From Hanover to Warsaw - Jews deported to the ghetto

On April 1, 1942, a train with 891 Jews left the Fischerhof train station in Hanover. His goal, the Warsaw Ghetto, set up by the German occupiers of the city in 1940, means death for many.

by Dirk Hempel

In a first deportation, the Nazi authorities had already deported exactly 1,001 people, most of whom came from Hanover, to the Riga ghetto from the Fischerhof train station on December 15, 1941. At the end of March 1942, the police forcibly rounded up other remaining Jews from Hanover, Hildesheim, Göttingen, Nienburg, Bad Pyrmont and other towns in the area and brought them to Ahlem in north-west Hanover.

Israelite Horticultural School serves as collection point

Even in the early years of Nazi rule, the local Jewish Horticultural School, which dates back to 1893, trained young Jewish men and women here - before they hoped to emigrate to Palestine. Now the police are crowding hundreds of men, women and children on the site. They have to endure for days. They carry clothes with them in suitcases and bundles. The authorities have allowed travel provisions for six days. Valuables such as jewellery, savings books and money were probably taken from them immediately.

Waiting for hours for your own deportation

On the evening of March 31, they are taken to the Fischerhof train station, which is a little away from the residential buildings in Hannover-Linden. Behind the two-story half-timbered building rise the chimneys and halls of the Hanomag machine factory, which builds tanks and cannons for the Wehrmacht.

The special train "Da 6" of the Deutsche Reichsbahn from Gelsenkirchen with 400 Jews and a wagon for the police escort team has been announced for 6:15 p.m. But his arrival is delayed. The 491 people stood on the platform in Hanover for five hours in the cold and rain. Then they are crammed into the overcrowded cars by police officers. The train does not continue to Braunschweig until the next morning, where another 109 people have to board. According to police instructions, they have eleven minutes to do this.

Many make money from the deportation of the Jews

Various authorities are involved in the deportations throughout Germany. In Hanover, the tax office at Waterlooplatz confiscates the assets of the deportees. The people from the district of Linden can buy the household effects they left behind cheaply at public auctions. The Reichsbahn also made money from the deportation trains. The Jews mostly have to pay the travel expenses themselves - despite their stolen assets:Adults pay 4 pfennigs per kilometer driven, children half. The NS regime enriches itself with a total of hundreds of millions of Reichsmarks.

Arrival in the ghetto:"Old people, many women, small children"

The destination of the deportees from Westphalia, Hanover and Brunswick:the Warsaw ghetto. Adam Czerniaków, the chairman of the Jewish Council there, who had to organize life in the ghetto on the orders of the German occupiers, only found out during the course of April 1 that around 1,000 people would arrive during the night and have to be accommodated. In his diary he records the following day:"At 10 a.m. I witnessed the distribution of food. The deportees only brought small pieces of luggage with them. Those over 68 years old were allowed to stay in Germany. Old people, many women, small children ."

The names of those abducted are known

Their names have been handed down, and today they are remembered in documentation, at commemorative events and on stumbling blocks. For example Max Blaulicht, who lived in Langenhagen in the "Feierabend" old people's and nursing home before he was deported. To 14-year-old Dora-Hella Moses from Pattensen. To Hermann Hammerschlag and his wife Bianka, who once ran a clothing store in Hamelin. Her daughter Helene Dina is only five years old when she arrives in the ghetto.

The Warsaw ghetto is horrible

In the Warsaw ghetto they find horrible conditions. About 400,000 people are locked up here on three square kilometers, sometimes even more. They are surrounded by a wall 3 meters high, 18 kilometers long and reinforced with barbed wire, and are closely monitored by the police.

The newcomers are distributed among the overcrowded living quarters, in which people live with seven to eight people in one room. Many are allowed to work, even outside the ghetto. Above all, factories that produce for the Wehrmacht benefit from the cheap forced labourers. But the German authorities took their deaths into account. They brutally terrorize the inmates. The food is scarce. The official monthly ration is only enough for a few days. There is no meat, no fat, hardly any vegetables. Because of the narrow streets and houses, typhus, typhus and tuberculosis are spreading.

The dead are lying in the street

At night you can hear the moans of the dying. The later literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, who survived the ghetto together with his wife, reports in his autobiography:

On the side of the road, especially in the morning hours, lay the corpses of those who had died of exhaustion or starvation, only scantily covered with old newspapers, and for whose burial no one wanted to bear the costs.Marcel Reich-Ranicki, "Mein Leben", 1999

80,000 people die of malnutrition and disease, freeze to death in unheated apartments in winter, and are murdered by the occupying forces.

The Warsaw ghetto will also become a place of self-help

The incarcerated set up welfare committees, set up soup kitchens, hospitals and homes for the elderly, and organize clothing collections. There are school lessons for children. Artists give concerts, appear at readings and theater performances to distract people and give them courage to face life. The historian Emanuel Ringelblum founds an underground archive that already collects records and reports. Today there are numerous books documenting life and death in the ghetto. For example, the diary of doctor Janusz Korczak, who was murdered with the children in his orphanage, or the memoirs of pianist Władysław Szpilman, who survived in hiding.

"Relocation" to Treblinka - resistance germinates in the ghetto

In July 1942, on the orders of SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, the "relocation" of the residents to the Treblinka extermination camp in north-eastern Poland began. By September the SS had killed around 280,000 Jews from Warsaw there alone. 60,000 people remain in the ghetto. Many are determined to resist. They found a fighting organization and, with the help of the Polish underground army, procured weapons, mainly pistols and explosives. In January 1943, they attacked German guards for the first time while they were rounding up Jews for transport to Treblinka.

Warsaw uprising and end of the ghetto

When the ghetto was surrounded by SS units planning more deportations on April 18, 1943, the Jewish combat organization began an uprising. The fighters fought battles with the Germans for weeks. The SS was only able to put down the revolt in May. Most of the surviving Jews are murdered in the Treblinka and Majdanek camps, and the remains of the ghetto are completely burned down.

Fischerhof train station and memories

By January 1944, a total of eight deportation trains with around 2,200 people left the station in Hanover-Fischerhof. In March 1943, more than 100 Sinti from Hanover and the surrounding area were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. To commemorate all victims of the Nazi era, the Lower Saxony Association of German Sinti donated a memorial in 1996, which stands near the former railway station building, which was demolished long ago. Few of those deported survived the Holocaust. The traces of the people who were deported from the Fischerhof train station on April 1, 1942 are lost in the Warsaw ghetto.