Walter Marx

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Walter Herbert Marx (born February 27, 1926 in Heilbronn ; † August 13, 2013 in New York City ) was a Jewish partisan and survivor of the Holocaust . Historians used his memories of his family's flight from Heilbronn via Luxembourg and France to Italy as important material for their research.

In the 2009 by André Waksman turned Documentary A break in the Holocaust. 1943 Le temps d'un répit , which describes the life of the Jewish refugees in Saint-Martin-Vésubie , Walter Marx can be seen as a contemporary witness.

Live and act

Family background

Walter Marx was the son of Ludwig (born February 8, 1897; died probably on March 4, 1943 in Majdanek ) and Johanna Marx (born April 29, 1900 in Fremersdorf as the daughter of Isaac and Rosa Isaac, née Reiss; died on December 10, 1943 in Auschwitz , from Heilbronn). Ludwig's father was called Berthold Marx (born on June 1, 1866 in Oberdorf am Ipf ; died on January 15, 1943 in the Theresienstadt ghetto ) and after an apprenticeship as a furrier and military service in Heilbronn, he founded a paper wholesaler in 1892, which was located in a flat before it was Aryanized - and the office building at Wilhelmstrasse 54 , which belonged to him.

Berthold Marx was married to Emma Jaraczewsky (born March 24, 1870; died February 25, 1926 in Heilbronn). The couple had three children: Berta (1895), Ludwig (1897) and Hanna (1899). While the daughters got married and moved away from Heilbronn, Ludwig stayed there and later became a co-owner in his father's business.

The historian Susan Zuccotti , who also looked at the Ludwig Marx family from Heilbronn as part of her research on the history of the Jews in Saint-Martin-Vésubie during World War II, notes that the family was German through and through .

Even in 1938, when many Jewish friends and acquaintances of the family had left Germany, Walter's father Ludwig, who had been honored in World War I , still assumed that the Nazis would not harm him.

Expulsion of the family from Germany

After the Nuremberg Race Laws were passed in 1935, the exclusion of Jewish citizens in Germany increased. Teachers and classmates began to harass nine-year-old Walter Marx with humiliation, insults and beatings, and his parents therefore send their only son, along with his cousin Werner Isaac, who lived with them, to an aunt and uncle in Luxembourg.

Werner Isaac (born June 30, 1926 in Fremersdorf ) the son of Max Isaac was (d. 1926 in Merzig) and Hanna ( Hansi ) Isaac, born Marx, after her husband's death in 1926 from Merzig was moved back to Heilbronn lived in her father's house at Wilhelmstrasse 54. She had found work in England and therefore left her son with her family. The two boys each spent their school holidays in Heilbronn with Walter's parents, the last time in the summer of 1938.

During the November pogroms in 1938 , Nazi thugs stormed the family home, devastated the business and deported Ludwig Marx along with other Heilbronn Jews to Dachau, where he was imprisoned from November 11, 1938 to January 25, 1939. Ludwig Marx was forced to stand for hours in the cold and freezing in the rain with other prisoners. As a result of the infection on his ring finger due to freezing - he was not allowed to take off his wedding ring - it had to be amputated afterwards. He was allowed to go after he signed his emigration papers. Ludwig Marx was probably released from prison because he gave his consent to emigrate.

The ordinance on the use of Jewish assets of December 3, 1939 forced Ludwig Marx and his father to give up their paper wholesale business. The house in Wilhelmstrasse, which belonged to Berthold Marx, also had to be sold and came into the possession of the city of Heilbronn.

In the summer of 1939 these processes were presumably completed and the family broke up: Ludwig Marx and his wife Johanna emigrated to Luxembourg to live with their son Walter and their nephew Werner. His mother probably stayed in England - Franke gives England as her emigration destination as 1939 - and the widowed Berthold Marx was brought to a forced retirement home for Jewish seniors in Herrlingen . The last address in Heilbronn for Ludwig and Johanna Marx is no longer the house at Wilhelmstrasse 54, where they still lived according to the Israelite community list of April 1, 1937 , but Moltkestrasse 27.

