Kurt and Betty Colsen with Peter and Keri in South Africa – 1947.
“How nice, that we got in contact in such a funny way. It’s a small world. I knew you since a long time from that nice picture of Kurt’s family.” – Mechtild Wolff
“Here are some more pictures for you...one shows you as a baby with your parents...simply wonderful. Keri, I wonder, who inspired me to meet you in NZ, it is so amazing.” – Hans König.
I have sat on this story for a long time.
It was the 1930s. Berlin. Persecution of the Jews had begun.
My father, Kurt Cohen, was a young Jewish doctor, forbidden by the Nazis to treat Aryan Germans.
The story goes that Kurt, his brother Otto, sister Anni and two others sat down at a restaurant, with a map in front of them and weighed up their options.
They had discussed leaving Germany on what they thought would be more of an adventure than actually emigrating. They were very aware of the hatred towards the Jews that Hitler and his acolytes were stirring up, but they never took it seriously as they all thought he wouldn’t last long.
I have been thinking of my Dad a lot lately in our present pass-please, two-tiered New Zealand society. If you’re unvaccinated you can’t go here or there. You can’t enter the library. Your child may not play club soccer. You will lose your job. If you protest, you are a danger to society. You are filth. We will turn the sprinklers on you, we will do whatever it takes to get rid of you. We have our orders, our battons, our riot gear, pepper spray and soft bullets. Move. Move. Move.
You may say I am stretching it to draw parallels but I have been thinking about propaganda and how it works and of how the Jews in Germany felt as things grew progressively worse for them in the early 1930s, long before they were crowded into cattle carriages.
Which brings me to my amazing story of co-incidence and connection across hemispheres.
I never knew much about Dad’s history other than that he had been raised in a small country town in Germany called Warendorf.
I treasure an old sepia class photograph of him in his final year at school. I always looked at that picture and wondered how many of those boys had gone on to serve in the German forces, in the Gestapo or perhaps like my father they were Jews. Perhaps some of those boys died in the concentration camps. Or perhaps they had grown into good, brave young German men, who had done their best to stop Hitler and his madness.
Decades later, as I hosted Airbnb travellers from Germany at my home in Kerikeri, I always asked visitors if they knew Warendorf.
My grandmother’s family owned a department store. I wondered if it was still there.
Most times they looked at me blankly and said no they didn’t know.
Until traveller Hans König came to stay in 2019.
I asked him the same question.
“Yes, I know Warendorf. I live 20 kms away from Warendorf”, he said.
Those words still ring in my ears.
When you go home, I asked him, please ask around and see if anyone remembers the Elsberg/Cohen family, what happened to them all and what happened to the department store they once owned.
Hans had plans to be away from Germany for some time.
I didn’t hear.
Then an email arrived. I trembled as I read it.
He had found an historian Dr Ekkehard Gühne who, in 2010, had given a lecture on the Elsberg family of Warendorf.
Further, his enquiries led him to Mechtild Wolff, the president of the home club (Heimatverein) in Warendorf.
The lecture by Ekkehard Gühne, to which the Heimatverein had invited its members and all interested Warendorf citizens, was entitled "The Elsbergs, the fate of a Warendorf Jewish family against the background of the Shoah".
On top of that, it turned out that Mechtild knew the Elsberg/Cohen family personally. She had stories to tell and photographs of my family.
“My family had close contact with the Cohen family, because they lived in the same neighborhood in Warendorf. The children played together ‘on the road’ and went to the same schools. My mother-in-law, Änny Kreimer, was a classmate and good friend of Anni Cohen. They helped the Cohens to transport the furniture and personal belongings to the ship when they left Germany in 1936.
“Later, Anni visited Warendorf nearly every year and stayed with her friend Änny Wolff. So I got to know her very well and adored her. She was such an elegant lady, like her mother Helene Cohen. My husband and I visited Anni twice, 1994 for the last time with our son Marcus and enjoyed our stay there so much.”
Mechtild sent a photograph of my mother, father, my brother and me as young children sent to Germany from South Africa in1947.
They had kept in touch.
