26 August 1945

Dear parents,

You can well imagine that ever since I came to Berlin my principal ambition has to find traces first of all of grandfather and then of other relatives who had to stay behind.[1] So are I have been very little successful, at least as far as grandfather is concerned. The main difficulty is to get to Lichterfelde. Even though Dahlem is not too far away from Lichterfelde it is almost impossible to get there by civilian transportation mean. However, I hope to be able to borrow a car some time this coming week, and then I'll start my investigations there. In the meantime,  I have been taking advantage of whatever means of transporation I could get. So, the day before yesterday I had a chance to go to the Jewish Hospital Iranischestrasse.[2] I thought that possibly grandfather had been sick at one time or another and been taken to the hospital. The secretary and I checked the records as back as 1941, but his name did not did not appear. Now, last night, after some concentrated thinking what I could do I suddenly remembered the nurse who used take care of grandfather, and I believe that I recall her name. Wasn't it Margarete Till? I know I wrote her a birthday letter once, and I am fairly sure that this was her name. Please correct me if I am wrong. Grandfather last address was Grabenstr. 12,I believe. Do you you remember it ? It was either 12 or 20. My visit to the hospital was not in vain in other respect. In the first place I found out what Palestine Camp, Bavaria is. When Jews were taken [from] Terezin, they were asked if they wanted and had a chance to emigrate to Palestine or other foreign countries. If they answered in the affirmative they were sent to this Palestine Camp, which is in or near Deckendorf in Bavaria.[3] So farI have not been able to get any message there. However, a friend of mine intends to go to Munich during the coming week and he promised me already to visit that camp. I cannot understand that the Joint in New York does not know this camp.

There were in the Jewish hospital about five hundred Jews who had just returned from Terezin. I want to spare you a description of' the condition of those poor wrecks. Immediately I thought of Heine 's dedication to the Siechenhaus in Hamburg "...geplagt von Krankheit, Armut und dem Judentume."[4] A friend of mine who went there to deliver a message from somebody' to this fellow 's mother asked to come with him to her room as he was afraid that the sudden news from her son night harm the old woman. However, the result was different from what we had anticipated. It seems that the suffering and experiences of these people have completely obliterated their sentiments. She just took the news as if she had been told that her son would not cone home for supper or something like it. While we talking to this woman I heard somebody behind me mention Breslau. So I turned around and saw three elderly women whom I asked right away if they came from Breslau. They definitely did. One was a Mrs. Margarete Lasch whose husband was president of the Jewish Congregation in the last few years. She said that she knows you and she was also familiar with my past history. The other one was a Mrs. Mimi Cohn and the third was the wife of Professor Semrau, the art historian. Mrs. Lasch could give me some information about other people from Breslau. I asked her about Mendelsson. Else M. died from cancer in Berlin a couple of years ago and Felix followed her shortly after. It seem that he just could not live without her and he died broken-hearted. I do not have the address of their children who may not know about this. I wonder if you could let them know. Dr. Alfred Cohn and wife are also dead. Mrs. Cohn went to the Gesellschaft der Freunde to get her ration card. However she went on the wrong day and, there she ran into Hampel (some Gestapo man, I suppose[5])  who exclaimed "Well we need a few more on this transport." He would not let her go home any more. All she could do was call her husband to bring her a few things. They were both taken to Auschwitz where they lost their lives. It seems that Dr. Cohn was already sick before, and they must have died on the transport. It is not easy to interview these people because the jump from one topic to the other. Do your remember a Fritz Goldschmidt? He also died in a camp. The director of the hospital is a Mr. Zwilsky, his wife's maiden name is Ruth Herzberg from Breslau. She used to work in the pharmacy of Dr. Schwenk. I promised those people to write to their relatives or friends in the States. Now I have a list of names to write to. The Joint has nobody in Berlin as yet, so I may have to function as a one man committee. But I do it gladly, even though it is very exciting. If I can only find a trace of grandfather!

All my love.