Luxembourg

The Marx family lived undisturbed in Luxembourg for almost a year. After the beginning of the western campaign of the German army in May 1940 with the attack by German troops on the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, Ludwig Marx tried to get to France to join the French army. However, he was only assigned as a volunteer to one of the Compagnie de travailleurs étrangers (CTE German: Working Groups for Foreigners ) founded after April 12, 1939 as prestataire voluntaire ( voluntary worker ). These units were unarmed and served as workers to support the French army, many of their members were recruited from the spring of 1940 in French internment camps for foreigners. Ludwig Marx's unit was deployed near the front and overrun by the Wehrmacht. Ludwig Marx fled back to Luxembourg.

France

Montpellier

On November 7, 1940, the Marx family was expelled from the German civil administration under Gustav Simon , along with the other Jews, from behind the demarcation line at Mâcon, as part of a major campaign aimed at making Luxembourg “free of Jews” suspended in the Saône-et-Loire department .

From here they fled together with Werner Isaac through the part of France ruled by the Vichy regime and not yet occupied by the Germans to Montpellier in the Hérault department , where they had distant relatives. They hoped to be able to travel to the USA from Montpellier. The family found their livelihood here until the summer of 1943: Ludwig Marx had an unofficial position with the president of the local Jewish community, and Walter supplemented the family income as an errand boy and messenger boy at a florist.

Without any specific threat - the Allied landings in North Africa did not begin until November 8th and the Germans did not reach Montpellier before November 12th - the family fled further inland on November 2nd, 1942. Walter Marx, who was 15 years old at the time, later suspected that rumors about the imminent occupation of the Mediterranean coast by German troops could have tipped the balance. The Marx family found shelter in Lamalou-les-Bains and duly registered there.

Barrack reconstruction in Gurs as part of the memorial

As part of the so-called Anton company , Italy and Germany divided up the previously unoccupied part of France as a reaction to the Allied landing in North Africa, so that Walter Marx's family was now in the German-occupied part of France.

At the beginning of the year, raids by Germans in search of Jews and arrests in the formerly non-occupied French zone increased. The number of Jewish hostages demanded by the Germans in retaliation for actions by the Resistance also increased . Ludwig Marx was arrested on February 20, 1943 because 70 Jewish men from the Hérault department had to be evicted by the authorities as part of such an operation. His family's attempt to free him immediately after his arrest with the support of the President of the Jewish Community in Nice failed because he had already been transferred to the Gurs internment camp . From there he was transferred to the Drancy internment camp on either February 26th or March 2nd , probably deported to Poland on March 4th or 6th and murdered in the Majdanek camp.

After Ludwig Marx was arrested, the rest of the family set out for the Italian-occupied part of south-eastern France, having learned that Italians treated Jews better than Germans. Even if Jews were not allowed to leave their place of residence without official approval, the journey was hardly a problem for them, and they came to Saint-Martin-Vésubie via Nice.

Saint-Martin-Vésubie
The place Saint-Martin-Vésubie

Through the refugee aid of the Jewish community in Nice ( Comité d'Assistance aux Réfugiés , also named Comité Dubouchage after the address of the synagogue at 24, boulevard Dubouchage) Walter, his mother and his cousin found accommodation in Saint, about 69 kilometers north of Nice -Martin-Vésubie, which had been occupied by Italy since November 11, 1942, and where over 1000 Jewish refugees were staying.

Although Italy, too, had officially committed to anti-Semitism by enacting its own racial laws ( leggi razziali ) since 1938 , Jews - unlike, for example, in France under the Vichy regime - did not have to be identified as such. Since the Marx family only had to report to the police every day, their living conditions had improved significantly. In retrospect, Walter Marx described life in Saint-Martin-Vésubie like this: The time in St. Martin was probably one of the best times of my life. It was like a paradise. After Years of persecution by the German and the French, we could speak any language we wanted, publicy. In Montpellier, we had never been able to speak any foreign language at all. There was such an elated feeling of freedom.

Italy

Borgo San Dalmazzo

The relative protection that the Jews enjoyed in the Italian-occupied part of France ended with the armistice between the Allies and the Kingdom of Italy on September 8, 1943 . The departure of the previous ally Italy prompted the German Wehrmacht to begin the so-called Operation Fall Axis , which, among other things, provided for the German invasion of the areas previously occupied by the Italian army, which began on September 9, 1943.

From September 8, 1943, many Jews from Saint-Martin-Vésubie began to flee across the Alps towards Italy, also on the advice of the Italian army, which announced that the refugees would be allowed to escape. In the next few days several hundred people crossed the border on difficult alpine paths in the hope of being able to flee under the protection of Allied troops in Italy, which was no longer involved in the war. Walter Marx remembered that the crossing took three to four days, and the steady stream of poorly equipped men, women and children laden with essentials reminded him of the exodus from Egypt .

