Erna Bagainski (F / Germany, 1934), Holocaust survivor

Erna Bagainski (F / Germany, 1934), Holocaust survivor

Joachim Bagainski (M / Germany, 1937), Holocaust survivor

• KEYWORDS : <Germany> <Theresienstadt> <05Feb45 Train> <Switzerland>

Biography

Erna Bagainski (20 Aug 1934) and Joachim Bagainski (7 Jan 1937) were born in Berlin, Germany, to Hermann and Margarete Bagainski. Hermann had three children from a previous marriage with Helene Ruschin: Margot (1919), Julius (1921), and Arno (1924). Hermann and Helene married in 1932, two years after the death of Helene in 1930.

Hermann was arrested on May 27, 1942 and shot the day after at Sachsenhausen with other 250 hostages in retaliation for an attack carried by a resistance group against the nazi propaganda exhibition "The Soviet Paradise". The relatives of those who had been shot (including Arno, and Erna, Joachim and their mother) were deported on June 5, 1942 to Theresienstadt on a special transport. In February 1945, Margarete, Erna and Joachim were released in a transport to Switzerland. Julius and Arno perished in the Holocaust, while Margot Sophie had been able to emigrate to Palestine with her husband.

Stolpersteine - In memory of Hermann Bagainski

Hermann Hirsch Bagainski was born on May 8, 1888 in the city of Gniezno, northeast of Poznań (today's Polish Gniezno). He was the son of railway worker Julius Bagainski and Minne Bagainski. Little information has been obtained about Hermann Bagainski's childhood and youth. In all probability, however, his parents belonged to the town's Jewish community, which at the time of Hermann's birth consisted of a little over 1,400 people. Hermann attended elementary school in Gnesen and then completed a commercial apprenticeship. Presumably he was used as a soldier during the First World War, even if no evidence of this has been preserved. In 1918 - Hermann was now 30 years old - his first marriage was Helene Ruschin, who was three years older than him. She was the daughter of the Schokken (now Skoki) resident businessman Leiser Ruschin and his wife Dorothea Ruschin, née Pinkus. After the wedding, the couple moved to Berlin, where Hermann Bagainski opened an office as a legal and tax advisor in 1922. Legal advice was less regulated under the law of the time and was also open to commercial professions. It was not until 1935 that the practice of the profession was restricted with the “Law for the Prevention of Abuses in the Field of Legal Advice” (later the RBerG) with the aim of preventing Jewish lawyers, who had been excluded from the legal profession since 1933, from resorting to non-lawyer advice.

Since 1919 the couple Hermann and Helene Bagainski lived in Berlin in an apartment at Elsasser Straße 85 (today's Torstraße) near Rosenthaler Platz in Prenzlauer Berg. Their daughter Margot was born in November 1919. Their sons Julius and Arno followed in 1921 and 1924. One year after the birth of the youngest son, the family moved to Elisabethstraße 12 near Alexanderplatz and in 1927 to a larger apartment at Lietzmannstraße 6 (roughly at the height of today's Berolinastraße). Hardly any sources have survived that could give an insight into the family life of the Bagainskis in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. It is known that the family had to deal with two strokes of fate at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s: In 1929, Hermann Bagainski lost his left leg up to his left leg as a result of an accident that he suffered during his apprenticeship Amputated thigh. He had to give up his legal advice office in Berlin and could no longer support his family through his own professional activity. In the early 1930s he was a welfare recipient. Hermann's wife Helene also died on July 5, 1930. Two years later, in April 1932, he married Margarete Schach, who came from Leesen (now Leźno) and worked as a housekeeper in Berlin. The children Erna and Joachim Bagainski, born in 1934 and 1937, emerged from the second marriage.

