Adele Kurzweil

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Photo from Adele's passport (issued September 1938)

Adele Kurzweil (born January 31, 1925 in Graz ; † September 9, 1942 in Auschwitz ) was an Austrian girl of Jewish origin who was murdered in Auschwitz during the Nazi era . It gained notoriety from 1990 onwards when a suitcase was found in the family's last refuge, the Auvillar in the south of France .

Life

Childhood in Graz

Adele Kurzweil was born in Graz in 1925 as the only child of the social democratic lawyer Bruno Kurzweil of Jewish origin and his Jewish wife Gisela (née Trammer). Mother and daughter left the Israelite religious community in mid-1926. Adele, named after her grandmother, grew up well protected in the house at Kirchengasse 15 (today Schröttergasse 7) in the Geidorf district . Photos from 1928 and 1929 show her with children of the same age in the family's own garden in Strauchgasse and in the adjacent Klemenschitz garden, which was described by contemporary witnesses as a “children's paradise”.

Adele, called Dele, first attended the elementary school for girls on the Graben and then, until 1938, the upper lyceum in the Palais Khuenburg on Sackstrasse . Although the Kurzweil family came under increasing pressure with the enforcement of the Nuremberg laws , entries in Adele's studbook show the continued sympathy of their teachers and classmates. The later Harvard graduate and sociologist Hanna Papanek (née Kaiser, 1927-2017), whom Adele met in Paris, described her as "calm, more withdrawn".

Escape and murder

Stumbling stone in Graz

The long-time lawyer for the Social Democratic Party , Bruno Kurzweil, was banned from working in June 1938 , whereupon the family left the country. Adele was able to finish the school year in Graz before she emigrated with her parents to Paris via Switzerland . Around Christmas 1938 the Rote-Falken- Gruppe “Friendship” was founded, which held weekly meetings within the diplomatic mission of the Austrian Social Democrats. The following summer Adele spent a month with 13 other children and young people born between 1924 and 1930 in a youth hostel in Le Plessis-Robinson . As Hanna Papanek later recalled, the group members went on excursions in the area and learned about Marxist theories. After the beginning of the Second World War , Bruno Kurzweil was temporarily interned in a camp in Meslay-du-Maine and Adele was sent to a refugee home of the Œuvre de secours aux enfants in Montmorency , from where she attended the fourth grade of the lyceum. Mother Gisela stayed behind alone in Paris and exchanged a lot of letters with her daughter. From February 1940, the girl ended her letters with the sentences “On top of that, nothing new here, but a lot in the world. Nevertheless, I am convinced that everything will be fine. "

Reunited, the family followed the social-democratic diplomatic mission to the south of the country and registered as refugees from Paris in the city of Montauban . While her father helped numerous party friends with exit visas to flee to the USA and Mexico, Adele received new comers at the train station. With the aim of the “ final solution to the Jewish question ”, the German authorities in France took more rigorous action and tracked down the Kurzweil family at their place of refuge. On August 26, 1942, Bruno, Gisela and Adele Kurzweil were arrested in Auvillar near Montauban, along with 170 other people, and arrested at Camp de Septfonds . At the beginning of September it was transported to the Drancy collection center . The family was deported to Auschwitz on September 9 with transport number 30 and murdered immediately upon arrival.

Adele Kurzweil's suitcase

One of the suitcases in the Museum of History in Graz (2019)

In 1990, a history student at the Université Le Mirail in Toulouse discovered and inventoried several sealed cabin suitcases and various other items, including furniture and a trunk, at the Auvillar police station. In addition to passports and other documents, the suitcases contained everyday items such as towels and toothbrushes. After the end of the war, the objects had been stored in a warehouse in the municipal office for decades. The local historians Pascal Caila and Jacques Latu were able to largely reconstruct the life story of the Kurzweil family on the basis of important documents. All documents were handed over to the Musée de la résistance et de la déportation (Museum of Resistance and Deportation) in Montauban - the family's last place of residence between 1940 and 1942.

Building on the trunk found, a history teacher at the Montauban Lycée Michelet initiated a project on the Holocaust and the persecution of minorities in 1994 . Her class designed an exhibition with Adele at the center and arranged for the schoolyard to be named after the girl, for which she was awarded the Prix Corrin of the Sorbonne . As a result, there was a collaboration with young people from Graz, who began in October 2000 with a project on the subject of flight and migration during the Nazi era. In cooperation with the ARGE Jugend, the students carried out library and archive research as well as discussions with contemporary witnesses and politicians. The result was an exhibition in the Graz synagogue , which opened in November 2001 and was visited by 2000 people in the first month. Due to the lively visitor interest, the exhibition was exported and shown by ESRA and during a conference in Berlin . In January 2018, the Graz Museum of History took over an exhibition entitled “Bertl & Adele - Two Graz Children in the Holocaust” from the House of Names , which, along with Adele Kurzweil, is dedicated to the Holocaust survivor Berthold Kaufmann.

