Biography of Thekla Freising, written by Prof. Dr. Heide Inhetveen
Thekla Freising’s short and sad life
“I remember Thekla well! In 1937 I started school and every morning went past the house. In the mornings she opened the window shutters at the Freising house. She was a very pretty girl; her head was always slightly tilted. She had a small hump.”
Similar to my 80-year-old neighbour, other village residents remember ”a pretty girl, a nice girl”.
The collective memory of the village – and the two photos of Thekla that I am acquainted with – retain the image of a young, wispy girl.
Thekla Freising was born on 24 October 1900, in the small mountain village of Sulzbürg in the Upper Palatinate. She was born in the house with the number 90, the family home. She was the youngest of seven children born to the metal goods and crockery trader Simon Freising and his wife Doris. Thekla was still an infant when her two eldest brothers Karl (born 1886) and Gustav (born 1888) left home to begin their commercial apprenticeships. The “Freising House”, as it still referred to today by older people, stood facing the synagogue that had been built in 1799. Thus, Thekla had a short walk to the Jewish school. While she was still attending school, her brothers Julius (born in 1890 in Sulzbürg), Siegfried (born in 1893 in Freystadt) and Benno (born in 1895 in Freystadt), also left home. It was a good thing that her sister Ida (born in 1895 in Freystadt), five years older than Thekla, was still living in the family home. The First World War brought the Freising family horror and loss. All five brothers were serving at the front. Sister Ida, by this time 20 years old, was running her brother Gustav’s business in Zirndorf. In the first months of the war, Siegfried was killed (died on 9 October 1914). Benno died two years into the war (on 27 June 1916, apparently by suicide). The other brothers survived, Gustav having suffered serious injuries. They each went their own way and established successful businesses in Regensburg and Plauen.
Thekla was now alone in the house with her parents. Her sister Ida had married on 22 January 1920 and was living with her husband and son Josef (born on 22 October 1920) in Zirndorf.[1] Her mother Doris died in 1925 from a weak heart. An impressive headstone marks her grave in the Jewish cemetery in Sulzbürg. Thekla now cared for her father, looked after the house and attended to the large hanging garden. A large number of the neighbouring Jewish families have in the meantime moved to Neumarkt and Regensburg or have set up home in Palestine. The young unmarried girl in Sulzbürg feels isolated. Increasing competition during the world economic crisis in the twenties had already worsened living conditions for Jewish rural families. With the coming to power of the Nazis, Thekla and her father also experienced increasing animosity in their village, which had been a home for Jewish families for 500 years. Opposite their house, in front of the synagogue, a “Stürmer-Kasten” (“Stormer-box”) was attached to a pair of posts. The current issue of Streicher’s smearsheet was displayed here in public and could be read free of charge. Fear crept up on Thekla when she looked out of the window and observed the village residents reading the anti-Semitic slogans. No wonder she closed the heavy window shutters at night and opened them in the morning. She experienced at first hand the terror of the “Night of Broken Glass” on 10 November 1938: men shouting and yelling – strangers from Neumarkt, but also people from her own village – smashed the synagogue windows, destroyed benches and chairs, the valuable Torah scrolls of the district rabbinate and the “great golden hand”. The alms box, was also broken open and sacred writings were later burned. The aged Emmanuel Regensburger was beaten up. Lazarus Weil was taken to Neumarkt Prison and from there to Dachau concentration camp, where he was imprisoned for one month. Thekla’s brother Karl was also a prisoner in the camp. The Sulzbürg synagogue was not set on fire, because many Christian houses were too near the building. Instead, the mob demolished the windows of the houses of the Freising and Regensburger families.[2] How Thekla and her father must have shivered with fear! It was presumably very difficult afterwards to find a handyman daring enough to repair the windows. There was also bad news from sister Ida in Zirndorf. There, during the Night of Broken Glass, the interior of the synagogue had been demolished and valuable ritual objects completely destroyed. On 11 November the few remaining Jewish families, presumably including Ida Krämer and her family, were taken away from Zirndorf in a lorry and left to their fate. When they returned, the town administration ordered them to leave as quickly as possible. Ida Freising fled to Nuremberg on 22 November 1938 and lived there from 28 November with her husband and son at Fürther Strasse 17[3]. How to flee successfully now became an agonising subject for all the siblings.
