Edgar Sarton-Saretzki

Edgar Sarton-Saretzki (born May 10, 1922 in Limburg an der Lahn ; † April 2, 2017 ) was a journalist , diplomat and author of German and Canadian citizenship of German origin.

Personal and professional development

Childhood and school days

Sarton-Saretzki was the only child of the tenor and Jewish cantor Nathan Saretzki (1887–1944) and his wife Emmy (1890–1944). In Frankfurt am Main , where the young family had moved the year he was born, he attended the Holzhausenschule in the Westend district before he switched to the humanistic Lessing grammar school in 1932 . Up until this year his father was also employed there as a teacher for the Jewish religion.

In 1933 he was treated for diphtheria for a long time in the infection building of the hospital of the Israelite community at Gagernstrasse 36. The almost complete isolation was difficult for him to endure.

After the National Socialists came to power in 1934, he had to switch to a Jewish school. Until the spring of 1939, he therefore attended the liberal Philanthropin , a reform secondary school of the Jewish community in Frankfurt at Hebelstrasse 17.

Emigration and internment

A few months after the pogroms of November 9, 1938, in which he witnessed physical violence in his immediate vicinity, he came to Great Britain in April 1939 at the age of sixteen, unaccompanied by the Netherlands . Because of the exclusion and expulsion carried out by the National Socialists in the German Reich , he tried to find a way to escape from Germany. As a schoolboy in Frankfurt am Main, he had to experience first hand the discrimination and disenfranchisement of the Jewish part of the German population. At the German-Dutch border near Emmerich he was checked by an SS member, his German passport was stamped without a word. When he already believed he was safe in the neighboring country, the Dutch platoon leader threatened to deport him, the underage Jew, back across the border into the German Reich. In Arnhem he met his friend Aenne from Frankfurt, who had meanwhile attended a Dutch boarding school.

In the British capital, London , he first had to make his way through a disreputable neighborhood, where he was first confronted with the reality of British class society. But then, through the mediation of a Jewish aid organization, he got the chance to work as a trainee at a subsidiary of Marks & Spencer , in a textile factory in Leicester . There he was the only "foreigner" among thousands of employees. Despite the British declaration of war against the German Reich on September 3, 1939, his life situation, which was somewhat normalized due to the possibility of work, tipped when the German Wehrmacht invaded France in May 1940 and the British actively supported the French army at the front. As a hostile foreigner , regardless of his status as a persecuted Jew, he was interned by the British as a "prisoner of war" (POW = prisoner of war) and finally brought by ship across the Atlantic to Canada . Behind barbed wire he found a cross-section of German society.

Professional development

In the internment camp he worked a. a. as a lumberjack and transport worker. After the end of the war, he received Canadian citizenship in 1946, seven years after his escape from Frankfurt. He worked as a radio and television journalist and eventually entered the Canadian diplomatic service. As European director he represented the Canadian province of Alberta . His professional career ended as counselor for investment at the Canadian embassy in the German capital Bonn . In Germany he became a guest speaker at universities, for example on his youth experiences in the German Reich in the 1930s or on the Canadian communication scientist Marshall McLuhan . The teaching staff of the Institute for Journalism at the Technical University of Dortmund made a television portrait of him.

Work-up

Sarton-Saretzki finally published an autobiographical work in 1998 that describes the first years of his emigration from Frankfurt am Main via the Netherlands to Great Britain and Canada.

After a lecture he gave in 1997 at a storytelling café of the Institute for Urban History in the Philanthropin in Frankfurt, the children of his parents' former domestic workers contacted him and gave him volumes of music that his father had burned during the pogroms of November 9, 1938 He had rescued the main synagogue in Frankfurt and handed it over to them for safekeeping before his deportation. These were scores by well-known Jewish composers and handwritten notes on the synagogue rite of the liberal Jewish liturgy . Their uniqueness quickly became apparent, since most of the documents of that time had been lost due to National Socialism and the effects of the war. In 2000, Sarton-Saretzki gave the scores and notes to the European Center for Jewish Music in Hanover, where the collection is kept as the Oberkantor-Nathan-Saretzki Foundation for research. Lists of the documents are also in the Historical Museum and the Institute for City history of Frankfurt am Main.

Edgar Sarton-Saretzki last lived in Frankfurt, close to his parents' last residence on Lersnerstrasse.

"There is not a day that I do not think of my parents in Auschwitz."

- Edgar Sarton-Saretzki, 2010

Stumbling blocks

In 2005, on the occasion of the laying of the 100th Stolperstein in Frankfurt am Main, he gave a short speech for his father Nathan, his mother Emmy and his grandmother Rosa Ullmann, in which he combined his personal experiences from then with his impressions today.

