Louise Hermanová

Louise Hermanová b. Freundová , also: Louisa (born on May 8, 1916 in Svitavy ; died on February 2, 2013 in České Budějovice ) was a Czech Montessori educator , nurse , tour guide and court interpreter who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp and 800 kilometers of death march .

life and work

Stumbling block for Louise Hermanová

Louise Freundová's mother died of the Spanish flu in 1918 or 1919 . Her father Emil Freund, owner of a men's haberdashery shop, married again. In 1934 she began training as a Montessori teacher in Prague . She worked as an educator in Jewish families, but had to change families again and again until 1942 because they either ran out of funds (for example through Aryanization ), because they had to flee or were deported.

In February 1942 she was also deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto , her father and brother Arnošt were already there. She immediately went to the hospital - looking for her father, but learned that he was transferred to Ghetto Izbica on the morning of her arrival with pneumonia and a high fever . In an interview conducted in 2003, she stated that her father had been transferred to Auschwitz on her arrival train. Since she hid under a coat weeping, whether the news about her father was in mourning, she was overlooked, was not transported on to Auschwitz and remained in Theresienstadt. A Jewish ghetto policeman offered her to enter them on a ghetto index card (persons close to them could be entered on these cards, who were then placed back in the list when they were transported to Auschwitz). When this officer met a woman he was about to marry, she had to be removed from the map. Two weeks later she was denounced and deported with exactly this woman to Auschwitz in mid-December 1943, where they both arrived on December 24, 1943. She was tattooed prisoner number 72708 and she came into the block 6, the entertainment block of SS . There she met Fredy Hirsch again, whom she had met in Prague. He helped her and she was housed in women's / children's block 30/31 of the Theresienstadt family camp , where she and Fredy and other women looked after the children who were separated from their families. Louise was assigned to forced labor in the Christianstadt concentration camp , where she worked in the manufacture of ammunition and weapons. They and their friends, whom they met in the concentration camp, sabotaged where they could (inadequate filing of threads, insufficient amounts of black powder being poured into shell casings). The camp was evacuated at the beginning of 1945 and the prisoners had to go west on a death march . Louise tried to escape but was caught again. After 800 km of walking, the destination - the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp - was reached. There Louise Freundová fell ill with typhus .

The camp was handed over to the British on April 15, 1945, and a medical unit arrived on April 17. Louise was marked with a black cross - this meant that she was given no chance of survival, she was considered hopelessly ill . Paramedics should only take care of those who are survivable . She was lucky, but was disinfected anyway and was taken to the military hospital in Celle. On July 14, 1945, she was released and drove to Prague, still wearing prison clothes. In the autumn of 1946 the Jewish community sent Louise to a reception center for Jewish survivors. Here she helped Polish Jews who wanted to travel to Palestine and met the doctor Dr. Know Alexander Hermann, who survived Auschwitz but lost his wife and their three-year-old daughter there. Louise and Alexander went to Prague, married on March 16, 1947 and moved to Broumov, where Alexander opened a practice where Louise also worked. They became parents of two children: Jana was born on December 26th, 1947, Otto on June 25th, 1949. In 1950 they moved to Most , a year later they moved to Sokolov , where Alexander Herrmann became director of the first polyclinic. In 1953 he became chief physician for internal medicine in České Budějovice , and Louise became a nurse in the same hospital.

After the death of her husband on February 25, 1975, she reoriented herself and became a tour guide, especially for German-speaking tour groups. In 1990 or 1991 she passed a diploma examination as a sworn court interpreter for the German language. She volunteered for Holocaust survivors, was a member of organizations and associations of former Jewish concentration camp prisoners, for example in the committee of the Auschwitz Committee and in the Czech-German Society . She also worked with the State Center for Political Education - Bergen-Belsen Memorial and gave lectures. The contemporary witness died on February 2, 2013 in České Budějovice.

Commemoration

On September 15, 2014 was in Svitavy in the Náměstí Míru č. 97 laid a stumbling block for them by the artist Gunter Demnig .

literature

• Svědectví deváté. Louise Hermanová . In: Jan Jelínek: A kde byl Bůh, když Židé umírali v Osvětimi? Sedmatřicet svědectví přeživších holocaust , Barrister & Principal publishing house, Brno 2014, ISBN 978-80-7485-021-9 , pp. 96–111 (Czech)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lars Hanßmann and Sabrina Männel: Curriculum Vitae ( Memento of the original from March 3, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The  archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed February 24, 2016
2. ↑ Memory of Nations: Louise Hermanová (1916 - 2013) ( Memento of the original from October 5, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The  archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed February 23, 2016
3. ↑ EHRI: Testimony of Hermanova Louisa, Freundova Louisa , accessed on February 23, 2016
4. ↑ deník.cz: Svitavská rodačka Louise Hermanová přežila nacistické běsnění při vyvražďování Židů , accessed on February 23, 2016
5. ↑ deník.cz: Louise Hermanová se stala v Osvětimi číslem 72 708 , accessed on February 24, 2016
6. ↑ USHMM: USC Shoah Foundation Institute testimony of Louise Hermanová , accessed February 24, 2016

Web links

• Short biography: Louise Hermanová, b. Freundová , created by Lars Hanßmann and Sabrina Männel
• Louise Hermanová, b. Freundová , short biography on the website of Nazi contemporary witnesses