Erna de Vries

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Erna de Vries in Münster 2018

Erna de Vries (born on October 21, 1923 in Kaiserslautern ; born Erna Korn ) is a German survivor of the Holocaust and a contemporary witness.

Since 1998 she has been reporting on her fate in schools and educational institutions. For their services, the Lathen community honored Erna de Vries with honorary citizenship; the Federal Republic of Germany awarded her the Medal of Merit of the Federal Cross of Merit and in 2014 the Federal Cross of Merit .

Life

childhood

Stumbling stone at Friedenstraße 30 in Kaiserslautern

Erna de Vries was born in Kaiserslautern in 1923. Her father Jacob Korn was a Protestant Christian, her mother Jeanette Korn, née Löwenstein, was Jewish. The parents raised their daughter in the Jewish faith. The father ran the "Sauerhöfer und Korn" forwarding company with a business partner. He died in 1931. The mother continued the company together with the partner of her late husband. Due to the reprisals against Jews, it became impossible to work in the company, so that the mother withdrew from the business and lived with her daughter on her savings from the share of the business. The daughter first attended a private Catholic girls' school, but later she could no longer afford the school fees and was transferred to the special Jewish class of a school in Kaiserslautern. After school she worked in a Jewish laundry. It was her wish to become a doctor.

Reichspogromnacht 1938

The morning after the pogrom of November 9-10, 1938, the Korns' home was devastated. “I also noticed that my mother was helpless, like more or less all Jews, and that she could no longer help me. From then on I stopped coming to her with my little worries […] ”, Erna de Vries reported later.

In 1939 Erna Korn began training as a housekeeper in the Jewish nursing home at Bachemer Strasse 95 in Cologne-Lindenthal and worked as a geriatric nurse. In 1941 she began training as a nurse in the Israelite Asylum . During a visit to her mother in Kaiserslautern in June 1942, the Israelite asylum was confiscated. The sick and frail patients were initially deported to the collection camp for Cologne Jews, to Cologne-Müngersdorf , and from there deported a short time later . After learning of the deportations of the Cologne Jews, she gave up training, stayed with her mother in Kaiserslautern and worked in an iron foundry.

1943: Accompanying the mother to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp

Her mother was supposed to be deported in July 1943. Erna Korn voluntarily accompanied her mother to Saarbrücken, where they were taken to the Gestapo prison. “That's how I got to the Saarbrücken prison with my mother . She was unhappy that I made it. But I didn't care at all […], I wanted to be with my mother. ”Her mother was to be taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Erna Korn insisted on accompanying her mother. The mother and daughter arrived at the concentration camp in late July 1943. They worked in the fish farm in the Harmense satellite camp . Erna de Vries suffered from phlegmon , which in her case manifested itself in purulent wounds on her legs. On September 15, 1943, she was transferred to death block 25 because of this. In the early morning of the following day, the inmates of the block were herded to trucks. “I had a wish, I wanted to see the sun again. I thought that if I saw the sun then nothing could happen to me. [...] ... and I saw the sun. "

Location of the women's concentration camp in Ravensbrück

Transfer to the Ravensbrück concentration camp

Erna Korn was spared the execution because an SS man took her out of the group because she was supposed to be brought to the Ravensbrück concentration camp as a so-called first-degree Jewish mixed race . In the following years she managed to say goodbye to her mother, who was murdered on November 8, 1943. Erna Korn worked in Ravensbrück until it was closed on April 15, 1945 in the associated Siemens warehouse in Ravensbrück . After the Ravensbrück concentration camp was cleared in April 1945, she dragged herself on the inmates' death march to Mecklenburg, where her trek was liberated by Allied soldiers. With three friends, she kept herself afloat by begging at Banzkow . The freed women were to be taken to a reception camp in Lübeck , but Erna Korn found accommodation with a peasant family.

