The Besas family and the limitations of statistical memory
One of the very few surviving artefacts connected to my grandfather's family is this photograph, dated 7 February 1939.
It was taken in the dining room at Charlottenstraße 22, not long before Frank left for England on the Kindertransport. On the reverse he wrote:
This is the last picture of our family that I have got. Taken two months before I left. On the left are myself, my mother, my sister and my father. Second from the right is an Aunt who later killed herself. The rest are friends. Please don't lose it.
The aunt was Gertrud Besas, born Rosa Gertrud Cohn in 1896 or 1897, in Wollstein (now Wolsztyn), in the Prussian province of Posen, Germany. She had an elder sister, Hilda Henriette, born on 20 September 1892. Their father was a merchant and the owner of a modest department store in Wollstein.
After the First World War, when Wollstein was returned to Poland, the family moved permanently to Berlin. Gertrud married George Besas, a lawyer, in 1918, and Hilda married Dr Paul Kornicker, a dentist, in 1921. Paul Kornicker was my great-granduncle.
Gertrud and Georg lived in a six-room apartment at Nassauische Straße 62, in Wilmersdorf, a suburb of Berlin. Hilda described their lives as "very cultured, wealthy, and bourgeois".
As early as 1933, Georg Besas was stripped of his right to practise under the provisions of Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums ("Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service"), and his firm closed in the autumn of that year. Humiliated and deprived of their livelihoods, Gertrud and Georg attempted suicide in September 1933. They were saved, but Georg jumped from a window shortly afterwards, dying from his injuries on 12 October 1933.
Gertrud was looked after by her sister, who allowed her son Stephan to live with her in the hope that this would maintain her spirits. However, plans that the family had made to flee Nazi Germany were undone when Paul Kornicker died of cancer in 1937. Fortunately, 16-year-old Stephan managed to secure a place on a Kindertransport to New York, arriving there from Hamburg on the SS Deutschland on 10 March 1938. Gertrud missed her nephew and was deeply troubled by her own circumstances, as she'd been compelled to give up much of her wealth—including her silver and jewellery—due to the Judenvermögensabgabe (punitive confiscation of wealth). Kristallnacht took place in November 1938, and during the following year her situation grew increasingly precarious, with the tenancy on her home being terminated effective 1 September 1939. This would force her to sell her furniture and move to a Judenhaus, where living conditions were often extremely difficult. Rather than endure this, she used poison to end her own life on 19 August 1939.
Her sister (my great-grandaunt), Hilda, was forced into labour at the Rheinmetall-Borsig armaments factory at the Borsig Works, near Tegel. She became seriously unwell and was released after four months. On 19 October 1941—the day after deportations from Berlin began, and four days before the borders were closed—she escaped to Havana via Portugal with a visa obtained by her son, who was by now living in California. Due to the US entering the war in December 1941, Hilda was forced to remain in Havana for a number of years, suffering ill health due to lack of medical provision in Cuba. Finally, in April 1944, she was able to make her way to California from Havana, via Florida, but wasn't reunited with her son until much later, as he was serving in Europe with the US Army. Both died in California—Hilda on 15 September 1977, and her son on 18 September 2000.
It's not clear whether the person in the photograph is Gertrud or Hilda, and the photograph attached to Hilda's immigration application does bear a striking resemblance to the woman in the picture. However, sisters often look alike, and it's not uncommon for people to describe their aunt's sister as their aunt. With that in mind, I don't think there's any reason to doubt my grandfather's recollection that this is Gertrud.
The SS Deutschland—the ocean liner that Stephan Besas escaped to New York on in 1938—offered a rare lifeline to Stephan and his fellow passengers. It later offered refuge to German soldiers and civilians surrounded by the Red Army in the Courland Pocket in 1945, making seven rescue voyages across the Baltic. By 1945 it had been repurposed as a hospital ship, although there was only enough paint available to paint the funnels white and add a red cross to the side of a single funnel. On 3 May 1945 the ship was attacked and sunk by RAF Hawker Typhoons in the Bay of Lübeck off Neustadt, along with two others, the SS Cap Arcona and SS Thielbek.
On board each of these ships were concentration camp inmates and Russian POWs, locked beneath deck and denied food and medical attention. Thousands died in the attack, but none from the Deutschland, which capsized slowly, allowing for the rescue of those on board by the SS Athen.
Many of those who perished in this attack had spent half a decade fighting to survive in ghettos and concentration camps, enduring the most horrific conditions imaginable, to then drown or be shot to death in the water by allied aircraft a few days before Victory in Europe Day. The few who managed to swim to land risked being shot by members of the SS, Hitlerjugend or Volkssturm militia. In 2000, while making the documentary The Typhoons' Last Storm, filmmaker Lawrence Bond tried to speak to survivors and witnesses of the attack. He received a letter from a rabbi and discovered that one of the RAF pilots had been Jewish. The pilot's family asked that the rabbi speak to Bond on his behalf, to protect his mental health, as the pilot had not known at the time of the attack that there were concentration camp victims aboard the ships.
These events are only adjacent to the story I'm trying to tell, but I made a post about it for a couple of reasons: to consider the power of the medium of photography to preserve a vital connection to the past, and to emphasise that when we think about the victims of historical and contemporary atrocities, we should also remember those who fall outside official statistics yet whose lives were nonetheless undone or permanently altered by the same forces. I support the Stolpersteine project in part because it acknowledges victims across the full spectrum of loss, including those whose suffering left little documentary trace but was no less consequential.
This post is based on my own translation of an article about the Besas's Stolpersteine on the official State of Berlin website.