Their arrival in Italy fell into a relatively chaotic phase: parts of the Italian armed forces were in the process of disintegration, the Allied troops had landed in Italy - albeit far away from the province of Cuneo , where the refugees were now. Instead, German troops, including the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler , advanced across the borders.

Around September 12, 1943, Johanna Marx and the two boys reached Borgo San Dalmazzo and found accommodation in an inn, Cavallo Rosso . At the same time, SS troops, whose commanding officer was Joachim Peiper, reached the region around Cuneo. On September 16, Peiper ordered a "campo di concentramento" to be set up for captured Jewish refugees in an abandoned barracks of the Italian mountain troops in Borgo San Dalmazzo.

On September 18, the SS called for the entire Cuneo region - signed by a "Hauptsturmführer Müller", who has not yet been identified - to all foreigners to immediately report the death penalty for both the fugitives and any helpers up to 18 O'clock in front of the collection point.

Walter Marx, his mother and his cousin hide in a small barn for a few hours, then they decided to surrender. On the one hand, they saw themselves in a hopeless situation without papers and did not want to put anyone in danger, on the other hand, while in Saint-Martin-Vésubie, Walter had unquestioned the news of his grandfather Berthold Marx's death, as naturally accepted for a 77-year-old and rumors about it the burning of people dismissed as crazy.

Deportation and escape
Memorial in Borgo San Dalmazzo

In the Borgo San Dalmazzo concentration camp, the three were registered and interned under the prisoner numbers 225, 226 and 227, and Walter and Werner, like most men, were used for forced labor.

During one of these missions, Walter was seriously injured on October 16, 1943: While loading weapons at night in complete darkness, he was trapped between a broken-down truck that the forced laborers had to push and an armored personnel carrier and broke a vertebra in the process. His right leg was temporarily paralyzed from the injury and he was first admitted to the small hospital in Borgo and later transferred to the hospital in Cuneo .

Initially, his mother was allowed to visit him under police supervision, but her visits stopped abruptly in mid-November. On November 21, 1943, 349 Jews had to march out of the camp to the train station, where they were forced into four waiting cattle wagons and deported to Nice. From there it went on to the Drancy internment camp. Werner Isaac and Johanna Marx were among them.

Walter was only able to provide information about the fate of his mother and cousin from the daughter of the innkeeper family from the Cavallo Rosso in Borgo San Dalmazzo, where the family had initially lived. Magdalena ( Nella ) Giraudo, who also visited him occasionally in the hospital, had seen the deportation herself.

When the SS asked the director of the hospital, Giuseppe Meinardi, about Walter's state of health in January 1944, the latter, along with two other patients, Hertzek Gerszt and Isidor Grunfeld, gave him an opportunity to escape, which, however, failed. The three were scheduled to take a taxi to the train station on January 30th and take the train to Genoa from Cuneo. Then they should contact the secretary of Cardinal Pietro Boetto , Don Francesco Repetto, in the Episcopal See of Genoa. Once there, however, nobody seemed to know about it and they were turned away. When the three of them were discussing what to do in a nearby restaurant, a stranger addressed them as Shalom . The three did not react because they suspected a trap. Years later it turned out that the bishop's secretary had again suspected a trap when they appeared and had then sent the man after them to find out whether they were threatened Jews.

In resistance

After this failed rescue attempt, Walter didn’t know what else to do but to turn to Nella Giraudo. She hid him for some time in her parents' inn, where Germans were also stationed. Out of the feeling of having to do something, decided the 17-year-old, to the partisans to join, and Nella Giraudo was him in a group it known resistance fighters in about 15 kilometers away in mountains near Demonte in the Stura were to accommodate .

Here Walter Marx received forged papers that identified him as Giuseppe Barale from France, who was born in a small town on the border with Germany. This should explain his distinct accent.

In the beginning, due to his injury-related limitation, he was only able to do paperwork such as handing out vacation tickets or certificates for the requisition of food from the local farmers. As his health improved, he also received military training. Under his new identity, he was smuggled into the Germans as a translator for a few weeks via a double agent in the spring of 1944 and was thus able to pass on information about an imminent raid and help prevent it.

