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Who was Erna Baruch

Who was Erna Baruch, Formerly Twelkemeyer?

Erna Baruch was not from Berlin. As Erna Herrmann, she had been born on 10.06.1906 in Nordhausen am Harz,Thuringia. Her parents, Theodor Herrmann and Else Herrmann, née Braumann, belonged to the Jewish community of the area; her father came from Göttingen. Presumably in the late 1920s Erna married her first husband, Hermann Twelkemeyer (born 1896), in Nordhausen. He was a Christian whose family came from Gütersloh in Westphalia. The young couple lived at Schackenhof 2 in the Harz town of Nordhausen, not far from the railway station.  The property was Jewish owned. It belonged to the Heilbrunn brothers. Erna’s parents probably also lived nearby. Hermann Twelkemeyer was a grocer who traded in bulk with meat, tropical fruits and other goods.

The young married couple, the Twelkemeyers, were doing well after their marriage. In autumn 1929 they took out a joint life insurance policy, which would later play an inglorious role. A long and happy life was planned: it was not until 1959 that the life insurance was to be paid out.

At first, however, the two were happy – especially when their daughter Edith was born to them on 31.03.1931. In family photos with the Jewish grandmother, Else Herrmann, the parents and their daughter smile happily into the camera. Edith later fondly remembered her nice Christian and Jewish relatives – but her Jewish ancestry did not play a particularly big role in her daily life. She experienced, “the best of both traditions,” as she later said: the Christian Christmas parties at her father’s parents’ home in Gütersloh; the Jewish Chanukah parties in Berlin at her great-aunt Lola’s in 124 Kantstrasse. Great-aunt Flora Lola Lauter nee Braumann was married to Louis Lauter, a Jewish businessman.

“These were lovely Jewish people that came and I loved them but being Jewish was never something that was discussed – you know, you are a Jewish child and you must do this and you must do that. At Christmas time I went one year to my father’s relatives in Gütersloh and the next year I would go to Berlin to be with my Jewish Omi’s sister and family. So it was the best of both worlds but a child accepts these things very much more and it’s only now when I think back that I think how could I not have guessed that things were not the way they should have been.”[1]

But only two years after the birth of Edith the signs indicated a storm was coming – even in Nordhausen. The Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933, marked the beginning. Nordhäuser SA and SS boasted that–

“At 10:00 a.m. all Jewish shops and businesses, as well as the offices of Jewish lawyers and doctors, were closed”.

“After the closure, red posters were displayed at the entrances with the following inscription: ‘Closed until the world Jews have stopped fighting against the awakened Germany. SA and SS Nordhausen.“[2]

After the introduction of the Nuremberg Race Laws in 1935, anti-Semitic agitation intensified. The local Nazi newspaper “Allgemeine Zeitung” writes on 5 August 1935 about a council meeting in Nordhausen, and notes how Lord Mayor Dr. Meister now intends to tackle “the Jewish question” in the city on the Harz: One begins with renaming the Jüdenstrasse (Jewish-Street), in “Am Ratskeller”. The Council applauds. There is also applause about the reasoning:

“By renaming Jüdenstrasse in Nordhausen, we want to make it known that it is above all important to us to bring about a time in Nordhausen in which no Jew is left in Nordhausen.”

Arrests of individual Jews “for rampant rents” or “racial desecration” followed, and brutal mistreatment took place in the streets. In the so-called “Poland Action” – the forced expulsion of Jews from the German Reich – at the end of October 1938, about 40 Jews from Nordhausen were deported to the no man’s land between the Polish and German borders.[3]

Daughter Edith and her cousin Kurt Herrmann had traumatic memories of 9 November 1938. The synagogue was burned down. In the city, Jews were arrested in their houses then driven through the streets as a demonstration of power; alongside the destruction of shops and the unhindered burning of the synagogue. Finally, they were held under guard for the night at Am Siechenhof. The women and children were released home the next morning, but many of the Jewish men were deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp.

According to Edith Twelkemeyer, her father, Christian Hermann Twelkemeyer, was also arrested during the November terror and released 2-3 days later. She did not say where he was taken.

“They took my father away. But my father, being non-Jewish, he, of course, was able to come back two or three days later and, you know, we were relieved at that.” [4]

”I can remember walking through town with the maid the day after,” recalls Edith Forrester, then a happy six-year-old in the east German town of Nordhausen. ” We saw the glass covering the street and the devastation in our friends’ homes, but I never really connected it to me – it was only when the SS dragged my grandmother from her sickbed that I knew fear. Night after night we’d lain awake, listening to the SS marching beneath the window, and then one day, inevitably, it was our turn. I can still hear them coming up the stairs and remember the confusion as they ransacked the house, hauled people out of bed, and took my papa away. They took all the men in the building, but only my father came back.” [5]

Her Jewish cousin, Kurt, had to endure much longer in the Buchenwald concentration camp. The Jews from Nordhausen and from all over Thuringia were driven together and suffered cruel and humiliating violence there for days on end, resulting in suicides, torture and murders in the camp. Finally Kurt succeeded in being released from the camp because of a lucky coincidence and some ingenuity.  Kurt had been in Buchenwald for about two weeks in November 1938. However, in the suit he wore when he was arrested, he found an old receipt. It was a receipt from his travel agency stating that he had booked passage on the „Orinoco“ steam-ship to Havanna, Cuba in the winter of 1938. Unfortunately it was only the receipt, not the ticket itself. He had sold the actual ticket a few days before he was sent to Buchenwald, because changes to the Cuban visa requirements meant that his plan to escape to Havanna would fail. Nevertheless, he took the receipt and told the Buchenwald SS-men that he would be leaving Germany for Cuba in a couple of days. Based on that, the SS-men let him go. A short time later he was able to flee illegally via Belgium to the USA.

The daughter of Erna and Hermann, Edith Twelkemeyer, was sent from Germany to England via the Hook of Holland as a child transportee in March 1939. Together with other children, including Bob Mackenzie, she landed in Harwich on 16 March 1939. Before leaving Nordhausen, her father accompanied her to the train station; her mother remained at her side on the journey via Hanover to Hamburg. There Erna helped her unsuspecting daughter Edith up the high steps into the train to Holland. They saw each other one last time as other children lifted the 7-year-old girl up so that she could look out of the window of the departing train.

Edith’s moving story about her very kind host parents, Mr and Mrs Forrester, in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, can only be briefly mentioned here (it is described in detail in a radio show).

Immediately after their daughter Edith was safe, Erna Twelkemeyer left her husband in Nordhausen and went to Berlin. Her daughter Edith was convinced that the separation and later divorce was a decision of her mother Erna. At first, she believed, Hermann Twelkemeyer would have not wanted to do this. Mother Erna would have told her husband that the separation was necessary for his safety.

Erna never saw him again after her departure. She herself had hoped to come to her daughter in Great Britain as a domestic servant, because for a time this was the only possible way for adult Jewish women from Germany to be accepted in the UK. But this plan failed.

“My father had to divorce her. He didn’t want to divorce her but she said, “It will be better for your safety and I will go”. So she agreed to that and she didn’t see him again. But it has been emphasised again and again by both sides of the family that my father wanted to stay with my mother and she would not allow it, so her child was going to be safe. And I think she had hoped she would get to Britain as a domestic because that was the only way they could get there, to be in service, but she never made it.“[6]