“ These stones, inserted into the ordinary structure of the street, weigh more for me than the grandiosity of many a memorial site. "

- Edgar Sarton-Saretzki, 2005

plant

• Advisory role for the documentary “Memorandum” (1966) by Donald Brittain on Canadian television about the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt am Main
• Edgar Sarton Saretzki: "We have been waiting for you ..." Ed. Ute Daub. CoCon-Verlag, Hanau 1997 ISBN 3-928100-55-6

Literature. Archival material

• Gabriele Toepser-Ziegert, Horst Pöttker (ed.): Journalism that wrote history. 60 years of freedom of the press in the Federal Republic of Germany. In: Dortmund contributions to newspaper research, 65. De Gruyter Saur, Berlin 2010 ISBN 978-3-11-023507-4
• European Center for Jewish Music , Hanover: Collection of Oberkantor Nathan Saretzki (Saretzkis sheet music collection with his handwritten notes)
• Historical Museum Frankfurt , “Library of the Elderly”: Box furnished by Sarton-Saretzki with numerous autobiographical memories and documents, including those of Nathan Saretzki, including a list of the notes and handwritten notes recovered from the burning main synagogue and a recording of the reconstructed last consecration hour in the Philanthropin
• Institute for Urban History (Frankfurt am Main) , S2, Sign. 17.164: Saretzki, Nathan

Web links

• Family data Emmy, Nathan, Edgar Saretzki at: uni-hamburg.de

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jewish nursing history - Edgar Sarton-Saretzki. In: juedische-pflegegeschichte.de. Retrieved June 8, 2018 . 
2. ↑ Family data Emmy, Nathan, Edgar Saretzki on: uni-hamburg.de
3. ↑ Edgar Sarton-Saretzki: A patient reports from 1933, interview from February 18, 2010 ( Memento from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) on: juedische-pflegegeschichte.de
4. ↑ Video clip: Interview excerpt with Edgar-Sarton-Saretzki from February 18, 2010 on: juedische-pflegegeschichte.de (0:29 min.)
5. ↑ Ute Daub, Edgar Sarton Saretzki: We have been waiting for them ... p. 17.
6. ↑ Saretzki, Emmy, Nathan and Ullmann, Rosa. on: frankfurt.de accessed Feb. 22, 2022
7. ↑ In the beginning enthusiastic National Socialist Navy and Wehrmacht members as prisoners of war on the one hand and Jewish refugees on the other, were often housed in the same camp. It took up to a year or more, depending on the camp, for Canadian authorities to find out who was in there, as the British had deceived them about the prisoners themselves. For the whole process cf. Annette Puckhaber: A privilege for a few. German-speaking migration to Canada in the shadow of National Socialism. Series: Studies in North American History, Politics and Society. Lit, Münster 2002. Zugl. Diss. Phil. University of Trier , 2000 full text
8. ↑ Summary: We have been waiting for you at the publisher
9. ^ Biographies and institutions in Frankfurt am Main: Edgar Sarton-Saretzki on: juedische-pflegegeschichte.de
10. ^ Foreword by Horst Pöttker, Technische Universität Dortmund, pp. 14–15 on: e-cademic.de (PDF file, 197 kB)
11. ^ Sarton-Saretzki, lecture , Technical University Berlin , June 2, 2003
12. ↑ Heidy Zimmermann: Shir Zion. Music and singing in the synagogue. In: Eckhard John, Heidy Zimmermann (Hrsg.): Jewish music? External images - self-images. Pp. 53-75.
13. ^ Historical Museum Frankfurt am Main. Documents on Nathan Saretzki. In: Library of the Ancients.
14. ^ Institute for Urban History Frankfurt am Main: S2, Sign. 17.164: Saretzki, Nathan.
15. ↑ Quote Saretzki, p. 22 at the Verbandsgemeinde Westerburg; from Burkhard Peschke: Commemorative speech for the inauguration of the synagogue in Westerburg 100 years ago on July 8, 1910
16. ↑ The Stolpersteine ​​campaign closes a gap in our culture of remembrance. In: Speech by City Councilor Franz Frey on the occasion of the relocation of the 100th Stolperstein in Frankfurt am Main for Nathan Saretzki, September 14, 2005 (PDF; 3.9 MB) on: stolpersteine-frankfurt.de
17. ↑ Edgar Sarton-Saretzki: “What one passes over day after day”. Address given on September 14, 2005 in Frankfurt am Main. P. 6. on: stolpersteine-frankfurt.de (PDF file, 3.8 MB)
18. ↑ Ute Daub: Memories of a documentary about the Auschwitz trial. Pp. 69-73. to: e-cademic.de (PDF file, 191 kB)
19. ↑ VHS-Kreis dares to look into the future. Frankfurter Neue Presse , September 23, 2011