The Rosenbaum Family

In the summer of 1938, the Nazis arrested the professional painter Ludwig Rosenbaum (1881-1964). He only was released when his wife Jenny (1890-1944), née Jacobowitz, obtained a visa to Shanghai for him in 1940. He had to leave Germany immediately.

The Nazis deported his disabled son Hans (b. 1920) from a residential home to the Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre and killed him on September 27th, 1940, as part of the Euthanasia Program “Operation T4”.

Jenny Rosenbaum and her daughter Henny (b. 1925) already had visas for Shanghai when they were deported to Riga. When the mother was knocked over during a roll call, she suffered a femoral neck fracture and was brought to the military hospital of the concentration camp Kaiserwald. From there, she was taken to the forest of Biķernieki and murdered.

Henny Rosenbaum’s nine-day death march ended with her liberation in Wałcz, Poland, on January 29th, 1945. Still in Poland, she married Avram Markiewicz (d. 1976), and the couple moved to Hannover.

“We don’t want to stay here. Although everybody is now friendly to our faces, the anti-Semitism cannot be eradicated.” (Henny Markiewicz-Rosenbaum’s letter from Hannover to her relatives, 1945).

Avram Markiewicz bought a commercial building on Herschelstraße in the city centre, but the couple emigrated to the USA at the end of 1949. Ludwig Rosenbaum lived with them on their farm until his death.

Picture credits

Private Collection, Henny Simon