After his unit was wiped out in the fighting over the strategically important Stura Valley in August 1944, Marx tried to get to France with a few others, but was separated from them along with a friend, Walter Burger. Also because Burger was worried about leaving his mother behind, they stayed in the valley of the Stura and continued to hide until the end of the war, sometimes with Jewish families in hiding, sometimes with other partisan groups.

After the Second World War

Walter Marx, who was staying on a farm near Demonte when the news of the German surrender reached him, went to Nice after his official release from the resistance to find out about the fate of his family.

He learned that his father had been deported to Poland via the internment camps in Gurs and Drancy and murdered in the Majdanek concentration camp . His mother was transported to Auschwitz via Nizza and Drancy and murdered there immediately upon arrival.

Jews arrested in Drancy internment camp

His cousin Werner Isaac had already been called in as a translator for the Germans in Borgo, which is why he was also deported to Nice, but traveled in a separate compartment and still doing translation work. In Nice he was separated from the rest of the deportees and stayed there for several weeks before he was also transported on to Drancy. When they arrived at the camp, most of the Jews from the Borgo San Dalmazzo concentration camp had already been deported to Auschwitz.

He was used again for forced labor in the camp, which saved his life until mid-August 1944. When the Allied troops took Paris, the rest of those imprisoned in Drancy were to be sent by train to Auschwitz via Bobigny . For reasons unknown to him, however, the group that Werner Isaac was with was taken to the train station, but only stayed there for a few hours and then returned to the camp, where he was liberated by the Red Cross on August 18, 1944.

In October 1946, after an uncle in the United States had given him an affidavit as a surety, Walter Marx left Paris for New York , where he spent a few years with his cousin Werner and another survivor from Saint-Martin-Vésubie, William Blye, shared an apartment.

In 1950 he married Ellen Appel, the daughter of Josef Appel (born 1888) and Helene Koopmann (born July 13, 1898). As a child, Ellen Appel survived the Holocaust by hiding in the Pensionnat des Jeunes Filles Saint Charles in Marseille , which was run by Belgian nuns with the motherhouse in Herseaux .

Request for retransfer against the city of Heilbronn

Wilhelmstrasse 54 with the rose pharmacy that still exists today

His aunt Hanna Isaac, the younger sister of his father and mother of Werner Isaac, found a job in England after her husband's death in 1926 and emigrated there in 1939. From here she also went to New York and, together with Walter as heir to his father Ludwig Marx, applied to the city of Heilbronn for the transfer back of the building at Wilhelmstrasse 54, which had come into the possession of the city of Heilbronn after the Aryanization.

At the end of the Second World War, the office of the Halle Commercial Health Insurance Fund (KKH), whose office at Klarastraße 15 had been destroyed, was housed in the building. After that, it served the Rose Pharmacy of pharmacist Karl Koch as a commercial building. This was originally at Rathausgasse 1. After the house was destroyed in an air raid on September 10, 1944 , Koch opened the rose pharmacy at Wilhelmstrasse 54.

The proceedings ended with a settlement between the heirs Berthold Marx and the new owner of the building.

Fates of other relatives in the Holocaust

Walter's paternal grandfather, Berthold Marx, was brought to Herrlingen by the Nazis from Heilbronn on July 26 or 28, 1939, to a so-called old people's home, from there he came to Oberstotzingen on July 10, 1942 , where a similar facility is located in the local castle and was deported from here on August 22nd to Theresienstadt, where he died the following January.

Walter's older aunt on his father's side, Berta Eskeles (born on March 18, 1895 in Heilbronn as Berta Marx; died on November 25, 1941 in Kowno (Eng .: Kauen) in Fort IX ) was with Hugo Eskeles (born on February 6, 1888 in Offenbach am Main ; died on November 25, 1941, in Kowno in Fort IX) and lived with him in Zweibrücken , where her daughter Senta Lore Eskeles (born on October 4, 1925 in Zweibrücken; died on November 25, 1941 in Kowno in Fort IX) lived. Hugo Eskeles was also imprisoned in Dachau from November 12, 1938 to December 16, 1938 after the November pogroms in 1938. In September 1939 the family from Zweibrücken fled to Munich. The background for the escape was the beginning of the Second World War on the Western Front and the fear of the expected war events. The family arrived in Herrlingen on September 4, 1939, and Berta's father Berthold Marx stayed for two weeks in the Jewish retirement home. From Munich, the three were deported to Kaunas on November 20, 1941, to the extermination camp set up in Fort IX, where they were murdered on November 25th.

literature

  • Danielle Baudot Laksine: La pierre des Juifs. 3 volumes. Ed. de Bergier, Châteauneuf 2003-2008 (Volume 1: La pierre des Juifs. Châteauneuf 2003, ISBN 2-9516778-4-7 ; Volume 2: Les grands visiteurs. Châteauneuf 2005, ISBN 2-9516778-7-1 ; Volume 3: La vallée des justes. Châteauneuf 2008, ISBN 978-2-916584-02-7 )
  • Alberto Cavaglion: Nella notte straniera: gli ebrei di S. Martin Vésubie e il campo di Borgo S. Dalmazzo, 8 September-21 November 1943 , L'arciere, Cuneo 1981, OCLC 9098012 , pp. 132-158.
  • Christian Eggers: Unwanted foreigners. Jews from Germany and Central Europe in French internment camps 1940–1942. Metropol, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-932482-62-X .
  • Liliana Picciotto Fargion: Il libro della memoria: gli ebrei deportati dall'Italia (1943–1945) , Mursia, Milano 1991, OCLC 27897479 , p. 351.
  • Hans Franke: History and Fate of the Jews in Heilbronn. From the Middle Ages to the time of the National Socialist persecution (1050–1945). Heilbronn 1963 (= publications of the Heilbronn Archives. Issue 11), OCLC 600889368 , pp. 137, 286, 308, 347, 348, 358, 363.
  • Ulrich Seemüller: The Jewish retirement home in Herrlingen and the fate of its residents. 2nd revised and expanded edition. Süddeutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, Ulm 2009, ISBN 978-3-88294-403-7 . Short biography of Berthold Marx, p. 184.
  • Jens Westemeier: Himmler's warriors. Joachim Peiper and the Waffen-SS in the war and the post-war period. 2nd Edition. Schöningh, Paderborn 2014, ISBN 978-3-506-77241-1 .
  • Juliane Wetzel: Region Italy: Borgo San Dalmazzo . In: Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (eds.): The place of terror . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 9: Labor education camps, ghettos, youth protection camps, police detention camps, special camps, gypsy camps, forced labor camps. CH Beck, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-57238-8 , p. 307f.
  • Susan Zuccotti: Holocaust Odysseys. The Jews of Saint-Martin-Vésibie and their Flight through France and Italy. Yale University Press, New Haven / London 2007, ISBN 978-0-300-12294-7 .

documentary

  • A break in the Holocaust. 1943 Le temps d'un répit. Director: André Waksman. France, 2009, 52 minutes. French / Italian with English subtitles.

