Sara Frenkel

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Sara Frenkel (* 1922 in Lublin , Poland ; born Sara Bass ; often also Sara Frenkel-Bass ) is a Jewish Polish woman and former forced laborer in Germany, who is committed to the memory of the children of forced laborers who died at the time.

Life

Sara Bass was born in Lublin in 1922. Her father Moshe Bass was a tailor, her mother Hensche was a housewife. During the Second World War, she and her sister Lea fled to the west from the German Wehrmacht . Her brother Chaim died in a concentration camp. She used forged personal papers issued in a Polish-sounding name with the help of a Polish priest in order to conceal her Jewish ancestry. From 1943 to 1945 she worked at the Volkswagen factory in what is now Wolfsburg . She was employed as a nurse in the “ foreign children care facility ” of the VW plant in Schachtweg, where the newborn children of the forced laborers were housed. The hygienic conditions were poor; around 35 children died. In June 1944 the children were taken to the Rorien children's camp. Bass refused to work there because of the equally catastrophic conditions, but despite the long walk he regularly visited Sofia Gladica, who was about one year old. Almost all of the children died, including Sofia.

Shortly after the end of the war, she married Manfred Frenkel. In 1946 a son was born. In 1947 the couple founded a jewelry store in Braunschweig , and in 1949 they emigrated to Israel . In 1959 they moved to Belgium . Sara Frenkel visited Wolfsburg and Rühren in the 1980s and, together with her husband, campaigned for the dignified design of the children's grave at the Rhenish cemetery. On her initiative, a memorial stone for the children was erected there in 1988. In an anthology published in 2005, she described her life, especially the period from 1943 to 1945.

In 2010 the Sara-Frenkel-Platz with a memorial for the Wolfsburg forced laborers was inaugurated in the Wolfsburg center in the presence of Frenkel. In 2012, a branch path in the Tiergartenbreite district was also mentioned in the presence of Frenkel's Sofia-Gladica-Weg. In 2014 Frenkel again visited the forced labor memorial and the children's grave in Rühren.

Sara Frenkel lives in Antwerp, Belgium .

Awards and honors

  • 2010: Naming of a Wolfsburg inner city square after Sara Frenkel
  • 2019: First award of the “Sara Frenkel Prize for respect, tolerance and moral courage” from Volkswagen AG to Sara Frenkel herself

Works

  • Moshe Shen, Julie Nicholson, Sara Frenkel, Sally Perel : Surviving in fear: four Jews report on their time at the Volkswagen plant from 1943 to 1945. Heel, Königswinter 2005, ISBN 978-3935112215 .

literature

  • Werner Smolka: Sara Frenkel. Self-published, Wolfsburg 2011.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Moshe Shen, Julie Nicholson, Sara Frenkel, Sally Perel: Survival in Fear: Four Jews report on their time at the Volkswagen plant from 1943 to 1945. Heel, Königswinter 2005, ISBN 978-3-93511- 221-5
  2. ^ Stumbling blocks for Braunschweig , accessed on February 6, 2016
  3. ↑ IG Metall report , accessed on November 10, 2014
  4. ↑ IG Metall picture series , accessed on June 24, 2015
  5. ↑ Honorary award for namesake Sara Frenkel-Bass waz-online.de from December 13, 2019, accessed on December 23, 2019
personal data
SURNAME Frenkel, Sara
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bass, Sara (maiden name); Frenkel bass, Sara
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish former forced laborer
DATE OF BIRTH 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Lublin