Cilly Levitus-Peiser

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Cilly Levitus-Peiser (born on October 19, 1925 in Frankfurt am Main as Cäcilie Levitus ; died on November 3, 2010 in Langen ) was a Czechoslovak - Israeli - German social worker and Holocaust survivor.

Life

Cilly Levitus was the second of four children of Ignatz Levitus and Regina, née Lesegeld, who came from Austria-Hungary and who had had Czechoslovak citizenship since 1918. The parents had run a small, kosher hotel in Karlsbad , then lived and worked in Frankfurt am Main, in Strasbourg and again in Frankfurt. The father died in 1931, and the mother managed to place the children in the Israelite orphanage on Röderbergweg, where she herself found a job as a housekeeper. After the transfer of power to the National Socialists, Cilly experienced increasing social discrimination against Jews on the way to school at the Jewish Samson-Raphael-Hirsch School . During the Poland campaign in 1938, the family was to be expelled from the German Reich. After the Reichspogromnacht , the home manager managed to find a place for Cilly and her younger sister Jutta in a Kindertransport with 24 children to the Netherlands on November 22, 1938, where they were accepted into the Nederlands Israëlitisch Meisjesweeshuis in Amsterdam . The older sister Hanna was able to emigrate by ship from Genoa to Palestine in 1940 with a Kindertransport . The younger brother Josef stayed with his mother in Frankfurt and was deported with her to the Lublin area in the German-occupied Poland in 1942, where they became victims of the Holocaust .

Mother's stumbling block in Frankfurt
An autograph for a reader

After graduating from elementary school, Cilly trained as a housekeeper and began training as an infant nurse in 1941. She therefore received a work permit, which made her “indispensable” when the German occupiers began in May 1942 to squeeze the Dutch Jews together in the Westerbork transit camp in order to deport them to the East. She managed several times to save her sister from deportation. Finally, she followed the advice of fifteen-year-old Heinz Landwirth (alias Jakov Lind ) to go into hiding. From 1943 onwards, she and her sister stayed in separate and constantly changing locations with forged papers. They survived the persecution of the Jews thanks to the help of the Dutch, who nevertheless did not always treat them well. SS-Unterscharfuhrer Alfons Zündler also helped her once .

After the end of the war, she married a soldier from the Jewish Brigade in 1946 and went with him and her sister illegally to British-administered Palestine . There she had her daughter Rinah and worked as a social worker in the State of Israel. In 1956 she married the radio officer Hans Peiser in her third marriage. With their son Benny, born in 1957, the family moved to Frankfurt in 1957 because of the better job opportunities. From 1970 she trained as a special education teacher and worked in the Hessian school service until she opened her own practice as a speech therapist in 1986 .

In 2000 she helped found the self-help group "Child Survivors Germany", of which she became the first chairman. The author Lutz van Dijk worked with her on an autobiographical story that appeared in 2002, from which she subsequently read aloud as a contemporary witness in schools.

Fonts

  • Lutz van Dijk: Not a word about anyone! : survive in hiding; the story of the Cilly Levitus-Peiser . Munich: Elefantenpress, 2002 ISBN 978-3-570-14627-9
  • Memories of Survival in the Netherlands , in: Andrea Hammel, Silke Hassler and Edward Timms (Eds.): Writing after Hitler. The work of Jakov Lind . Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001, ISBN 0-7083-1615-8 , pp. 193-198

literature

  • Jakov Lind: self-portrait . Authorized translation from English by Günther Danehl. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1970.
  • Helga Krohn : Saved from the Nazis: an aid campaign for Frankfurt children in 1939/40 . Jewish Museum, City of Frankfurt am Main. Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1995 ISBN 978-3-7995-2318-9 , pp. 46-51.
  • The eye of the needle . Film report about Cilly Peiser, who returns to the places from her life before the war.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cecily Levitus-Peiser. Stations in a lifetime , in Lutz van Dijk, 2005, pp. 205–210.
  2. ↑ The life data of the parents also in: Stolpersteine ​​for Regina Levitus and Jossel Levitus , in: City of Frankfurt am Main
  3. ↑ Jutta Rosen-Levitus
  4. ↑ Contemporary history . In: Der Spiegel . No. 14 , 1994 ( online ).
personal data
SURNAME Levitus-Peiser, Cilly
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Peiser, Cilly; Levitus, Cäcilie (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czechoslovak-Israeli-German social worker and Holocaust survivor
DATE OF BIRTH October 19, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt am Main
DATE OF DEATH November 3, 2010
Place of death Langen (Hesse)