On the trail of their persecuted family in Hamburg
The descendants of Eva and Georg Oppenheim live in Great Britain, where their great-grandfather was able to flee to in 1939. Born in 1906, Georg was a Jewish lawyer who lived in the Grindelviertel district. He was politically active and a supporter of the SPD, then the KPD. Together with Rudi Neumann, the husband of his stepsister Flora, he held training evenings in the Sternschanze area. Both were arrested shortly after the National Socialists came to power in July 1933 and were initially taken to the Fuhlsbüttel Concentration Camp (Kolafu). Georg Oppenheim was sentenced to two years in prison for ‘high treason’. After his release, he managed to escape: via the Netherlands, he reached Czechoslovakia, where he worked for a Jewish aid organisation in Prague until the German occupation. In 1939, he was able to flee to London via Poland. There he met Eva Stein again, the sister of a friend from Hamburg. Eva was the daughter of Clementine and Mathias Stein, who had worked as a teacher at the Talmud Tora School for many years.
Eva Stein had originally dreamed of becoming a pianist. This was no longer possible for a Jewish woman at that time, so she completed a course in home economics. After the November pogroms of 1938, she managed to flee to England as a housemaid. Eva and Georg married in 1940, but were separated again and interned as ‘enemy’ aliens. They later had three children. They never saw their respective families again. After the war, they learned that they had been deported and murdered.
Georg and Eva Oppenheim's granddaughter Natasha Walter began to write down the family's history after the death of her mother Ruth. In 2023, her book Before the Light Fades: a Memoir of Grief and Resistance was published. The next generation is also keeping the memory alive. On their trip to Hamburg, Jacob, Florence and Joshua Brunert visited the places where their great-grandparents Georg and Eva Oppenheim had lived. At the Fuhlsbüttel Memorial and the Stadthaus remembrance site, a stimulating exchange took place on questions of family tradition and the significance and work of memorial sites in view of the current political situation. The perspective of descendants is of increasing importance in this regard.
