzerstraße 14, Julius Gronemann, Sally Gronemann and Rosa Gronemann were witting on their suitcases. The SA-men documented:



Not far away, in Oberwiek 49, Mendel Ginsberg, Rudi’s father, was kept in check by two SA-men, too. He had been listed under this address until the census of 1939, together with his Aryan wife Gertrud Beier. The deportation lists confirmed that the Jewish salesperson made this trip to the transit ghetto in the Lublin district on his own. Gertrud Beier stayed in Stettin. It was impossible to find out whether she was about to get a divorce or whether this had already happened before, just like the Nazis urgently suggested it to all Aryan women. In the ghetto, Mendel Ginsberg pretended to be a locksmith, his father-in-law’s employment in Gruben. Being an artisan, constantly looked for and needed in the camp, he had a higher chance of surviving. Has he ever met Laja again, after his return to Stettin? Has he ever seen his son Rudi who had been in good hands in a kindergarten in Berlin, before the deportation? Who knows?

„We did not get to see any orders. When the SA-man left me for a second and when the guy assigned to my husband was in another room, too, I glanced over the table at which I was investigated. In the hurry, I was only able to read the first line: “You are requested to participate in the action of clearing Stettin from Jews.”(…) Then, they gave us the task to pack one case per person with good clothing, even silverware was allowed. (At the train station, these cases were taken away from us and we have never seen them again.) The older SA-man told me: “Wear warm clothing, the place you’re going is cold!”(…)
Since no car was at hand that was supposed to fetch us, we were waiting dressed up during the entire night, watched by two guys who even accompanied us to the bathroom. Two or three times during the night, a plainclothes official appeared and was given the status. At about 8 o’clock, the car came by and we, just like eight others with one SA-man each, were brought to the goods station. We had to stand for hours and many women passed out.(…) Two armed men were standing behind me. They, they had me strip searched and gave me a slip of paper: Community travel to G. (I’ve forgotten the name), 20 Zloty and a bag with bread and sausage.(…) I’ve seen that the elderly, who couldn’t carry stuff properly, were beaten with clubs and, after falling to the ground, kicked. As soon as everybody was inside the train, it was locked from outside, at noon we had salty barley soup and the train left around 2 o’clock. The ride in the ice cold train took three days and we did not have a sip of water.
Since there was not really enough room for everybody, we took turns, rotational standing and sitting. My parents-in-law were coming with us; they were 78, another relative even 83 years old.
Every now and then, the train stopped for hours. We heard shouts and shots, but could not see anything through the thickly frozen window. There was an old gentleman with bladder trouble in our cabin; he had to use a catheter. After the incredible pain had made him loud and furious, the train stopped and one of the men tried to open the window in order to call for a doctor. When hearing what was going on, the guard shot to our window and yelled, close the window, let the bastard perish! One of us happened to have some pills and gave him some more after he had woken up again. All this made my old relative go insane and he wanted to get out through the window, four men had to keep him back.
Then, one o’clock at night, the train suddenly stopped in Lublin. Soldiers in black uniforms tore up the doors and grabbed the legs of older people who were not fast enough, to pull them out of the wagon. As soon as were assembled, the march to the SS-camp started. Double pace, continuous shots, we threw away everything that we still held in our hands. In front of me, my mother collapsed. Her daughters were forced to keep going by hard pokes. Multiple feet shoved this and other bodies to the side of the road. Inside the camp, we just looked at the hay on the ground, indifferently, but had to stand to attention from time to time when the SS appeared. At noon, without food or drink, the women were loaded upon open sleds for the trip to Belzyce or Piaski. The men had to walk the 25 kilometers. It was a terrible trip on the open sled through Poland’s wide snow fields, 4°C below zero.
Thirteen amputations of frozen limbs were made in the hospital of Lublin at the next morning; one of them was a seven year old girl who lost both feet, all her fingers on one hand and several on the other. In summer, the child came back to Lublin and I had to look after her. In injuries of her feet had not healed until then. I don’t want to write anything of this frightening filth, the icy coldness, lice, typhus, etc. (…)“

For the Jewish Germans (among other 25 from Ueckermunde) the journey was, because of the incredible hygienic conditions and the frigidity, a journey into a strange and bizarre world. To Piaski, where families with many children were forced to live, or to Glusk, the place where mainly old people were brought, like Julius Gronemann, 69 years old at that time. For the assimilated Jews with German citizenship, a journey to the dark middle ages. They’ve never heard about the foundations of Piaski, Izbica or Glusk, founded by Jewish settlers from the 18th century.
The pitiful villages of the pious Chassidim were far away from the western awareness, far away in Poland. What did the salesperson, the teacher, the doctor or the Jewish housewife from Stettin in Pommern know about the miserable living conditions in the poor villages and about the faithful Chassidims’ pious manners? If anything, then only by hearsay.