Mechtild supplied names for the young men in my Dad’s graduation photograph. I notice a Theo Enders. I remember that name too from my childhood. He and his wife came to stay with us.
Dad’s father, Siegmund Cohen, had come to Warendorf from Kiev and married local girl Helene Elsberg. They moved to Russia and returned to Warendorf in 1914 with their three children, Otto, Kurt and Anni.
It was Helene’s brother, Eduard Elsberg, who had built the first department store in Warendorf in 1928.
“Many small half-timbered houses were demolished to build this large department store in the style of Berlin department stores. This marked the beginning of a new era for the Warendorf merchants. All the women now wanted to go shopping in the Elsberg department store, because they clearly had the trendiest fashion there. My grandmother Eugenie Göcke also liked to shop at the Elsberg department store, such as her first pair of gray stockings in the early 1920s. This was the latest fashion, because until now the women here only wore black or brown stockings. At Elsberg, the daughters were allowed to choose their dowry early on, because mother Eugenie had the feeling that there would be a shortage. How right she was. In addition, the service at Elsberg was always courteous, since the right hand of the bachelor Eduard Elsberg was his amiable sister Helene Cohen. The Cohens were well acquainted with my grandparents as they lived in the Munsterwall neighborhood.
“Eduard Elsberg was a very social citizen. Not only did he do a lot of good in his Jewish community, he also helped where he could with the Catholic citizens. For example, every year he donated communion clothes for needy communion children, which he had Mrs. Elisabeth Schwerbrock, who also ran a textile store in Warendorf, distribute.
“The Elsberg department store had been exposed to anti-Semitic hate speech since 1930. Not infrequently, his advertisements were smeared and provided with anti-Jewish slogans. Eduard Elsberg was subject to an unspoken boycott. His customers faced reprisals if they bought from him. My grandfather, Eduard Göcke, no longer dared to go into a Jew's shop, because he was a teacher in Warendorf and was already on the party's black list because he didn't want to join the NSDAP (the Nazi party). But you knew how to help yourself: His wife chose his clothes at Elsberg and a salesman brought the selection home and teacher Göcke looked for the right thing. So he could continue to enjoy the good goods from Elsberg and at the same time you could support the merchant Elsberg. However, the controls became ever stricter, so that in 1937 the decline in business became so serious that Eduard Elsberg had to lease his business to Potthoff & Scholl from Duisburg-Hamborn. He didn't want to sell! On January 7, 1937, the Potthoff and Scholl department store opened.
“Eduard Elsberg moved to Berlin and from there was taken to a concentration camp, where he was murdered by Nazi henchmen.”
Getting back to my father and his siblings: Anni and Kurt left Germany in 1936. They packed up their lives and left on a ship to South Africa, to start new lives there. Their mother, Helene, ‘Mutti’, joined them later. Sadly my grandfather, Siegmund, had died of a heart attack prior to their departure.
Anni's husband, Gustav Kloekner was not Jewish but the Nazi's were after him too because he was outspoken about his opposition to the Nazi regime and refused to give the sieg heil salute. He finally escaped Germany and followed Anni to South Africa. They had three children – Ronald, Helen and Michael.
Otto and his wife Miriam settled in Israel where they were among the founders of Givat Brenner Kibbutz, They had three children – Yehudit, Michael, and Lilith.
Kurt re-qualified as a doctor in South Africa.
When he left Germany, he was engaged to a non-Jewish woman, Kitty, who followed him to South Africa. He knew that if she returned to Germany to visit her family, bearing the strongly Jewish name 'Cohen', the whole family would be at risk of persecution by the Nazi regime. For this reason he changed his last name to Colsen.
His marriage to Kitty didn't last and he remarried my mother, Betty (Pocock) in South Africa. They had my brother, Peter, and me.
Ekkehard Gühne’s 2010 lecture offered general insights into the Jewish population in Warendorf, but focused in particular on the lawyer Dr Karl Elsberg, my grandmother’s brother.
According to Gühne, this branch of the Elsberg family went back to the businessman Leeser Elsberg. His tombstone can still be found today in the Jewish cemetery in Warendorf.
