Lilly Wust

Elisabeth "Lilly" Wust (born November 1, 1913 in Berlin as Elisabeth Kappler; † March 31, 2006 ibid) was a German housewife and recipient of the Federal Cross of Merit. She was named Righteous Among the Nations .

Life

Gravestone of Elisabeth Wust in the cemetery of the Giesensdorfer village church in Berlin

She became widely known through the book Aimée & Jaguar by Erica Fischer , which documents Elisabeth Wust's love affair with the Jewess Felice Schragenheim in the context of National Socialism based on Wust's memories and statements from contemporary witnesses, and through the eponymous film based on the book . On numerous websites, book and film are equated in terms of content, which is not factually true, since the book is a reflective-critical contemporary document with statements, letters, photos and other evidence, but the feature film only has a pseudo-documentary character and because the scenes played by may differ from the actual occurrences. The title of the book and film quotes names that the lovers gave each other, with Lilly "Aimée" and Felice "Jaguar".

As the mother of four sons and a follower of the National Socialists, Wust fell in love with the Jew Felice Schragenheim in 1942, who moved in with her four months later. Lilly divorced her husband shortly afterwards. The two women lived together for just over a year until Felice was abducted by the Gestapo on August 21, 1944 . Although Wust was interrogated and threatened with deportation to the concentration camp, she was ultimately spared punishment as she carried the Mother Cross . Her love for Felice continued even after the Nazis picked it up, as numerous love letters prove. Wust provided the friend with food and clothing as best he could, and shipments were also lost. After Schragenheim's further deportations , Wust spent a long time researching their whereabouts. Felice Schragenheim had probably already perished, possibly on a death march from the Groß-Rosen concentration camp to Bergen-Belsen , and was buried anonymously. On February 14, 1948, she was declared dead by the Berlin-Charlottenburg District Court, and the date of death was set as December 31, 1944.

Judging by the entries in her diary and a suicide attempt, Elisabeth Wust had been broken inside since the news of Felice Schragenheim's death. Meanwhile impoverished, she married a second time in 1950, but without loving her husband, whom she described as unattractive and unsympathetic and who turned out to be bossy and violent in marriage. During the marriage, she made another suicide attempt. The marriage ended in divorce just one year after they closed.

Elisabeth Wust received the Federal Cross of Merit on ribbon in September 1981 for hiding three other Jewish women in her apartment in addition to Felice until the end of the war. After the medal was awarded, she sometimes felt contempt in her surroundings and her apartment door was smeared with manure. As a result of this anti-Semitic psychological terror, she withdrew more and more.

Almost 80 years old, Wust met the author Erica Fischer and told her her story. Of long intensive talks, left behind letters and poems, as well as its own research, the book was published in 1994 Aimée & Jaguar , which provided the template for the 1998's eponymous movie of 1999 as the opening film at the Berlinale was presented. Wust's story also became known to a broader television audience through an appearance on the program Boulevard Bio in 1994 and the WDR documentary Das Kurz Glück zum Lange Traum (1994).

In 1999 she was honored as Righteous Among the Nations .

Wust felt particularly close to her son Eberhard, who had converted to Judaism and who had lived in Israel since 1961 . Only when she visits him will the zest for life return and she will feel among her own kind. This is how the 80-year-old described it in the book. It was her wish that after her death all documents from the time with Schragenheim, which she kept in two suitcases, would be brought to him in Israel. She later decided to donate the said estate including her diary to the Jewish Museum Berlin , which Eberhard arranged after her death.

In 2008, two years after Lilly Wust's death and fourteen years after the book was published, a friend of Felice Schragenheim's at the time, Elenai Predski-Kramer, spoke up. She criticized the statements in the book and voiced her suspicion that Wust himself had betrayed Schragenheim to the Gestapo out of greed. She supported this assumption with the fact that Schragenheim had drawn up a deed of donation in favor of Wust three weeks before her deportation, and with the fact that the Gestapo was in possession of a photo of which there were only three copies, one of which was in Lilly Wust's private collection found. For her part, Wust had contributed images of the document of the provisional donation and the copy of the fateful photo in their possession to the book of Fischer. Said allegations were never substantiated.

The grave of Elisabeth Wust is in the cemetery of the Giesensdorf village church in Berlin.

Web links

• Jewish Museum Berlin: Objects from the estate of Elisabeth Wust

literature

• Erica Fischer : Aimée & Jaguar. A love story, Berlin 1943. Kiepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne 1995, ISBN 978-3-462-03499-8 .
• Erica Fischer: The short life of the Jewess Felice Schragenheim. "Jaguar", Berlin 1922 - Bergen-Belsen 1945. With photos by Christel Becker-Rau. dtv, Munich 2002 ISBN 3-423-30861-3 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Der Tagesspiegel: Elisabeth Wust (born 1913). Retrieved July 5, 2008 . 
2. ↑ ^{a b} Erica Fischer: Aimée & Jaguar. A love story, Berlin 1943 , Cologne 1994: Kiepenheuer & Witsch.
3. ↑ Aimée & Jaguar ( Memento from December 29, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
4. ↑ Traces of Lesbian in Film: The Nineties. Retrieved September 18, 2015 . 
5. ↑ Berliner Zeitung: Israel honors Berliners as 'Righteous Among the Nations'. Retrieved July 3, 2008 . 
6. ↑ Der Tagesspiegel: “Aimées” memories come to the Jewish Museum. Retrieved July 5, 2008 . 
7. ↑ Another version: Painful memories of a survivor. Retrieved July 3, 2008 .