“(…) More than a year ago, we resettled to this small, rustic town with Poland’s Jewish inhabitants“, wrote desperate Gertrud Brandl. „The clash with a completely changed basis of life has scared all of us.
Everything was s amazingly different, shipwrecked people who land on a lonely island could not have been more astonished: climate, people, places, nutrition – everything was utterly different. The first anxiety was the different climate; we came unprepared for the hard frost, the waist high snow, the icy tempest, most of us unprotected against the coldness after most of us had lost the luggage in a grotesque ending of the journey.(…) We had to move in with the rest of the population. I have to say that in a thankful way, although they were not quite the ideal people to live with.(…) They did bear the burden appropriately enough and still do. Even though there were many causes for complaint, I do not want to withhold that Jews from the west would have had an utterly worse intent. Living together with these people leads to difficulties. Fundamentally, they are compassionate and benevolent. They always hustle eagerly for the family’s income (fortunately with many children), they are hard working and skilled in every skilled trade.
The little houses, made of wood and loam with a greyish blue from the outside, looked so alike that we first thought it would always be impossible for us to differentiate between them. The houses only consisted of an enlarged ground floor and a loft which functioned as a storage room below the roof, only accessible with a ladder from the outside. The apartment had an integrated large kitchen and a parlour. This was usually the residence of three different generations: Grandparents, the young married couple and the children. Under the kitchen was a cellar for food, also only accessible through a trap door and with the help of a ladder...“

Overnight, the completely assimilated and adapted Jews from Pommern were dependent on the friendliness of the poor, local Chassidim, with the Yiddish language and a mentality that was completely strange to German Jews. The materialistic, enlightened and culturally spoilt Jews from German cities did not only battle their way through inhuman and continuously degrading living conditions. They were, whether willingly or not, directly confronted with the mystical world of an utterly alien Judaism, and with a nearly hopeless kind of existence. Only until the “final solution”. Because 1941/42 the situation changed. The compelling German advance got stuck in Russia’s winter. At the front in Germany, woollens were collected for the soldiers at the eastern front, since they were not prepared for fighting war in winter. The time of “Blitzkrieg”, the fast wars of conquest, were over once and for all and the military had to adapt and prepare for an enduring and conventional war of abrasion.
The planning of a “reservation for Jews” in Poland had failed. Rethinking was up-to-date. Climbers in the national socialistic bureaucratic elite did not show stoppages. Arrangements for troubleshooting were made quickly. The preparations for the mass murder of all Jews living in the Lublin district had already been completed in October 1941.
At first, the building of an extermination camp was begun and a firing order was issued to prevent Jews from leaving the ghettos. Hitler had already announced the dreadful project long ago and it had then been certified among a small group of people on Oct. 25th 1941:
“This race of criminals is to be blamed for two million deaths during the world war, plus hundreds of thousands at present. Don’t you say: ‘We can’t lure them on to destruction’! Who’s taking care of our people? It’s only good if there’s the preceding fright that we want to eradicate Judaism!”

Who is looking for our people? It´s good that everybody fears us, because we wipe out all the jews”. In Krakau at the 16TH of December Hans Frank, the Chief of the Generalgouvernment of taken poland felt to clarify: “I want to be honest with you, that way or the other the Jews must be finished (...) As a basic principle of my expectation towards the Jews, I want them to be stashed away. They must be disposed. I negotiated for the purpose to deport them to the east. In January there will be a conference in Berlin about this topic (...). This meeting will be in the Reichsicherheitshauptamt with SSObergruppenführer Heydrich. However there will be a huge jewish migration. But what will happen with them? Do you think they will be put in settlements in the eastland. We were told in Berlin: Why do you even bother? We can`t use them in the eastland or in the Reichskommisariat, liquidate them yourself! Gentleman, I must ask you to arm yourself against any mercy. We must crush the jews wherever we meet them and wherever it is possible for us, to keep the strukture of our Reich. (...) We can´t shoot or poisen those 3.5 million jews, but there will be a way to succeed with their annihilation, because the Reich has made arrangements for this case. The Generalgouvernment must be as free of jews as the Reich. It is the business of the instances, which we must create and use, where and how all that will happen. I will tell you about the effectivity when the right time has come”. The murderers where determined.

At January 20th in 1942 Reinhard Heyrich invited 13 state secretaries of different ministers
and high decorated SS – officials to a Meeting with a following brunch to the “ Am Großen
Wannsee – mansion” in Berlin. He was assigned with the „final solution of the Jews“ from the
NS – regime. The topic of the meeting was “the solution to the Jews”. Adolf Eichmann took
the notes during this conference.At this point the genocide was already happening.
Storm troopers had already shot or gassed distressfully more than 500.000 Jews in Poland and in the Soviet Union until 1942. But from now on the European Jews should be killed with a bureaucratic and industrial efficiency. Most of the Jews from Pomeranian were already deported out of their country more than two years ago. A lot of them died even before their execution in 1942 because of their inhuman living standards.
On january 7th 1942 Martha Bauchwitz, a dentists wife, still wrote a letter to her daughter Louise Lotte Hoyer-Bauchwitz from Piaski to Stettin:” The heart demands too much, cheerful and peaceful is the aging than.” That´s not only poetic it´s the truth. And even if you can´t feel the peace from the outside, in the inside it is calm. Calm, but not dull (...). Our life could be called lonely compared to others, but it is a new, a difficult and huge experience. The circumstances hurt bad, you are cold and you know that others are even more cold ... you experience disculture and dirt, without being able to defend yourself. But you don’t get hurt in the inside. It is luck, that we experience aging and maturation together, it is mercy (...). I´m happy to see the beauty, not only the damage.”

Some minds were not destroyable. Not even under the worst circumstances.
The villages Piaski, Izbica and Glusk were vacatedbetween march 1942 and April 1943. The survivors aged, tired figures, were brought in the destruction camps to Sobibor and Belzec. None has survived this hell. From Julius Gronemann there was still one single sign of life. He wrote to his sister Sophie Rapmund in September 1942 on a postcard: " We get away from Poland and know our destiny. " Anneliese Dorgeloh wrote in 1998 the descendant of the old man: " We have found out from a forester Gäde here from Torgelow after ending of the Pole's campaign that he had to guard prisoners in Poland, including your grandfather. Mr. Gäde tried to make the life of the old man, who also had to work on the field, a little more tolerable, as far as possible. This was the last what I have heard about Mr. Gronemann. "
To make the life more tolerable...
The corner house in Wilhelmstrasse 1 in pommern Torgelow, former textile business and stately flat of the respectable Jewish businessman Julius Gronemann,still exists. The facade suffered quite in all confusion of the time and decades of GDR history. Plaster crumbled from the walls. The rooms had become orphans. Too long the property relations remained unsettled. Too long there lasted the results of a cruel war. The children and grandchildren of Julius Gronemann live far away. In Santiago de Chile, in Israel, in Vienna. But not anymore in Germany.



"My husband longs for home", a Pomeranian Jew from the ghetto in Piaski thinks, " is there still a way Back? " There is no way back in this native pommern country. For nobody. This Pomeranian's land is burnt down. Today citizens of the federal republic, venture their luck and try to build up a new existence in those offices of the textile house of Julius Gronemann with the opening of a culinary studio. Not an easy undertaking. The small town in the Ueckermünder Heide, right beside the thick wood full of blue and cranberries, has hardly recovered from the wounds of the post-war period. The much-promised turn brought no healing. The fear of unemployment is present. Stettin also became quiet. Today the quickest train from Berlin-Lichrenberg just needs two hours to the polish city. Only a few tired Polish people, after one week of sweating work, sitting in the compartment on their way home. Ýou can barely see some visitors of the portcity coming over the polish border.

