Marie Grünberg

Marie Grünberg (born Albrecht , born January 21, 1903 in Pappelhorst in der Neumark (after 1945 incorporated into Küstrin ); † October 27, 1986 in Berlin ) was a Berliner who killed four people persecuted by the National Socialists during the Nazi era saved her by hiding her in her gazebo in Berlin-Blankenburg . The Holocaust -Gedenkstätte Yad Vashem honored Marie Grünberg therefore 1984 as Righteous Among the Nations .

Life

Marie Grünberg came from a Protestant family, her father was a gardener. Until 1917 she attended the one-class school, which she finished with good grades. In Berlin, Marie Albrecht met the Jewish soap dealer and business owner Kurt Grünberg (1902–1962), and in 1930 they married against the opposition of their two families. Kurt Grünberg ran a shop on Berliner Allee in Berlin-Weißensee . The childless couple lived in a small apartment on Fehrbelliner Strasse on the Spandauer Bridge in Mitte . At Ziegelstrasse 30 in Berlin-Blankenburg , the Grünbergs owned a small property with a summer house with two rooms and a veranda. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, the Grünbergs' marriage was considered a mixed marriage .

On November 11, 1938, shortly after the Reichspogromnacht on November 9, Kurt Grünberg was arrested by SS men in his soap shop , pushed into a truck and taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp . Like his brother Erich, he was badly mistreated there. He was released on December 23, 1938 and returned to his wife, injured and emaciated. Soon after his release he had to sell his soap business to an Aryan owner and in the following years do forced labor . He had to commit to emigrate as soon as possible, but it did not succeed.

Fearing the expropriation of Jewish property (Aryanization) , the couple tried in 1939 to transfer the house and property in Blankenburg to Marie Grünberg as the sole owner. The application was rejected on the grounds: “Even after the transfer of ownership of the property from the Jewish man to his Aryan wife, the man still has a significant influence on the management and usufruct of the property. The contract therefore does not in fact result in de-jewelery of the property and can therefore not be approved ”.

Officially, the Grünbergs lived in their apartment in the city center. The couple lived mostly in the Blankenburger Laube, where they grew fruit and vegetables and celebrated numerous family celebrations. From 1941, Kurt Grünberg, who was saved from deportation by his mixed marriage with a Christian, had to wear the yellow star and the nickname "Israel". His ration cards were marked with a "J", his rations were thus smaller than that of non-Jews. Thanks to the income from the garden, the couple could still feed themselves relatively well.

During the factory action on February 27, 1941, around 11,000 Jews living in Berlin were arrested; 9,000 were deported either via Theresienstadt or directly to Auschwitz . Kurt Grünberg was imprisoned for a few days in Rosenstrasse, but released again after large protests by many non-Jewish mixed marriages.

Marie and Kurt Grünberg then let four persecuted people illegally live in their city apartment and in their Blankenburg arbor until the end of the war in 1945: Kurt's brother-in-law Martin Grünberg (1906–1994) was a former textile merchant who had been doing forced labor on the railway track construction until he went into hiding. Oskar Ostaszewer (1896–?), A Jew from Poland, was his colleague there. His cousin Gertrud Dobrin (later married Klindzan, 1899–1985) was among the people in hiding. The fourth person was Dobrin's non-Jewish fiancé, the carpenter Richard Klindzahn (1906–1970), who had opposed his conscription to the Wehrmacht and now had to fear a transfer to the Penal Division 999 . In addition, the youngster Zvi Aviram , a nephew (actually Kurt Grünberg's great cousin), kept slipping into the Grünbergs.

Only two ration cards were available to feed the six people, one of them with a reduced ration. Marie Grünberg was the only one who took care of the supplies and, despite having severe myopia, was out on her bike every day to find groceries. It was always to be feared that nosy neighbors might see the full pockets and denounce them. The Blankenburg grocer Herbert Salewski from Georgenstrasse 17 is said to have supported them by bringing groceries in a briefcase through Suderoder Strasse in the direction of Ziegelstrasse. From his hiding place, Oskar Ostaszever organized a trade in counterfeit ration cards, in which Zvi Aviram was also involved.

On November 23, 1943, the Grünbergs' city apartment was destroyed in a bomb attack, so that the couple and the four people in hiding had to live permanently in a small space in the simple wooden house in Blankenburg. Until the end of the war, the people in hiding lived in extreme isolation. When Kurt Grünberg went out to do forced labor and Marie Grünberg was out to get groceries, the four of them were not allowed to make a sound so as not to arouse suspicion in the neighbors. After Zvi Aviram was arrested by the Gestapo in the winter of 1943 , Marie Grünberg briefly panicked. Afraid of being blown up, she put the illegals in front of the door, but took three of the desperate people back two weeks later. Grünberg was very relieved that Aviram had not revealed anything to the Gestapo. Martin Grünberg experienced the end of the war in hiding with Marie Grünberg's neighbor Charlotte Rosenthal, who was married to a communist who was a prisoner of war.

The deportation of all mixed race and mixed marriages to the Theresienstadt Ghetto, planned by the RSHA at the beginning of 1945, failed due to the advance of the Allies . Kurt Grünberg, however, was still taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp . He survived his imprisonment in the concentration camp and returned to Berlin in bad health. He was very ill until his death on February 2, 1967.

Marie Grünberg continued to live in Blankenburg after the death of her husband. In August 1984 she was honored by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations . Heinz Galinski , then President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany , carried out the ceremony in the Jewish community hall on Fasanenstrasse. Also present were members of the Berlin Jewish Community and Zvi Aviram, the nephew who had emigrated to Israel. Marie Grünberg died on October 27, 1986 and was buried next to her husband in the cemetery of the Jewish Community in Berlin.

Commemoration

In October 2014, the Round Table Blankenburg applied to the Pankow district office to rename the street 46 to Marie-Grünberg-Straße . Straße 46 is in the immediate vicinity of the hiding place at the time on the property at Ziegelstraße 30. The name was changed to Marie-Grünberg-Straße after the redevelopment of the street on November 12, 2016.

In his autobiography With the Courage of Despair , published in May 2015 . My resistance in the Berlin underground 1943-1945 praised Zvi Aviram's aunt as a courageous and selfless woman and describes in detail how dangerous and stressful her work for her husband and those in hiding was. On May 13, 2015, the Round Table Blankenburg organized a public event in honor of Marie Grünberg in the Protestant parish hall in cooperation with the Anne Frank Center , the German Resistance Memorial Center , the Berlin-Blankenburg parish and the Albert Schweitzer Foundation "Living and Care". at which Zvi Aviram was also present.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lexicon of the Righteous Among the Nations: Germans and Austrians. Edited by Israel Gutman with the assistance of Sara Bender. 2005. ISBN 978-3-89244-900-3 , p. 131.
2. ↑ Zvi Aviram: With the courage of despair. My resistance in the Berlin underground 1943–1945 . Volume 6 of the series of publications by the Stille Helden Memorial , edited by Beate Kosmala and Patrick Siegele, Metropol-Verlag Berlin, 2015, ISBN 978-3-86331-237-4 .
3. ↑ Marie Grünberg - A Just Among the Nations , text on dorfanger-blankenburg.de, taken from: Hansjürgen Bernschein: Blankenburger Geschichte (n) 6 (2009), accessed on May 14, 2015.
4. ↑ Press release from the Pankow district office