Fredy Hirsch
Fredy Hirsch (bourgeois Alfred Hirsch ; born February 11, 1916 in Aachen ; † March 8, 1944 in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp ) was a German functionary of the Jewish Boy Scout Association and a Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination and concentration camp. There he was committed to the upbringing and survival of Czech Jewish children from the Theresienstadt ghetto .
Life
Fredy Hirsch, son of the butcher and food wholesaler Heinrich Hirsch (* in Aachen) and his wife Olga, née Heinemann (* in Grevenbroich ), grew up in Aachen. In 1926 his father died after a long illness. Together with his older brother Paul, Fredy Hirsch participated in the Jewish scout movement, which also pursued Zionist goals. From 1926 to 1931 he attended the former Hindenburg school, a secondary school with secondary school , her successor since 1945, the Couven-Gymnasium . From 1933 he headed the Jewish Boy Scout Association in Düsseldorf .
His brother Paul studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau. In 1933 he emigrated with his mother to Bolivia, where he worked as a rabbi, and in the 1950s he became a rabbi in Buenos Aires , Argentina. It is said that Fredy Hirsch did not want to emigrate to Bolivia with him in 1933.
Alfred Hirsch left Düsseldorf in 1934 and moved to Frankfurt am Main and from there in November 1935 into exile in Czechoslovakia . There he lived in Prague , Brno and Ostrava (Moravia). In Brno he worked as a rhythm teacher in the Maccabi Association, where, as the historian Anna Hájková has pointed out, he also met his partner, the medical student Jan Mautner. He worked on the hachsharah , the preparatory courses for emigration to Palestine . From there he moved back to Prague. On November 24, 1941, 324 Jewish men, the so-called construction command , were deported to Terezín (Theresienstadt in German) to be used by the SS in the expansion of the ghetto. In addition, 1000 men came to Theresienstadt as a second construction team . Hirsch was a member of the 24-person "staff" of the Prague Jewish Community, which from December 4, 1941 had to build the organizational structure of the ghetto. As part of the limited and strictly monitored Theresienstadt Jewish self-government, Hirsch was involved in child welfare for the captured Jewish children and held a leading position there. Hirsch organized, among other things, sports and cultural events for the captured children.
On September 6, 1943, he was deported from “Theresienstadt” along with other prisoners to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. In Block 31 (children's block) within the area of the Theresienstadt Family Camp (B II B), which is sealed off around this particular group of inmates, he achieved somewhat better food and hygiene conditions for the children and teachers. Shortly before the first transport from the family camp was sent to be gassed by the SS, Fredy Hirsch was found dead. According to a prison doctor's diagnosis, he had apparently taken his own life from an overdose of barbiturate . According to research by journalist Dirk Kämper , however, there are now considerable doubts about the suicide thesis.
Commemoration
- In Theresienstadt, a memorial plaque in the garden of the former boys' home L 417 commemorates Fredy Hirsch.
- In order to commemorate Fredy Hirsch's life and to remind people of the deeds of the Nazis during the war, a stumbling block was set in honor of Fredy Hirsch at Richardstrasse 7 at his former residence in Aachen . Fredy Hirsch was a central figure in the ZDF documentary With the Courage of Despair .
- The community garden of the Initiative Urbane Gemeinschaftgärten Aachen eV , founded in 2013 on the property at Richardstrasse 7, was named HirschGrün in memory of Fredy Hirsch .
- On February 12, 2016, his hundredth birthday, the Couven-Gymnasium in Aachen organized a ceremony for Fredy Hirsch, during which the school canteen was renamed the Fredy-Hirsch-Forum . Four contemporary witnesses from the Czech Republic and Israel, who had known the honoree and who owed him their survival in Auschwitz, as well as a niece and a biographer of Fredy Hirsch were guests of honor.
- In 2017 the tribe of VCP scouts in Berlin-Kreuzberg was named after Fredy Hirsch.
literature
- Shimon Adler: The Children's Block in the Family Camp at Birkenau. In: Yad Vashem Studies on the European Jewish Catastrophe and Resistance. XXIV. Jerusalem 1994, pp. 281-315 (Eng.)