Leeser came to Warendorf in 1873. A manufacturing trade was opened, laying the foundation for what later became the Elsberg department store.
Son Eduard later took over the department store. He remained single.
"He was a lovable person who was socially oriented," Gühne told his audience.
In 1942, however, Eduard was deported and murdered, as were some of his siblings.
His brother Karl Ellsberg survived the Holocaust. In 1930 he received his doctorate in law from Erlangen. His doctoral thesis was printed in Warendorf by Schnell-Verlag. However, it soon became practically impossible for him to work as a lawyer, so he left Germany in 1939, in anticipation of the war.
The Centre for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin records Karl Elsberg’s description of his experiences with the Nazi system. For example, Ellsberg wrote:
"The fact is that the German people did not prevent the Nazi policy in principle and in detail and did not make the policy of robbery and murder impossible."
History records that Karl Elsberg and his wife Anneliese went to Cologne on August 26, 1939 to flee across the Belgian border. A short time later, they managed to escape with 20 other people crammed into a truck. Arriving in Brussels, Karl Elsberg applied for a visa for the USA in vain.
When the attack against France took place in May 1940, the Elsbergs were captured and taken to the South of France. Luckily, the family ended up in a camp near the Spanish border. This part of France had not yet been occupied by the Germans. Later the family escaped to the Aosta Valley in Italy, where they were protected by Italian partisans. They stayed there, with mountain farmers, until the end of the war. In 1946 the family emigrated to the USA, where Karl Elsberg died in 2001.
Following the piecing together of this jigsaw, spanning Germany, New Zealand, Israel and South Africa, my cousin Helen (Anni and Gustav’s daughter) took her daughter and niece to Germany to meet Hans and Mechtild.
My brother Peter, his wife Clare and I were set to follow in 2020 to visit Hans and the old department store, and to thank Mechtild and those close to her for helping our family get out of Nazi Germany - and thus save our lives.
The COVID-19 pandemic put those plans on hold.
I am so grateful for life.
The Elsberg department store in 1930. The impressive department store still exists today. It is a listed building and one of the most unusual commercial buildings in Warendorf.
My Dad’s class in their final year at the Gymnasium Laurentianum where they sat their final examinations before university. The year was 1926. Kurt, front, far left, was 20 years old.
Lest we forget:
The following shows how the Nazis treatment of the Jewish people developed during the 1930s.
1933
• Jewish people were removed from public office and professions – civil servants, lawyers and teachers were sacked.
• School lessons were to reflect the view that Jewish people were ‘Untermensch’.
• On 1 April 1933, a boycott of Jewish shops and other businesses took place.
• SA (a paramilitary organization associated with the Nazi Party) actively encouraged Germans to avoid entering Jewish places of work.
• Many Jewish shops were vandalised.
1935
• The Nuremberg Laws were introduced at the Nuremberg Rally on 15 September and removed many Jewish rights.
• Jewish people were denied the right to be German citizens.
• Marriage and relationships between Jewish people and Germans became illegal.
1938
• Jewish people were banned from becoming doctors.
• Jewish people had to carry identity cards which showed a ‘J’ stamp.
• Jewish children were denied education and banned from schools.
• Jewish men had to add ‘Israel to their name, women had to add ‘Sarah’.
1938
• On the night of the 9 November 1938 Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were attacked throughout Germany and Austria.
• Around 7,500 Jewish shops were damaged or destroyed. 400 synagogues were burned to the ground.
• Almost 100 Jewish people were killed and 30,000 were sent to concentration camps.
1939
• Jewish people were banned from owning businesses.
• The first ghettos (segregated housing within towns, with a controlled entrance and exit) were opened in Eastern Europe to separate Jewish people from ‘ordinary’ citizens.
Star of David Emblem
On 23 November, 1939, Jewish people were ordered to wear the Star of David emblem on their clothes. This helped identify them more easily.
The Nazis persecution of the Jewish people meant that many other Germans lived in fear of the Nazis turning on them.
This severely reduced the number of people who were willing to openly oppose the Nazis.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zn8sgk7/revision/5