At the end of the 1930s, as the expropriation of Jewish property continued, 80-year-old Simon Freising knew that he could no longer hold on to his property in Sulzbürg. He found a young couple who wanted to purchase the estate. A preliminary contract, dated 4 July 1939 (between Simon Freising and a Mr and Mrs Grasruck), stated that Simon and Thekla could live in two rooms on the first floor in the northern section of the house until 1 January 1940 and harvest the fruit and vegetables from the two gardens in 1939. On 4 March 1940 the conclusive appointment with the notary took place, during which Ida and Karl Freising declared that they waived the right to inherit their father’s estate, in favour of their sister Thekla.[4]
Thekla and her father were now homeless and the family fell apart. Simon Freising moved to Regensburg, to a senior citizens’ home which functioned as a ghetto. He died there in January 1941 and so was not deported. Julius had already emigrated in summer 1938; Gustav left for Brazil on 1 April 1939. Ida and her family fled to North America on 7 March 1940, three days after the meeting with the notary. Simon’s brother Karl in Regensburg managed to save his eldest daughter Ruth, aged 17. She was able to reach New York.[5] A memorial stone for her was laid in Regensburg. For Karl, his wife Irma and the two younger children Doris and Alfred, it is too late. Dispossessed and poverty-stricken, the Freising family in Regensburg was deported to Piaski in April 1942 and murdered there. Four memorial stones in Regensburg commemorate their fate.
Thekla Freising is registered as living in Nuremberg from 13 July 1940. This is a city in which the National Socialist Gauleiter Julius Streicher organises attacks and pogroms against the Jewish population. He also creates an atmosphere which the contemporary witness Arno Hamburger described as “much worse than in other German cities, much worse”.
In Nuremberg, an odyssey begins for Thekla: initially she works as a domestic servant for the Baumann family[6] at Laufertorgraben 6. A few months later, on 2/3 December 1940, she begins work at the “Lazarus und Bertha Schwarz'sche Altersversorgungsanstalt”, a Jewish senior citizens’ home in Johannisstrasse 17.[7] She remains there for four months before going to live and work at Kaulbachplatz 13, employed by a Mr and Mrs Liebenthal.[8]
On 21 November 1941 a decree is issued forbidding Jews to leave the country; the Nazis are now committed to the extermination of the European Jews. One week later, on 29 November 1941, more than 1,000 Jews, half of them from Nuremberg, are brought to a barracks camp on the Nazi Party rally grounds. They are beaten, insulted, robbed of their valuables and then deported to the Jungfernhof concentration camp near Riga from the Märzfeld railway station.[9] They include the Liebenthals, the married couple who had given Thekla employment and accommodation.[10] On 28 November Thekla flees to Tuchergartenstrasse 15. However, she only remains there for a short. time. The second wave of deportation begins and on 24 March 1942, 1,000 Jewish people are deported, including 426 from Nuremberg. Thekla is one of them, together with five other residents[11] from Tuchergartenstrasse 15.[12] Three days earlier – on Shabbat! – Gestapo officers had taken them away to Langwasser, where they were detained under atrocious conditions.[13] Deportation followed – in a train numbered Da36. On Thekla’s registration card, National Socialist officialdom had written “emigrated”. The destination, 900 kilometres away, is the ghetto at Izbica near Lublin.[14] The monthly report from the district president for Upper and Central Franconia, dated 5.5.42, formulates the event in cynical bureaucratic fashion: “On 24 March 781 Jews, and on 25 April 105 Jews were evacuated to the east. Apart from a few suicides and attempted suicides, there was no trouble.” [Bayern in der NS-Zeit, vol. 1, Munich 1977, p. 484] [3]
Up until March 1942, when these deportation trains arrived from the German Reich, Izbica was principally a ghetto for Polish Jews. In April, a section of the ghetto population was deported to Belzec concentration camp. In June the whole ghetto was liquidated, the people there shot or taken to the recently completed extermination camps at Sobibor and Belzec. All those who had arrived on the second transport from Nuremberg were also murdered.
We do not know exactly when and where Thekla was murdered. Her “deregistration” is dated 8 April 1942 on her Nuremberg registration card. On 18 July 1952 (legally valid as of 1 September 1952) she was pronounced dead by the Nuremberg district court. The time of death was entered as 8 May 1945.[15]
Literature (see also footnotes):
Michael Diefenbacher, Wiltrud Fischer-Pache (Hrsg.): Gedenkbuch für die Nürnberger Opfer der Shoah. Edelmann, Nuremberg 1998, ISBN 3-87191-249-2.