- Dirk Kämper: Fredy Hirsch and the children of the Holocaust. Orell Füssli, Zurich 2015, ISBN 978-3-280-05588-5
- Ilana Michaeli, Irmgard Klönne: Gut Winkel - the protective island. Hachshara 1933-1941. Series German-Israeli Library, 3rd lit, Münster 2007, ISBN 978-3-8258-0441-1 (see Spreenhagen )
- Claude Lanzmann : Shoah. Preface by Simone de Beauvoir . Claassen, 2nd ed., Düsseldorf 1986, pp. 206-217
- Hermann Langbein : People in Auschwitz. Ullstein, Frankfurt 1980, ISBN 3-548-33014-2
- Lucie Ondrichová: Fredy Hirsch. From Aachen via Düsseldorf and Frankfurt am Main through Theresienstadt to Auschwitz-Birkenau. A Jewish biography 1916–1944. Translated from the Czech by Astrid Prackatzsch. Hartung-Gorre, Konstanz 2000, ISBN 978-3-89649-593-8
- Rudolf M. Wlaschek: Jews in Bohemia. Contributions to the history of European Jewry in the 19th and 20th centuries. (Publications of the Collegium Carolinum, 66) Oldenbourg, Munich 1997, ISBN 978-3-486-56283-5 , p. 114
- Raimund Kemper: On a Jewish biography: Fredy Hirsch 1916 - 1944, in Cultural Link Canada - Germany: Festschrift for the 30th anniversary of an academic exchange. (Mannheim Studies in Literary and Cultural Studies, MLK). Edited by Beate Henn-Memmesheimer a. a. Röhrig, St. Ingbert 2003, ISBN 3861103559 , pp. 177-188
Film and radio
- ZDF documentary: With the courage of despair. 70 years after Auschwitz , broadcast on January 27, 2015. The film depicts the fate of people who, despite the constant risk of death in the hell of the murder machine, showed courage, preserved their humanity, and sacrificed themselves for others, moderated by Hugo Egon Balder .
- The silent hero of Auschwitz , broadcast by Jürgen Nendza and Eduard Hoffmann about Fredy Hirsch in the series Lange Nacht from Deutschlandfunk / Deutschlandradio Kultur on January 28, 2017 (with detailed literature list), manuscript of the broadcast as PDF
- Dear Fredy , Rubi Gat documentary with contemporary witnesses, Israel 2017.
- ZDF History: A German Hero - Fredy Hirsch and the Children of the Holocaust , broadcast on January 27, 2019.
Web links
- Biography ( memento of March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) of Louise Freundová on hermanova.de
- Biography at holocaust.cz (Czech)
- Fredy Hirsch at www.ghetto-theresienstadt.info
- Documents on Fredy Hirsch in the collections of the Jewish Museum in Prague .
- Margot Gasper: Who was Fredy Hirsch? A search for clues. In: Aachener Nachrichten , February 8, 2016
- Lothar Stresius: Fredy Hirsch is “a role model for today”. In: Aachener Nachrichten, February 12, 2016
- Archive of the month February 2016 at the Aachen city archive
- Alexander Lohe: Fredy Hirsch , in a memorial book project for the victims of the Shoah from Aachen
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d Fredy Hirsch at www.ghetto-theresienstadt.info
- ^ Anna Hájková : Young, gay - and murdered by the Nazis . In: Der Tagesspiegel Online . August 31, 2018, ISSN 1865-2263 ( tagesspiegel.de [accessed September 16, 2018]).
- ↑ Dirk Kämper: Fredy Hirsch and the children of the Holocaust, p. 209, note 286
- ↑ Hirsch, Alfred (Fredy). In: ways against forgetting . Retrieved February 12, 2019 .
- ↑ Press kit: With the courage of desperation: ZDF press portal .
- ↑ Hummingbirds with a scarf . Article of the Berlin Week of June 10, 2018
personal data | |
---|---|
SURNAME | Hirsch, Fredy |
ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Hirsch, Alfred |
BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German prisoner of Jewish faith in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp |
DATE OF BIRTH | February 11, 1916 |
PLACE OF BIRTH | Aachen |
DATE OF DEATH | March 8, 1944 |
Place of death | Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp |