Rita Gerszt

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Rita Gerszt , b. Dajczer (born August 20, 1898 in Radom , † June 30, 1942 in Bernburg ) was a Polish communist and resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Life

Rita Gerszt ran a lingerie shop in the southern part of Elberfeld . Together with her husband Yzchok , she was a member of the Jewish workers' cultural association and the KPD . After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists , the couple organized money collections from Jewish sympathizers of the labor movement to finance the resistance. On June 30, 1936, Yzchok Gerszt was arrested in the course of a third wave of arrests of communists and trade unionists in the Wuppertal region. At the time of their arrest, their daughter, Stephanie, was four months old. As part of the Wuppertal trade union trials, he was sentenced to four years in prison and then deported to Auschwitz . Rita Gerszt tried to get her husband released through a desperate request:

" I received my expulsion from German territory on June 30, 1939 and therefore I plead with you to release my husband from the last remainder of his sentence so that we can emigrate together and my child has his father again (...) I I am in a very desperate situation and I do not know where to turn with my 3 year old child without my husband. Instead, if my husband is released, there is the possibility of his relatives in the USA guaranteeing him to enter there. The registration for this is also available at the American consulate under No. 3153 of the Polish quota. "

But without success, in 1939 she was arrested for four weeks herself; she then fled with her daughter to Belgium , where she was staying with her sister. During the occupation of Belgium by the Wehrmacht , Rita was arrested again, this time by the Gestapo , but the five-year-old daughter was able to run away in the chaos of the raid and later found her way back to her aunt's apartment. - Stephanie Gerszt survived the war with the support of Jewish aid organizations (the "Comite de defense des juifs" hid Stephanie under a false name in an orphanage in Forest) and was able to travel to her uncle in the United States in 1948 .

death

Rita Gerszt was brought to Düsseldorf and sentenced there to four months in prison for alleged foreign exchange offenses. She was then taken to the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp and from there later to the Bernburg asylum , where she was murdered during Operation 14f13 . She was one of the 1,600 or so Ravensbrück prisoners who were gassed with carbon monoxide and then burned. Of the approximately 60,000 people who were cremated and gassed there, only 80 urns could be found in 1947, but they only have a number and no name. Her husband Yzchok Gerszt died about three years later on a death march in 1945.

Honor

In 2002, on the initiative of the district youth council of the Wuppertal district of Cronenberg, for Rita and Yzchok Gerszt in front of the house at Karl-Theodor-Straße 4 not far from house number 6, in the presence of the patrons, the mayor Peter Jung and the chairman of the Jewish community of Wuppertal, Leonid Goldberg , two "stumbling blocks" laid. They were similar to the stumbling blocks of Gunter Demnig's project , but were made in-house according to the description on Demnig's website and an exhibition was added. Demnig protested and prohibited further such actions.

In June 2008, in honor of the Gerszt couple, in the presence of their daughter Stephanie, a memorial plaque was unveiled opposite the former house on Reiterstrasse 3 in Wuppertal-Elberfeld; the memorial plaque was destroyed in 2012. On October 25, 2008, Demnig's “official” stumbling blocks were laid in front of the house at Reiterstrasse 3 for Yzchok and Rita Gerszt. Since February 2016, a green area west of Josefstrasse in Wuppertal has been called "Rita and Yzchok Gerszt-Park".

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Stolpersteine ​​(2002). denkmal-wuppertal.de, February 15, 2015, accessed on June 16, 2015 .
  2. ↑ Meeting of the Elberfeld district representation on February 24, 2016. (No longer available online.) Wuppertal.de, February 24, 2015, archived from the original on February 26, 2016 ; accessed on February 26, 2016 . 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. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.wuppertal.de
  3. ↑ Andreas Boller: Gerszt-Park is reminiscent of a Jewish couple. In: wz.de. Westdeutsche Zeitung, accessed on March 1, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME Gerszt, Rita
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Communist and resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH August 20, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Radome
DATE OF DEATH June 30, 1942
Place of death Bernburg