The pedagogue Peter Gstettner attached the importance of a cultural relic to the trunk find, which provides insight into the personal context of the flight and thus contributes to the support of the collective memory . In contrast to Anne Frank's diary, for example , the suitcases as found objects contained elements of the escape or death transports. According to Gstettner, relics like these enable an educationally valuable, emotional and personalized approach to the crimes of National Socialism.

reception

The fate of Adele Kurzweil served several times as a template for artistic works in the years after its historical processing. In 2009, the author Manfred Theisen dedicated a novel to Adele with the title The Suitcase of Adele Kurzweil , in which he linked the real background of the girl with a fictional framework. The President of the Association for Holocaust Remembrance and Promotion of Tolerance, Ruth Kaufmann, traced Adele Kurzweil's life story in 2018 in the form of a diary.

In 2004, on the occasion of the unveiling of a death march memorial on the Präbichl, students of the BG / BRG Leoben staged a 30-minute play about the Hungarian girl Judita Hruza, in which they also incorporated elements of Adele Kurzweil's escape. Manfred Theisen and Thilo Reffert also adapted Theisen's novel for a stage play that premiered on January 24, 2020 at the Graz children's and youth theater Next Liberty .

In memory of Adele Kurzweil one was on July 4, 2014 stumbling block to their home address Grazer (now Schröttergasse 7) installed .

literature

Web links

Commons : Adele Kurzweil  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

annotation

  1. ↑ Heimo Halbrainer's biographical text is based on various files from Muriel Morris Buttinger's estate . These are archived in the documentation archive of the Austrian resistance under the numbers 18.882, 18.884 and 18.886. Further sources were the archives of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Graz as well as documents of the Kurzweil family, which were in the suitcases and archived in the Musée de la résistance et de la déportation in Montauban .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Heimo Halbrainer: Graz-Paris-Montauban-Auschwitz. Stations of a short life. Biographical sketches for the Bruno, Gisela and Adele Kurzweil family. In: Christian Ehetreiber, Heimo Halbrainer and Bettina Ramp (eds.) With the ARGE Youth Against Violence and Racism: Adele Kurzweil's suitcase. On the trail of an emigrating Jewish family from Graz. CLIO, Graz 2001, ISBN 3-9500971-2-0 , p. 26 f.
  2. ↑ Heimo Halbrainer 2001, p. 28.
  3. ↑ Heimo Halbrainer 2001, p. 30.
  4. ↑ Heimo Halbrainer: The failed escape of Adele Kurzweil and her family. In: Christian Ehetreiber, Bettina Ramp and Sarah Ulrych (eds.): ... and Adele Kurzweil and ... Escape stories 1938 to 2008. CLIO, Graz 2009, ISBN 978-3-902542-19-9 , p 56 f.
  5. ↑ Heimo Halbrainer 2001, p. 33.
  6. ↑ Hanna Papanek: The indispensable, unbearable research. In: Christian Ehetreiber, Heimo Halbrainer and Bettina Ramp (eds.) With the ARGE Youth Against Violence and Racism: Adele Kurzweil's suitcase. On the trail of an emigrating Jewish family from Graz. CLIO, Graz 2001, ISBN 3-9500971-2-0 , p. 42 ff.
  7. ↑ Julian Ausserhofer, Birgit Stoiser, Tanja Rumpold & Elena Teibenbacher: The Austrian Emigration in France. In: Christian Ehetreiber, Heimo Halbrainer and Bettina Ramp (eds.) With the ARGE Youth Against Violence and Racism: Adele Kurzweil's suitcase. On the trail of an emigrating Jewish family from Graz. CLIO, Graz 2001, ISBN 3-9500971-2-0 , p. 92.
  8. ↑ Hanna Papanek, p. 48.
  9. ↑ Heimo Halbrainer 2001, p. 37.
  10. ↑ Bettina Ramp & Sarah Ulrych: Giving the youth a memory - The project “The suitcase of Adele Kurzweil”. In: Christian Ehetreiber, Bettina Ramp and Sarah Ulrych (eds.): ... and Adele Kurzweil and ... Escape stories 1938 to 2008. CLIO, Graz 2009, ISBN 978-3-902542-19-9 , p 65.
  11. ↑ Bettina Ramp & Sarah Ulrych, p. 66.
  12. ↑ Bettina Ramp & Sarah Ulrych, p. 67 ff.
  13. ↑ The suitcase of Adele Kurzweil. Der Standard , November 7, 2001, accessed September 15, 2020 .
  14. ↑ Bertl & Adele - Two Graz Children in the Holocaust. Universalmuseum Joanneum , accessed on September 15, 2020 .
  15. ↑ Peter Gstettner : A suitcase full of stories. On the topicality of biographical relics from the Nazi era. The scant footsteps of the children. In: Christian Ehetreiber, Bettina Ramp and Sarah Ulrych (eds.): ... and Adele Kurzweil and ... Escape stories 1938 to 2008. CLIO, Graz 2009, ISBN 978-3-902542-19-9 , p . 93 ff.
  16. ↑ Bettina Ramp & Sarah Ulrych, p. 72 ff.
  17. ↑ The suitcase of Adele Kurzweil. Next Liberty , accessed September 15, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Kurzweil, Adele
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kurzweil, Dele (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian Holocaust victim
DATE OF BIRTH January 31, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Graz
DATE OF DEATH September 9, 1942
Place of death Auschwitz