Zypora Frank

Zypora Frank (born May 23, 1935 in Auschwitz ) is the owner of part of the property of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp .

Her grandfather Josef Meltzner († May 15, 1944 in Blechhammer concentration camp ) owned a factory for the manufacture of tea products on the Birkenau site. When the German attack on Poland began in September 1939, her mother Rifka Jacoby and her children fled across the Russian border, with her husband Shmuel Jacoby following shortly afterwards. In Siberia, they were first detained in a labor camp for 18 months. Then they could relocate to Tajikistan , where they spent the next few years in Leninabad .

When they wanted to return to Poland on May 23, 1947, they were attacked as Jews by a crowd. She survived the explosion of a hand grenade unharmed. The family fled to France and boarded a ship in Marseille that took them to Israel. They arrived in Israel on July 2, 1947.

In Israel she learned the profession of teacher. She married Yitzhak Frank, a businessman. In 1987 she visited her home in Poland for the first time. Her mother died in December 1991, her father in February 1992. After her husband died in 1995, she had time to deal with her parents' papers. In doing so, she came across inheritance documents that her mother had left behind.

Her mother had verifiably paid property taxes on the factory site where her grandfather owned a factory near Birkenau. When she went to Krakow at the end of 1997 , the exact location of the property could be verified according to the land registry. In the Auschwitz Museum, too, aerial photographs could be used to show how the Germans demolished their grandfather's factory and used the site to build a factory for detonators. Today there is a car repair shop.

Although she had the inheritance of this property secured, she asked for no lease and did not want any compensation payments from the state.

credentials

• Auschwitz belongs to me , in: Süddeutsche Zeitung of August 14, 1998