3 September 1945

Dear parents,

Yesterday I had again an opportunity to go out to the Jewish Hospital and I spent there a few hours talking to people. I found three Mr. Gnadenfeld from Breslau who had also come back from Theresienstadt. I spent an agonizing half hour with him. Of course, he recognized me right away though I had some trouble recognizing the human wreck which once has been the happy and friendly Mr. Gnadenfeld. He has had several bone fractures and is still suffering from a facial paresis. He is also half demented in consequence of his experiences. His wife died from starvation, and his daughter was sent to Poland.[6] His mind is still circling around these two events. He still expects his daughter to come back, and of course I let him believe it though I know that nobody will be coming back from there, especially not young people. He has nothing left, and I don't think he quite realizes his situation. Be asked me for a lot of thing, and I'll see what I can get him. I'll add a request for a package at the end of the letter which you should send me without delay. You cannot imagine the misery in this hospital. I went through wards in the hospital where the returnees are staying. Old women were lying on ragged straw mattresses, too weak to get up, emaciated to the bone, without the proper care they would require because there is not enough food or clothing or equipment for them. They need everything. They have less than the poorest man has ever had. The director of the hospital, Mr, Zwilsky[7], is a very nice and kind man who does about everything he possibly can, but he is not a magician. No representative of the Joint is here. Why not? Do the American Jews think that the removal of the Nazis from office is a magic event which assures the well-being of the few remaining European Jews? Do they how that, if they give half of their possessions for charity to these survivors, they have by far not done enough to deserve a peaceful complacent life as they are leading in the States? I wish I had the power of speech to give an adequate description of the conditions of these remnants of once harmless and happily living creatures. Their eyes stare blankly without comprehension of the present or the future, Once in a while they fill with tear in remembrance of the horrid fate of their husbands, brothers, wives, children. Everyone of them is alone, a leftover branch of a once green blooming tree. But what is the use of talking about all this. These Jews will die in time and they will take their memories with them, their frightened looks and their destroyed bodies, and the outside world will forget their martyrdom, because it is a natural process to forget the horrid, However, as long as they are living, something must be done to help them.

As I told you I have been writing a few letters to relatives of some of those people. Now yesterday an elderly man asked me to let his relatives know about him, but he did not have their addresses. Could you please pass the following information on to the "Aufbau": Mr. Max Rosner, formerly Berlin-Neukölln, now Jewish Hospital, wants to inform the following relatives that he has returned from Theresienstadt: Son Heinz Rosner, and Dr. Berthold Rosenbaum, formerly lawyer in Berlin. Don't give my address to the "Aufbau", but let them get in touch with you and then you can give my address to these relatives.[8] I an afraid that I would be swamped with mail beyond my capacity if the paper knew my address.[9] I could not find out much about Ernst and Edith.l1] It seems that they were sent to Poland, and I know what that means.

Please send me a package with plain food, nothing fancy, especially some meat and cheese and sugar.

All my love,

yours

Heinz

Notes:

1. See discussion of his grandfather (which includes Ernst and Edith, mentioned in second letter). Not sure what other relatives Dad would have had on his mind, but I have found that he had a second cousin Clare Katzenstein who, along with her husband and infant daughter Recha, lived in Berlin and were killed in Auschwitz.

2. For a book about the survival of the hospital: Refuge in Hell: How Berlin's Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis, by Daniel B. Silver.

3. Presumably Deggendorf, one of the displaced persons camps.

4. Dad's quotation is slightly off:  Heine wrote in the poem (written shortly after the death of his uncle, Salomon Heine, who founded the Jewish Hospital of Hamburg and who also helped Heinrich Heine financially)  "Behaftet mit den bösen drei Gebresten,/ Mit Armut, Körperschmerz und Judentume!} [In English translation of "11. THE NEW JEWISH HOSPITAL AT HAMBURG," the hospital was for those "Afflicted by the three most dire misfortunes/Of poverty, disease, and Judaism."] For a story of the hospital during the Nazi error in German, click here.

5. Presumably Walter Hampel. According to a book on the deportation of Jews from Brelsau, on the Yad Vashem site, in 1966,  "[t]he Gestapo and Nazi officials on trial included Hans-Joachim Gerke, Hermann Fey, and Walter Hampel, who were in charge of the deportations. Despite survivor eyewitness accounts of the events, the prosecution failed to procure convictions."

6. Presumably, Rosa Gnadenfeld (born January 28, 1880, and transported to Theresienstadt on August 31, 1942) and Elly Gnadenfeld (born May  17, 1910, also transported August 31, 1942, and then to Auschwitz on January 29, 1943). [The person Dad met was Georg Gnadenfeld.]

7. Erich Zwilsky, who had been a pharmacist at the Hospital, which enabled him and his wife and son to survive the war in Berlin as full Jews (more here, including photograph of Hospital).

8. The Aufbau was the leading newspaper for German-speaking Jews in the United States and around the world. See Leo Baeck Institute. 

9. Dad may have been right, but there had been some publicity in the States about the Jewish Hospital. On July 14, the New York Times ran a long story (parts of which were picked up by other papers), which included an appeal by Erich Zwilsky for aid. In addition, another story ran on August 25 (when Dad was there), talking about how the hospital ,"an informal center of the Jewish community[,] is in particular straits." Among other things, it appears that since Berlin fell, the district in which the hospital resides moved from being part of Soviet zone (during which Russian-Jewish officers were helping with food, etc.) to the British zone and, at the time, to the French zone.