Helene Holzman

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Helene Holzman (born Czapski , Lithuanian name: Elena Holcmanienė ; born August 30, 1891 in Jena , † August 25, 1968 in Gießen ) was a German painter and author .

Life

Helene Holzman was the third child of the Jena physicist Siegfried Czapski and his wife Margarete, née Koch. Around 1908 she attended, among others, Otto Herbig and Clara Harnack , who later became the mother of the two resistance fighters Arvid and Falk Harnack , the painting and drawing school under Erich and Fritz Kuithan in the Volkshaus Jena . This school was run by the Carl Zeiss Foundation , whose deputy authorized representative was Helene's father until 1907.

Later, like Clara Harnack, she worked as a teacher and translator and at times also as a bookseller. Probably only after her marriage to the Jewish bookseller Max Holzman did she move to Kaunas . As a German with a Lithuanian passport and “half-Jewish”, she was exposed to the terror of the Holocaust from 1941 , to which her husband and older daughter fell victim. Helene Holzman and a group of women friends tried to save as many endangered children as possible from the Kaunas ghetto . She survived the persecution and the concentration camp together with her daughter Margarete and died in a car accident in 1968.

Her notes on the years 1941 to 1944 in the German-occupied Lithuania were published posthumously in 2000 under the title This child should live by the daughter Margarete Holzman and Reinhard Kaiser and received several awards.

Let this child live

At that time, Helene Holzmann was living in Kaunas with her Jewish husband Max and their two daughters. Her husband fell victim to the pogroms after the German invasion in 1941, and her nineteen-year-old older daughter Marie was shot as a pacifist a little later .

Of the 40,000 Jews who were counted in Kaunas before the war, around 2,000 saw the end of the war. Helene Holzman's reports on the Holocaust begin with the invasion of the Wehrmacht at the end of June 1941. Immediately afterwards, the murder squads of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD , supported by nationalist Lithuanian “partisans”, began to hunt Jews on the streets; the rounded up victims were taken to the Ninth Fort outside the city, where they were immediately shot.

Helene Holzman describes the specific division of tasks between Lithuanian volunteers, the German police and the Wehrmacht. In many places the scenes were recorded by German reporters. During these recordings, care was taken to ensure that only Lithuanian executors were included.

By the end of 1941, almost all Jews in rural Lithuania had been killed. Only a few cities, including Kaunas, still had ghettos in order to exploit Jews as labor before they were murdered.

In autumn 1943 the Vilnius ghetto was dissolved. Those who were still alive were transported to concentration camps , for example the concentration camp in Kaunas (previously the Slobodka ghetto). At the end of March 1944, in a surprise operation by the SS and their Ukrainian helpers, most of the children and old people were transported away from there.

When the Red Army approached in early July 1944, the Kaunas concentration camp was also evacuated. The remaining Jews were deported westwards - the men mainly to Dachau , the women to the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig. In the end, the SS units burned down house by house in the former ghetto. The people who were still hiding in subterranean rooms suffocated. Anyone who ventured into daylight was shot. “When we went to the rubble site after the Russians had moved in, the corpses lay between the protruding chimneys in the rubble of the burned down houses. The smell of putrefaction carried for miles in the summer heat. "

For eleven months in 1944, after the Germans left, Helene Holzman wrote down what had happened. There were three notebooks closely written in pencil that the mother had never shown to her younger daughter Margarete during her lifetime. “This child should live” appeared more than thirty years after the author's death and has since been translated into numerous languages.

Late awards

  • A double exhibition took place in Jena in 1991: Helene Czapski-Holzman (1891–1968), paintings, watercolors, collages, Johannes Ilmari Auerbach (1899–1950), sculpture, painting, graphics . It was accompanied by a symposium: German-Jewish Cultural Heritage in the 20th Century: Lifetime Achievements, Fates, Humanistic Legacy (November 16, 1991).
  • In 1999 Helene Holzman (posthumously) and her daughter Margarete were awarded the Cross of Honor for Lifesavers by the Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus .
  • Helene Holzman received the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis posthumously in 2000 .
  • In 2005, Helene Holzman was posthumously awarded the honorary title “ Righteous Among the Nations ” by the Yad Vashem National Israeli Holocaust Memorial Center in Jerusalem .

Works

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Publication for the exhibition and the symposium of the Jena City Museum
  2. ^ Maria Schmid: Helene Czapski-Holzmann. Paintings - watercolors - collages. Jena 1991.
  3. ↑ Helene Holzman on the website of Yad Vashem (English)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Holzman, Helene
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Czapski, Helene (maiden name); Holcmanienė, Elena (Lithuanian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter and author
DATE OF BIRTH August 30, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Jena
DATE OF DEATH August 25, 1968
Place of death to water