Speech from Bernd Siegler at the laying of the stumbling stones on 30 April 2024

Who were Dina and Ludwig Schloss and their three daughters Gerda, Ruth and Käthe Annemarie, who are commemorated today by five stumbling stones laid at Rankestrasse 68 in Nuremberg?

 

For a long time, they were a completely normal Jewish family, rooted in Germany and here in Nuremberg. So rooted, that Dina, Ludwig and their oldest daughter Gerda didn’t pursue their hobbies (tennis and swimming) in one of the Jewish sport clubs here in Nuremberg, but very deliberately chose in 1930 and 1932 to join a civic, non-denominational sport association, the Nuremberg Football Club.

 

As the National Socialists came to power on 30 January 1933, the exclusion, expropriation and expulsion of Jews in Germany began immediately and with a breathtaking speed – a process which would later lead to their systematic persecution and murder.

 

The fact that the Nuremberg Football Club, in an act of anticipatory obedience, expelled Dina, Ludwig and Gerda Schloss from membership as early as 30 April 33, simply because they were Jews, was a life-changing experience for the family. A non-governmental organisation had excluded them overnight, without any order to do so.

 

Who were then Dina and Ludwig Schloss and their three daughters Gerda, Ruth and Käthe Annemarie and what happened to them?

 

The businessman Ludwig Schloss was born on 30 July 1889 in Nuremberg as a son of a Jewish merchant family from Ludwigsburg. He attended the Königliche Alte Gymnasium Nuremberg (today Melanchthon Grammar School), was an active member of the SPD and volunteered for service in the First World War. For six years he was a prisoner of war in France and returned to Nuremberg in 1920.

 

His wife Dina, who he married on 2 August 1920 in Ludwigsburg, was born on 26 December 1893 in Ludwigsburg. Influenced by her impressions of the First World War, she, a primary school teacher, was active as a pacifist.

 

Dina and Ludwig Schloss moved to Rankestrasse 68 and had three daughters: Gerda, Ruth and Käthe Annemarie. The family had a cook, a nanny and a chauffeur; two grand pianos stood in the music room.

 

“We were prosperous and lived very comfortably in our house in Nuremberg. Together with my sisters, we had a happy and light-hearted childhood,” said Käthe Annemarie, the youngest of the three daughters.

 

Ludwig Schloss owned a paper and cardboard wholesale business in the Fürther Strasse. In 1933, he won a libel case against Julius Streicher. Thereupon Streicher published a picture of the house in Rankestrasse with the caption “The Jew Schloss did not raise a flag on 1 May” in his antisemitic smear sheet Der Stürmer. “From this time onward, we began to experience harassment from the National Socialists more and more,” wrote Käthe Annemarie.

 

On 3 December 1934, the family moved to Stuttgart, where another branch of Ludwig’s company was located. Daughter Ruth: “My parents were not Zionists in Germany. In 1933 they said: ‘How long can this Nazi nonsense go on?’ But after a year, the ‘nightmare’ was still not over.”

 

Daughter Gerda remembers: “For my very German parents, it was a huge shock when Hitler came to power. But they came to the right conclusion: When something like this can happen in Germany, it can happen somewhere else. Therefore, Eretz Israel [N.B.: the country of Israel] was the only choice.”

 

The oldest daughter Gerda was sent to Palestine at the end of April 1936; the remainder of the family came one-and-a-half years later. Ludwig Schloss sold his house and business in Nuremberg and bought some land and a small house in Palestine. He became director of an agricultural cooperative in Kfar Schmaryahu in the Tel Aviv district; his wife worked in the cooperative as a farmer.

 

“My parents had to work very hard. They wanted to build the economy of the country from the ground up through farming and raising poultry,” said daughter Ruth.

 

Ludwig died in Kfar Schmaryahu in 1957, his wife Dina in 1972.

 

And the three daughters?

 

Gerda Schloss was born on 18 June 1921 in Nuremberg. She had already discovered her love of the piano in Nuremberg and was about to start a career as a pianist. After a conflict with Julius Streicher, the family moved to Stuttgart at the end of 1934. There, Ludwig Schloss sent his oldest daughter to the Zionistic youth movement Habonim.

 

In April 1936, the parents sent the 14-year-old Gerda on a ship to Palestine. There, she went to the children’s and youth village Ben Shemen and learned farming.

 

“Ben Shemen was then a Jewish island in an Arabic country. You could set your watch by the times we were shot at in the evening – it happened so often. The change from a sheltered, middle-class family home to this new reality was enormous,” said Gerda later.

 

As her parents arrived and bought land in Kfar Shmaryahu, Gerda also had to help there. She took the name Chaya and worked on the establishment of a kibbutz in central Israel. She worked there 25 years in farming and married librarian Shlomo Marcus in 1943. Daughter Esther was born a year later. In 1946, the couple divorced. Six years later she married Daniel Arbel, a farmer and librarian with whom she had three children: Avital, Naomi and Itai.

 

In the 1960s, she started her piano study again, which she had broken off in 1936. Chaya Arbel made an agreement with the kibbutz: “I taught children piano and in exchange got one day off for my studies. In the morning at 4 am, I would drive with the milk truck to Tel Aviv and had piano, harmony and composition instruction. In the evening, I would hitchhike back home.”

 

As other kibbuze asked for her services, she gave up farming at age 45, studied with a leading pianist, founded a music school and further developed Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music. Chaya Arbel became one of the greatest modern composers in Israel. She composed 30 solo and chamber music pieces and five symphonic works.

 

Chaya Arbel died at age 85 on 14 December 2006 in Israel.

 

 

Ruth Schloss was born on 22 November 1922 in Nuremberg as the second of three daughters of the Schloss family in Nuremberg.

In her first years of school, she attended the Nuremberg Holzgarten primary school and then a grammar school for girls. After a conflict with Julius Streicher, the family moved to Stuttgart at the end of 1934, where Ruth attended a Waldorf school.

At the end of April 1936, her one-year-older sister Gerda emigrated to Palestine. Ruth and her younger sister Käthe Annemarie arrived with their parents one-and-a-half years later.

From 1938 to 1942, Ruth Schloss attended the Bezalel Art Academy in Jerusalem. After graduation, she illustrated books and studied from 1949 to 1951 at the Académie de la Grand Chaumière in Paris.

Afterwards, she returned to Israel and married the head of the Hashomer Hatzair Workers Party, Benjamin Cohen. She gave birth to two daughters, Raya and Nurit, and was active in the Communist Party of Israel.

From 1960, Ruth Schloss had an atelier in Jaffa for more than 20 years. In her drawings and paintings, she addressed the trauma of the Holocaust and human suffering in the wars in the Middle East. Her work is often compared to that of Käthe Kollwitz. In 2008, she had a large retrospective exhibit in the Kunsthalle Nuremberg with the title “Painting – My Second Native Language”.

Ruth Schloss died on 6 July 2013, in Kfar Shmaryahu.

 

Käthe Annemarie Schloss was born on 9 February 1927 in Nuremberg. She attended the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. In 1937, she emigrated with her parents and sister Ruth to Palestine.

 

She took the name Malka and grew up in the kibbutz in Kfar Schmaryahu in the Tel Aviv district. In 1946, she went to Jerusalem to study music. She joined the paramilitary Zionistic underground organisation Hagana and was called up for military service. She experienced the siege of Jerusalem as one of the first female officers first hand.

 

In 1948, she married Hans Wolfgang Schmuckler in Jerusalem. Both lived together in Palestine and had two sons, Amnon and Oren. Her husband decided to return to Europe. Because he had better job perspectives there, Malka decided to follow him. As a woman in her forties, she returned to Germany as if it were a foreign country. In 1997, her autobiography “Guest in My Own Country: Emigration and Return of a German Jew” was published.

Malka Schloss-Schmuckler died in 2008 in Berlin.