Alfred Gottwald, Diana Schulle: Die ‚Judendeportationen‘ aus dem Deutschen Reich 1941-1945. Marix, Wiesbaden 2005, ISBN 3-86539-059-5
http://www.rijo.homepage.t-online.de/pdf/DE_NU_JU_gedenkb2.pdf Where the Nuremberg victims of the Shoa were killed.
[1] Information about Ida Freising from Nuremberg City Archives, C 21/X (registration cards of Jewish residents up until 1945) series I No. 5.
[2] cf. Hirn 2011, p.126. He quotes from Martina Lang’s essay (Hausarbeit).
[3] Many of the neighbouring families in her street were Jewish. Thus, in the adjoining house with the number 16, J. Grünbaum &Co. had a horse-blanket factory. The hops trader Anton Buchmann lived in 17b; in the house with the number 17, Sigmund Kirschbaum, with his export business dealing in stationary materials. Cf. http://www.rijo.homepage.t-online.de/pdf/DE_NU_JU_gewerbe.pdf
[4] Contract of denunciation of inheritance; sales contract, PA Anna Fürst, printed by Hirn 2011, p.602.
[5] Departure on the ship President Harding on 14 February 1938 from Hamburg to New York.
[6] Nuremberg City Archives (Dr. Jochem): registration card (C 21/X Nr. 2). The Baumann brothers may have been manufacturers of galalith products at Jakobstrasse 5. Cf. http://www.rijo.homepage.t-online.de/pdf/DE_NU_JU_gewerbe.pdf . According to http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/Nuremberg/nur003.html a family by the name of Baumann, consisting of three people, lived at Weinmarkt 12a. They were deported. It is possible that the Baumann family with whom Thekla lived emigrated.
[7] The Lazarus and Berta Schwarz Foundation was established in 1894 and purchased the building in Johannisstrasse 17 in 1899. It served as a home for Jewish senior citizens for 40 years. In January 1939 the deputy Gauleiter Karl Holz bought the building and then sold it in July 1939 to the Jewish community. In 1941 over 50 people were being cared for here. In 1942 it passed into the hands of the Reich Insurance of Jews in Germany, which was affiliated to the Reich Association of Jews in Germany. The residents, together with the people living in the Jewish senior citizens’ homes in Knauerstrasse 27 and Wielandstrasse 6, were deported on 10 September 1942 to Theresienstadt concentration camp in North Bohemia (“old-age transport”). The departure of the 533 people – most of them old and in some cases war-disabled and physically handicapped – from the railway station in Finkenstrasse, was dramatic. Only 26 of the Jewish passengers survived the journey. The building at Johannistrasse 17 was now empty and the Cnopf’sche children’s hospital purchased it from the Reich Association of Jews in Germany. Cf. http://www.stadtteilforum.org/index.php?id=753.
[8] Cf. Registration Office Archives, Nuremberg C 21/X (registration cards of Jewish residents up until 1945) Series I No. 2
[9] Initiator of the action was the Nuremberg police president and SS-brigadier general Dr. Benno Martin. The action was carried out by detective superintendent and SS Major Dr. Theodor Grafenberger, head of the “Jewish department” of the Nuremberg-Fürth Gestapo. The deportation was filmed by Richard Nickel, who was commissioned by the SS.
[10] Cf. http://www.statistik-des-holocaust.de/OT411129-Nuernberg8.jpg Registration Office Archives, Nuremberg C 21/X. According to http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/Nuremberg/nur008.html the couple were Fanny Liebenthal (née Oppenheimer) born in 1892 in Burgkunstadt and Kurt Liebenthal, born in 1895 in Königsberg.
[11] These were Moritz and Juliane Künstler, Cornelia Prager, Jakob, Martha and Robert Wetzler. Cf. http://www.statistik-des-holocaust.de/list_ger_bay_420324.html
[12] http://www.rijo.homepage.t-online.de/pdf/EN_NU_JU_jtn.pdf (city map of Nuremberg with the Jewish districts, Tuchergartenstrasse NO-district)
[13] see http://www.rijo.homepage.t-online.de/pdf/DE_NU_JU_kolb_text.pdf (download 26 May 2015)
[14] To the deportation area at Märzfeld railway station cf. stadtbild-initiative-nuernberg.de
[15] Registration Office Archives, Nuremberg C 21/X (registration cards of Jewish residents up until 1945) Series I No. 2, information from 26 May 2015; see also Diefenbacher/Fischer-Pache (ed.) 1998, p. 80.