Memorial book

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary in Air Cargo News from August 14, 2013 (accessed April 30, 2015)
  2. ↑ "The history of the Marx family is discussed in particular, since their fate was significantly influenced by decisions in which Peiper was directly or indirectly involved - up to the arrest of Walter and his mother Johann by Peiper's men in 1943." (Westemeier , P. 46) Furthermore, with the help of the memories of Walter Marx, Westemeier succeeds in exposing Peiper's post-war assertion that he and his unit were not involved in the deportation of Jews to Italy as a protective claim. Walter Marx, for example, remembers an SS man named Israel, whom Westemeier can also prove with the help of other sources. (Westemeier, p. 271)
  3. ↑ Liliana Picciotto Fargion : Il libro della memoria: gli ebrei deportati dall'Italia (1943–1945) , Mursia, Milano 1991, OCLC 27897479 , p. 351.
  4. ^ Data from Johanna Marx on Bundesarchiv.de
  5. ^ Data from Ludwig Marx on Bundesarchiv.de
  6. ↑ Data from Berthold and Emma Marx geb. Jaraczewsky on steinheim-Institut.de
  7. ↑ Data from Berthold Marx ( Memento from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) on stadtgeschichte-Heilbronn.de
  8. ↑ Data from Berthold Marx on Bundesarchiv.de
  9. ↑ Seemüller, p. 184.
  10. ↑ Gravestone inscription from the database epidat - database on Jewish gravestone graphics from the Steinheim Institute
  11. ↑ Walter's family (...) was German through and through. All four of Walter's grandparents were born in Germany and he has traced his paternel grandfather's German anchestry back to the seventeenth century. In: Zuccotti, p. 29; translated: Walter's family (...) was German through and through. All of Walter's four grandparents were born in Germany, and he had traced his paternal grandfather's German ancestors back to the 17th century.
  12. ↑ Zuccotti, p. 30.
  13. ↑ Westemeier, p. 46.
  14. ^ Zuccotti, p. 29.
  15. ↑ Cavaglion, p. 144: “Isaac Werner - pat. [Ernità] Max - mat. [Ernità] Marx Hanzi - n. [Ato] Merzig 30-6-1926 - sfd - naz. germanica - razza ebraica Suppl. 21 - I "
  16. ↑ Westemeier, p. 268, note 489 on p. 711.
  17. ↑ Westemeier, page 268, with reference to note 489 on page 711: “These registration lists are preserved and provide information about the people of Saint-Martin-Vésubie, cf. on this the adaptation of Cavaglion: Nella Notte Straniera , pp. 43–49. Werner Isaac was Walter Marx's cousin. The Isaac family lived in Merzig in Saarland until their father's death in 1926. Then Werner moved with his mother to Heilbronn a. lived with the Marx family. Together with Walter Marx, his mother first sent him to relatives in Luxembourg. Like the Marx family, after deportation to Vichy France, he lived first in Montpellier, then in St. Martin-Vésubie. He joined Walter u. his mother on the march across the Alps to u. stayed with them. He was later deported from Borgo via Nice to Drancy a. liberated there in 1944. ”[Werner Isaac in battle on all fronts 1941–1944].
  18. ↑ Franke, p. 380.
  19. ↑ Zuccotti, pp. 29/30.
  20. ↑ Data from the memorial book of the Federal Archives for the Victims of the National Socialist Persecution of Jews in Germany (1933–1945)
  21. ↑ Zuccotti, p. 30: "Ludwig was one of the estimated twenty thousand Jews throughout the country to be arrested without cause. Sent to Dachau, he was forced to stand with other inmates for hours in the cold and rain. His hands froze, and because he was not allowed to remove his wedding band, his ring finger developed an infection requiring amputation. Like most of the Jews arrested on that occasion, Ludwig was released after he produced the documents required to leave Germany. He and Johanna joined their son and nephew in Luxembourg in 1939 »...
  22. ↑ cf. the cover letter for the retransmission procedure by the lawyer of Hanna Issac and Walter Marx in the Heilbronn city archive, signature B033-460
  23. ↑ Emigration list. In: Franke, p. 355f, here p. 358: Isaac, Hansi geb. Marx ... [born on] February 16, 1899 [in] Heilbronn [apartment in Heilbronn z. At the time of emigration] Wilhelmstrasse 54 [emigrated on] July 1939 [to] England.
  24. ↑ Israelite Community List of April 1, 1937. In: Franke, p. 287f, here p. 290: “Marx, Ludwig II; Family; Paper wholesale; Wilhelmstrasse 54 "
  25. ↑ Emigration list. In: Franke, p. 355f, here p. 363: Marx, Johanna geb. Isak ... [born on] April 29, 1900 [in] Fremersdorf [apartment in Heilbronn z. At the time of emigration] Moltkestrasse 27 [emigrated on] July 21st, 1939 [to] Luxemburg.