Married Josef de Vries in 1947

After the end of the Second World War , she lived in Cologne, where she met Josef de Vries (1908–1981), whom she married in 1947. She has three children with him. Her husband was Jewish and between 1939 and 1945 was a prisoner in the Neuengamme , Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps . She went with him to his home town of Lathen in Emsland, where she stayed after her husband's death.

processing

She kept her striped prisoner dress from her time in Ravensbrück, which has been on display at the Ravensbrück Memorial since 2001 .

In old age, she fulfills the wish of her mother, who told her when she said goodbye: "You will survive and tell us what has been done to us." Since 1998 she has given lectures, mainly at schools. In February 2020 she made her last public appearance as a Holocaust witness.

In February 2016, at the age of 92, Erna de Vries traveled to Detmold to testify as a witness in the trial of the 94-year-old former SS sergeant, Reinhold Hanning , who worked as a security guard in Auschwitz.

Honors

The Lathen municipality gave Erna de Vries honorary citizenship. The Federal Republic of Germany honored her in 2006 with the award of the Order of Merit Medal . In 2014 she was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit on ribbon by Federal President Joachim Gauck . In the same year, the Emsland district awarded her the Emsland Medal. On November 1, 2015, a secondary school in Münster, which until then had the name of Karl Wagenfeld , was renamed Erna-de-Vries-Realschule . The square in front of the town hall in Lathen has been named Erna-de-Vries-Platz since March 2016 . Since June 22, 2018, the former elementary and high school in Lathen has been called "Erna-de-Vries School".

Documentation

  • About the life of Erna de Vries students built the University of Muenster in the framework of the project "Slow Motion", the film documentary Erna de Vries - I wanted to see the sun again , which on 22 November 2007 in Fürstenberghaus the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster premiered has been.
  • The program Erna de Vries: My Story - Persecuted by the Nazis has been broadcast several times by Phoenix since June 2005 .
  • Erna de Vries: My mother's assignment. A survivor of the Shoah tells. Edited by Gabi Fischer, Marianne Walther and Birte Weiß. Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-86331-045-5 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Marina Strauss: Holocaust eyewitness: "You have to tell what they did to us." In: dw.com. April 18, 2019, accessed May 5, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Erna de Vries on the pogrom night 1938 In: projektzeitlupe.de
  3. ↑ Barbara Becker-Jákli: The Jewish hospital in Cologne: the history of the Israelite asylum for the sick and the elderly from 1869 to 1945 . Emons, Cologne 2004, ISBN 3-89705-350-0 , p. 417 f .
  4. ↑ Erna de Vries on the deportation In: projektzeitlupe.de
  5. ↑ Erna Korn: I wanted to see the sun again In: projektzeitlupe.de
  6. ^ Curriculum vitae Erna de Vries: Auschwitz In: projektzeitlupe.de
  7. ↑ Last appearance by Holocaust witness de Vries In: ndr.de , February 12, 2020, accessed on February 19, 2020.
  8. ↑ Hans Holzhaider: Auschwitz - You think all the time: Will I be able to survive again? Süddeutsche Zeitung, February 10, 2016, accessed on February 10, 2016 .
  9. ↑ Sven Mechelhoff: Holocaust survivors honored. Contemporary witness Erna de Vries receives the Cross of Merit . In: Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung , November 24, 2014.
  10. ↑ Landkreis Emsland - press releases - Erna de Vries receives Emsland Medal In: emsland.de , April 23, 2012, accessed on July 24, 2019.
  11. ↑ New school name. The patroness is called Erna de Vries . In: Westfälische Nachrichten , November 3, 2015
  12. ↑ Aloys Schulte: Name plate revealed: "Erna-de-Vries-Platz" inaugurated in front of the town hall in Lathen. In: noz.de. March 30, 2016, accessed July 24, 2019 .
  13. ↑ My story (2002) S09E19: Erna de Vries In: fernsehserien.de , accessed on September 10, 2019.
  14. ↑ My Story - Persecuted by the Nazis In: ard.de , accessed on September 10, 2019.


personal data
SURNAME Vries, Erna de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Korn, Erna (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Holocaust survivors
DATE OF BIRTH October 21, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Kaiserslautern