With the gradual disenfranchisement and persecution of Jews since 1933 - or all persons who were considered Jews under the Nuremberg Laws in the Nazi state - coercive measures began against the Bagainski family. This included numerous measures of discrimination and social exclusion, the deprivation of civil rights and displacement from professional and economic life. Hermann Bagainski had since recovered from the effects of his operation, but was no longer given any work opportunities. In the next few years he was employed on a voluntary basis in the Jewish asylum for the deaf and dumb in Berlin-Weißensee and received a small allowance for this. In 1935 the family moved into an apartment at Greifswalder Str. 202. Hermann's sons from his first marriage had previously attended the municipal elementary school in Georgenkirchstrasse. Under the pressure of racial policy, which envisaged “as complete racial segregation as possible” in schools in the educational system with a decree of 1935, they had to leave elementary school. From the mid-1930s onwards, they attended the Jewish school on Rykestrasse for a short time. The career aspirations of the sons as car mechanics and electricians came to nothing, as they could not find an apprenticeship position in National Socialist Germany despite the great efforts of the family. Julius had to contribute to the family's income as a worker at the central cattle farm in Lichtenberg. Arno began an apprenticeship as a cook at the central kitchen of the Jewish community at Gormannstrasse 3, but gave it up in autumn 1941. He had been threatened several times on the way to work after being seen with the "Star of David" on his clothes. Margot Sophie, now married Timendorfer, was the only family member who managed to leave the country. She emigrated to Palestine with her husband in 1939. From October 1941 both the 53-year-old Hermann Bagainski and his wife and two sons Julius and Arno had to do forced labor for companies based in Berlin. Only Julius knows which company it was, namely the "Leather goods factory Gebr. Schlägel" in Lichtenberger Röderstraße 25 (today's Karl-Lade-Straße). Julius had been living as a subtenant of Clara Beer at Uhlandstrasse 47 since February 1941.

The disenfranchisement was followed by deportation: Julius Bagainski was deported to the Litzmannstadt ghetto (Łódź) in October 1941, and his father was arrested in Berlin in May 1942. Margarete Bagainski later reported about the imprisonment: “On May 27, 1942 at around 8 o'clock in the evening, some police officers appeared in our apartment at Greifswalder Strasse 202, who said they had to pick up my husband. When I asked her why only my husband and not the whole family was being picked up, the answer I received was that I could not be given any information, I could get it at the Levetzowstrasse assembly camp. The cause of this arrest became clear to me when I heard soon after that on the same evening 500 men, all Jews, in all districts of Berlin were taken from their apartments. The action was named 'Lustgarten'. There a fire broke out in a wooden house that was built and displayed as part of the so-called Soviet exhibition. Five Jews were accused of starting this fire. In retaliation, 500 Jews, including my husband, have now been arrested. "

After an actually trivial dispute about an overnight visit, Hermann Bagainski was reported by the house's block warden, Mr. Riedel, for the deportation, which the National Socialists took as an arbitrary retaliatory measure after the attack on the Nazi propaganda exhibition "The Soviet Paradise" by the resistance group around Herbert Baum carried out. After his arrest, Hermann Bagainski was deported to Sachsenhausen on the evening of May 27, 1942, and murdered there with 250 other hostages on the morning of May 28, 1942 in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

His wife Margarete Bagainski received the deportation notice on June 3, 1942 and was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto on June 5, 1942 with Arno, Erna and Joachim Bagainski on a special transport intended exclusively for relatives of those who had been shot. Margarete Bagainski reported later: “The next morning, all transport participants had to assemble in the barracks courtyard. There the SS commandant [Seidel] read out a list containing the names of our men [...]. On this list, the commandant announced that the named persons had been shot on the orders of Reichsführer Himmler for participating in underground movements ”. Of the family members of Hermann Bagainski, his wife Margarete survived the Nazi persecution with their children Erna and Joachim. They were liberated in Theresienstadt in May 1945. Hermann's daughter Margot Sophie, married Timendorfer (later she called herself Mirjam Timnah) survived with her husband in exile in Palestine. Hermann's son Julius Bagainski was deported from the Litzmannstadt ghetto to the Kulmhof extermination camp (Chełmno) in May 1942, where he was murdered. The fate of Arno Bagainski has not been clarified beyond doubt. At the beginning of 1943 he registered for a work detachment in Theresienstadt and was presumably transferred to the so-called external detachment Zossen (later “Wulkow”). The members of some work details had been promised that their relatives who remained in the ghetto would not be deported any further during the work assignment. With the members of the Wulkow external command, who were deployed to build barracks, the SS adhered to it differently than with other commandos. In 1944 Arno was transferred to Berlin for possession of cigarettes, where he was held in the collective camp in the former pathology of the Jewish hospital on Schulstrasse in Berlin's Wedding district. At the end of September 1944 he wrote a letter from here to his stepmother in Theresienstadt, who, according to the family, received it. It was Arno Bagainski's last known sign of life