  26. ↑ Emigration list. In: Franke, p. 355f, here p. 363: Marx, Ludwig… [b. on] February 8, 1897 [in] Heilbronn [apartment in Heilbronn z. At the time of emigration] Moltkestrasse 27 [emigrated on] July 2nd, 1939 [to] Luxembourg.
  27. ↑ Eggers, pp. 44/45.
  28. ↑ Zucchotti, p. 38.
  29. ^ Zucotti, p. 49: "Walter Marx's father, Ludwig found an unofficial job with the president of the local Jewish community in Montpellier. ... fifteen-year od Walter Marx worked part-time as an errand and delivery boy for a florist ».
  30. ^ Zuccotti, p. 79.
  31. ↑ Zuccotti, pp. 80/81.
  32. ^ Zuccotti, p. 89.
  33. ↑ Zuccotti, p. 93; translated: The time in St. Martin was probably one of the best times of my life. It was like paradise. After years of persecution by the Germans and the French, we were able to speak any language we wanted in public. In Montpellier we couldn't speak any foreign language at all. That was such an encouraging feeling of freedom.
  34. ^ Zuccotti, p. 106.
  35. ↑ Westemeier, p. 268.
  36. ^ Cavaglion, p. 79: “Analogo salvataggio fu quello, veramente curioso, di Marx Walter (n. 225 dell'elenco internati). So infatti si legge in un certificato del Sindaco di Borgo , rilasciato, su richiesta dell'interessato, dopo la Liberazione: Il Sindaco sulla scorta degli atti di ufficio certifica: 1) che il signor Marx Walter, proveniente dalla residenza forzata di St.- Martin-Vésubie (Francia) è stato internato in questo campo di concentramento in data 18 September 1942 per ordine del Comandante Germanico delle SS Capitano Müller. 2) che lo stesso Marx Walter, mentre la sera del 16 ottobre 1943, verso le ore 19, tornava con altri compagni su un autocarro del lavoro effettuato per conto delle SS germaniche, sotto il cavalcavia ferroviario rimase schiacciato, causa l 'oscurità, tra l 'autocarro e un carro armato tedesco di guardia, riportando la frattura parcellare della prima vertebra sacrale D. 3) che la stessa sera del 16 ottobre 1943 il Marx Walter venne ricoverato nell'Ospedale Civile di questo Comune, e il giorno successivo, 17 ottobre 1943, trasportato all 'Ospedale di Cuneo. "
  37. ↑ Wetzel, p. 307.
  38. ↑ Westemeier, p. 711, note 491
  39. ↑ Westemeier, p. 169.
  40. ^ Zuccotti, p. 97.
  41. ^ Zuccotti, p. 136.
  42. ↑ Westemeier, p. 176.
  43. ^ Zuccotti, pp. 147/148.
  44. ↑ After the war, Walter Marx, who wanted to thank her for saving him, could not find Magdalena Giraudo again. The two only met again on the occasion of a commemoration in Borgo San Dalmazzo in 2000, at which he publicly thanked his savior again. Magdalena Giraudo's return visit to New York led to an article in the New York Times about Walter Marx and his fate. See the New York Times, May 7, 2000
  45. ^ Zuccotti, p. 153.
  46. ↑ Zuccotti, pp. 153/154.
  47. ^ Zuccotti, p. 141.
  48. ↑ http://wp.ge-mittelkreis.de/webfrie05/webinsch/jupage/fkoopj.htm
  49. ^ Zucotti p. 199: "Ellen's parents had been born in Germany but moved to Belgium before the war. In May 1940, her father, Josef, born in 1888, was arrested as a German enemy alien in Belgium and expelled to France. He passed through several camps in unoccupied France, including Saint-Cyprien, Récébédou, Noé, and Gurs, before the Vichy police delivered him to the Germans in the occupied zone in early August 1942. He was deported to Kosel or Auschwitz on convoy 25 on August 28, 1942, and did not return. Ellen survived by hiding at the Pensionnat des Jeunes Filles Saint Charles, operated by nuns from a convent in Herseaux, Belgium. Her mother, Leni, was hidden by the head of the Brussels Stock Exchange. Ellen and Walter Marx have three sons, David, Ronald, and Gary, and five grandchildren ”.
  50. ↑ Cavaglion, p. 144: “Isaac Werner - pat. [Ernità] Max - mat. [Ernità] Marx Hanzi - n. [Ato] Merzig 30-6-1926 - sfd - naz. germanica - razza ebraica Suppl. 21 - I "
  51. ↑ Westemeier, p. 268, note 489 on p. 711.
  52. ↑ Franke, p. 331.
  53. ↑ Seemüller, p. 165.
  54. ↑ Data on Berta Eskelses geb. Marx on Bundesarchiv.de
  55. ↑ Data from Berta, Hugo and Lore Eskeles on holocaustcontroversies.yuku.com
  56. ↑ Seemüller, pp. 30/31.
  57. ↑ Information on the film at www.jewishfilm.org (accessed April 30, 2015)
  58. ↑ Article Matteo Sacchi in Il Giornale on January 26, 2011 about the film and the story behind it on the occasion of its broadcast (accessed on April 30, 2015)
personal data
SURNAME Marx, Walter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Marx, Walter Herbert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Holocaust survivor, Jewish partisan, contemporary witness
DATE OF BIRTH February 27, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Heilbronn
DATE OF DEATH August 13, 2013
Place of death New York City