Ellen Marx (human rights activist)

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Ellen Marx (also Ellen Pinkus de Marx , born March 24, 1921 in Berlin as Ellen Pinkus ; died September 11, 2008 in Buenos Aires ) was a German human rights activist who was active in the Argentine exile at the Madres de Plaza de Mayo .

Life

family

Ellen Marx was born as Ellen Pinkus into a German-Jewish family in Berlin. Her father, Isidor Pinkus, worked as a leather wholesaler and was a staunch democrat. Her mother, Gertrud, née Hope, was a Social Democrat and a member of the League for Human Rights . Ellen Pinkus received a liberal Jewish upbringing. She attended the Princess Bismarck School . In 1934 she joined the Berlin scout organization Ring , which had belonged to the Association of German-Jewish Youth since 1933 and which in turn was affiliated with the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith .

Escape from Germany

After the November pogroms in 1938 , her father lost his customers. Ellen Pinkus had to leave high school without being able to graduate from high school. When her father escaped arrest by the Gestapo by accident , she decided to emigrate with the support of her mother . In 1939 she took the train to Paris in a youth group of the Jewish Central Association , where she received a visa from the aid organization HIAS ( Jewish Colonization Association ), and was able to travel from Le Havre to Argentina on a cargo ship . On May 25, 1939, the ship reached the port of Buenos Aires . On the ship she suffered from scoliosis (after Jeanette Erazo Heufelder , polio). Since the disease was left untreated, it kept her back bowed for life.

Her parents stayed behind in Berlin. Her mother was murdered in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp , her grandfather in the Theresienstadt concentration camp , as Ellen Marx only found out in 1999 on a trip to Israel from a list in the Israeli Yad Vashem memorial . Her father died in Berlin in July 1942.

Exile in Argentina

In Buenos Aires she took a job as a nanny for a Catholic family. When the family found out she was Jewish, they fired her. She worked in another household and in a nursing home that a Jewish doctor had founded. In 1940 she found a job as a kindergarten teacher in the children's home of the Israelite aid organization Asociación Filantropia Isrealita (AFI), which had been founded by long -established Jewish merchant families in Buenos Aires in order to be prepared for the flow of Jewish refugees from Europe. At a musical evening event hosted by the Jewish cultural community in Belgrano , she met the pianist Erich Marx, who was eleven years her senior, who was also a German-Jewish emigrant who had studied piano and singing in Mainz and followed his brother to Argentina in 1935. His parents were murdered in Theresienstadt. She married him on March 11, 1942. The couple had three children.

She taught German at the Pestalozzi School , founded in 1934 , which was mainly attended by children of Jews who had fled Germany and Austria. The parents of the children, whom Ellen Marx looked after in the children's home of the Jewish Aid Organization, had managed to flee before the beginning of the Holocaust . Above all, the children had to learn the new language, Spanish. When she returned to work in 1950 after giving birth to her own children, she met children whose parents had survived the Holocaust and were severely traumatized. Most of them came from a displaced person camp near Ulm that had been set up for 7000 survivors of the Shoah.

Engagement as one of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo

As a result of the military coup in Argentina in 1976, members of the military junta opposition, or suspects, were kidnapped, held in secret camps and tortured. Among the Desaparecidos (Disappeared) was Ellen Marx's 28-year-old daughter Nora. Upon learning of her daughter's arrest, Ellen Marx joined the Madres de Plaza de Mayo . However, she never found her daughter again. After the end of the Argentine military dictatorship , research revealed that Nora, along with others, had been abducted from a workshop that made tote bags. The group used printing machines there for the production of dissident leaflets. There are still no further indications of Nora's fate. A plaque in the science faculty of the University of Buenos Aires , where Nora studied, commemorates her. The kaddish for Ellen Marx's daughter was given by Rabbi Rothschild in Buenos Aires.

In 1983, Ellen Marx and Idalina Tatter, whose husband was one of the disappeared, traveled to Germany at the invitation of Amnesty International and the Evangelical Church as a representative of the relatives of victims of the Argentine military dictatorship. She spoke at the Protestant Church Congress, at press conferences and in universities. She introduced herself as a Jew from Berlin and said: “You Germans know what an authoritarian regime is.” She accused the German embassy in Argentina of having, in contrast to other countries, only insufficiently cared for the missing German citizens. They were received by Willy Brandt , who promised help to the German mothers in the Plaza Mayo, and also spoke to the then Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl . Ellen Marx wanted to file a criminal complaint against the Argentine military. The human rights attorney Wolfgang Kaleck , who represented the disappearance of Nora Marx before the German judiciary, filed a complaint in 1999 on behalf of the German-born relatives of the victims of the Argentine military dictatorship, initially with the Berlin public prosecutor's office and later with the Higher Regional Court in Nuremberg. However, there was no trial in the case of Nora Marx and others, as the courts declared that they were not responsible on the grounds that the victims were not Germans.

According to the final report of the commission set up by the Argentine government to investigate the fate of thousands of those who disappeared, over twelve percent of those who disappeared belonged to the Jewish community, many of whom were descendants of the German-Jewish emigrants, although Jews made up the Argentine population was just under one percent.

In the early 1960s, Ellen Marx was naturalized in Germany again, but did not return. Ellen Marx was committed to solving human rights violations and crimes during the Argentine dictatorship. Until shortly before her death, she headed the group of the German mothers of the disappeared and victims of dictatorship in Argentina. In September 2008, ten years after the death of her husband Erich Marx, she died of a stroke in the Jewish old people's home Hogar Alfredo Hirsch near Buenos Aires. She had given family memorabilia to the Jewish Museum Berlin .

Ellen Marx remained connected to German culture throughout her life and spoke “wonderful” German, wrote Tonia Salomon in her obituary in the Tagesspiegel .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Jeanette Erazo Heufelder: From Berlin to Buenos Aires. Ellen Marx. German-Jewish emigrant and mother of the Plaza de Mayo , Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2014, p. 15f.
  2. ↑ a b c Heufelder (2014) ibid., Pp. 65–67
  3. ↑ a b c Tonja Salomon: Ellen Marx (born 1921) . In: Der Tagesspiegel , September 15, 2008, obituaries
  4. ↑ a b c The obligation not to be silent , interview with Ellen Marx , Latin America Information Center
  5. ↑ Heufelder (2014) ibid., P. 76f.
  6. ↑ Heufelder (2014) ibid. P. 204
  7. ↑ Heufelder (2014) ibid. P. 153
  8. ↑ Is the federal government doing too little for Argentinians of German origin who have been abducted by the junta? Two women are suing. Help and search! In: Die Zeit , No. 27/1983
  9. ^ Lecture by Jeanette Erazo Heufelder. Ibero-American Institute, Berlin, November 4, 2013
  10. ↑ Jürgen Vogt: In Memorian: Ellen Marx . Argentina News, October 4, 2008 (obituaries in German and Spanish)
  11. ↑ Heufelder (2014) ibid. P. 151
personal data
SURNAME Marx, Ellen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pinkus, Ellen (maiden name); Pinkus de Marx, Ellen
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Argentine human rights activist
DATE OF BIRTH March 24, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH September 11, 2008
Place of death Buenos Aires