Yzchok Gerszt

Yzchok Gerszt (born October 16, 1901 in Brzeziny , † January 13, 1945 near the Auschwitz concentration camp ) was a Polish communist and resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Life

Yzchok Gerszt immigrated to Germany from Poland in 1920, worked as a tailor and traveler, and in 1933 set up a tailor shop in Elberfeld . In Poland he was already politically active in the socialist " Bund ", in Wuppertal he joined the KPD in 1924 . He worked with the Wuppertal resistance fighters Ewald Funke , Jukiel Gilberg , Karl Ibach and Friedrich Senger in the "AM-Apparat" (anti-military apparatus, a kind of secret intelligence service) of the KPD. As an employee of the Wollberge & Co. company, which was owned by the textile entrepreneur and comrade Abraham Berkowitz , Gerszt came into contact with police officers from the Waldesruh police barracks , who had new uniforms tailored at Berkowitz. Supposedly dissatisfied or anti-Nazi police officers were recorded in a file and newspapers were sent to them; after 1933, however, these actions were discontinued. Until 1933 Gerszt was also involved in the board of a Jewish workers' cultural association in which the East Jewish immigrants had come together. After the “ seizure of power ” by the National Socialists, Gerszt, together with his wife Rita, organized money collections from Jewish sympathizers to finance the illegal resistance.

death

In the course of the third wave of arrests of communists and trade unionists in the Wuppertal area, he was arrested on June 30, 1936 and sentenced to four years in prison at one of the Wuppertal trade union trials. He served this sentence in the prisons in Herford and Siegburg . He was then taken into “ protective custody ” and deported to Auschwitz . There he died on a death march just a few days before the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army .

Yzchok's wife Rita fled to Belgium with their daughter in 1939 . There she was arrested by the Gestapo in 1940 and murdered in the Nazi killing center in Bernburg in 1942 .

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, a memorial plaque was unveiled opposite the former home on Reiterstrasse 3 in Wuppertal-Elberfeld. The unveiling was also attended by daughter Stephanie, who had survived persecution and war and who had left for an uncle in the United States in 1948 . The memorial plaque was destroyed in 2012. On October 25, 2008, Demnig's “official” stumbling blocks were laid for Yzchok and Rita Gerszt in front of the Reiterstrasse house. Since February 2015, a green area west of Josefstrasse in Wuppertal has been called "Rita and Yzchok Gerszt-Park".

Individual evidence

1. ^ Jewish communists in the KPD's AM apparatus on gewerkschaftsprozesse.de
2. ↑ ^{a b} Stolpersteine ​​(2002). denkmal-wuppertal.de, February 15, 2015, accessed on June 16, 2015 . 
3. ^ Meeting of the Elberfeld district council 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.  
4. ↑ Andreas Boller: Gerszt-Park is reminiscent of a Jewish couple. In: wz.de. Westdeutsche Zeitung, accessed on March 1, 2016 . 

Web links

• Yzchok Gerszt on gedenkbuch-wuppertal.de
• Yzchok and Rita Gerszt memorial plaque on denkmal-wuppertal.de (destroyed in 2012)