Markus Schattner

Markus Schattner and Family

Markus Schattner was born on March 16, 1901 in Solotvin (Solotwina), an eastern Galician shtetl where Jews had resided as early as 1717, reaching a peak of fifty percent of the town’s population of nearly four thousand people, one year before his birth.

It’s not known if Markus left Solotvin with his family as a child, or as an adult, but he eventually came to reside in Berlin, Germany where he earned a living as a merchant. It was there that he resided with his wife, Margarete, his one year old daughter, Regina, and his two year old son, Siegfried, when on September 13, 1939 he was arrested and taken to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp not far from Berlin. He was held captive there for a year until September 3, 1940 when he was transferred to the Dachau concentration camp. He remained a prisoner there for nearly one and half years until February 26, 1942 when he was transferred to the Hartheim Euthanasia Center. Markus was murdered there shortly after his arrival, if not the same day.

A short time after Markus’ death, Margarete, who had been struggling to support and care for her two children under the most difficult and extreme conditions, received a letter informing her that her husband’s ashes were available for purchase, for the price of three Reichsmarks! Although appalled by this information, and still grieving the loss of her husband, she consented to pay the price demanded.

After receiving the ashes, with no way to confirm that they were truly those of her husband, Margarete buried them in the Weissensee Jewish Cemetery in Berlin, in the grave of her father whose body was interred there less than one year earlier.

It was later that year, on December 9, 1942, that Margarete, age thirty-one, and her two children, Regina, age four and Siegfried, age five, were arrested and transported to Auschwitz, where they were murdered upon arrival.

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In June 2017, after learning the fate of his distant cousin Markus, Santa Rosa resident Howard Shattner, and his dear German friend Renate Kratschmer, who had uncovered the story, arranged to have a gravestone placed on Markus’ grave.

On October 2, 2017 Howard, Renate, Rabbi Walter Rothschild, and several other friends, dedicated the gravestone with prayers and words of remembrance in a somber ceremony, during a break from the pouring, Berlin rain, the appropriate weather to mark this sad occasion.

--Written by Howard Shattner.