Only some older nostalgia-tourists visit the metropolis of Pommern with its 400,000 inhabitants and its alternating history. Melancholy resonates when they look of the Hakenterrasse on the west shore of the Oder over the wide river of their old native country.The grey-yellow water reflects, beside the milky light of the day, transfigured Memories. The air smells shallow. As ever. The ocean is not far away.
The history of the pommern port with its shipyards and the castle of the princes of Pomorze has transfigured itselves for a long time and evaporate above the Odershore between the bridges. Szczecin? No, for them the city is called Settin . You speak German with each other. A walk in the past. With a heavy heart.
In little groups they look at the few heirs that were remaining spared from the war, or the things that were laboriously rebuilt from the Polish. Time past by. And just a little is left. The Tausendjährige Reich only left wreckage. In 1945 the Soviet army conquered the city. In the end, at the Potsdam conference Stettin was assigned to Poland.
The only thing that remained are the pilgrim journeys on the traces of melancholy. Did the refugees of that time unpacked the suitcase from the lost native country when their world broke down one day? Uprooted families everywhere. The prodigious high duty of a disastrous war. Lost generations. On this side and the other. Laja got away once again. Their destiny took another turn.
After the Jewish businessman's family from Torgelow couldn´t afford housekeeper in the Stettiner flat in Pölitzerstrasse 14 anymore and "survival" had become the heaviest burden, the young woman decided to leave Stettin.
She missed her child anyway. So at first she went to Berlin. She knew that her small Rudi was in Niederschönhausen in Moltkestrasse 8-11 at the Jewish childcare. To see him again was a big Joy.
I hope the cute small Rudi has it well, completely clothed in KadeWe he surprised Laja ", wrote later a friend Hans Gronemann to Shanghai. Nevertheless the whole family Gronemann helped the single mother. As long as it was possible. The old man had also talked them into emigration. The businessman from Torgelow apparently knew about the possibility to leave perhaps over Brussels to England, mentioned in one of his letters: " on the 1st April S. want to Brussels and then over winter to England. Arthur is probably also unsteady where to turn to. " Yes, where to turn to? “
Laja met brothers Heinz and Bernhard Hoffmann from Breitestrasse 49/50 in Stettin. The 24-year-old driver Heinz Hoffmann fell in love with her and persuaded them to the long trip to Belgium. He planned, to escape together with his 23-year-old brother Bernhard, in the end of 1938 to Brussels. Both young Jews did not want to watch deedless any more. And Heinz incorporated Laja in the escape.
Bernhard drove off in the end of 1938. Heinz left a month later. Laja came along in the beginning of 1939 with her baggage, two-year-old Rudi in the hand, on the big trip. Straight through West Germany. To Belgium. Final goal was Brussels. A year later, on the 12th February in 1940, the whole Jewish municipality of Stettin was deported. In the train eastwards Julius Gronemann, her caring employer and fatherly friend, and Mendel Ginsberg, her faux pas of the Torgelower time.
The Hoffmann's brothers had left their father Max, their mother Martha and the small 11-year-old sister Margot behind in Breitestrasse 49-50 in Stettin when they desperatly tried to escape pver the border to Belgium. The whole family, as well as Gronemann and Mendel Ginsberg, came on the infamous transport to Lublin on the 12th February in 1940.
From there it went to Belzice, a small place close to Lublin where they probably all found the death. Today reports of their destiny, noted by eyewitnesses, lie forever preserved in Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial of Jerusalem. In Berlin-Niederschönhausen the definitive clearing of the childcare was ordered on the 1st April in 1942 and babies, children as well as nursing staff were all deported to Auschwitz.
Laja and Rudi. They had once again luck. How much longer? Everybody who goes to Stettin by train, looks at grey socialist architecture, weather-beaten record constructions and fallow, neglected building land. The dusty inheritance of communist economy. The price of a pointless war. The swinging gentle hill scenery of the eastern Uckermark compensates it, a feast for the eyes and consolation for the sad heart.
Grass and buttercups sprout between the rails. The rails were partly built in the thirties. The speedlimit is hardly 60 kilometres per hour. An idyl along the railsection. This unviolacy between Berlin and Stettin will probably be preserved for quite a while on Polish side. The train wheezes inexorably, short-winded and comfortably by the orphan scenery. Peace.

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