Markenbildchen weg, two houses, one restored, the other replacing my aunts’ bombed apartment building | Photographer: Cécile
My three aunts, Johanna, Dorothea and Elisabeth Schneider, called Hanna, Dora and Elisabeth, lived in a ground floor apartment at Markenbildchen weg 30 p.t. Koblenz, Rhein.
I remember staying with them, perhaps I was 5 years old, and standing in an elegant room looking at the chandelier hanging over a large polished wooden table, noticing Tante Hanna’s typewriter waiting for the touch of her fingers.
It was breakfast time and I follow Tante Dora down a narrow passage leading to a small kitchen where she had boiled an egg to the exact softness for me to dip the narrow slices of rye bread and butter into the yolk after she neatly slices off the top.
They lived in the ground floor apartment of a 19th century style building at the head of a street of similar ornate buildings.
Until the day they didn’t.
They were removed from the city of Koblenz, like other Jews, forced to live in a “Jew house” in the nearby small town of Gondorf.
It would be the beginning of their final journey.
Hanna, Dora, Elisabet left the misery of Gondorf by train for the ghetto in Izbica, Poland and then, they vanished.
Did a virulent typhoid epidemic snuff out their lives? or were they murdered in the nearby extermination camp, named Belźec?
As I began to write “A Garland for Ashes”, a memorial embracing my parents and aunts, I travelled back to Germany, staying and visiting the places of happy memories and grievous losses.
And even though I can no longer visit the homes where my family once lived their ordinary, daily lives, where they laughed and loved and feared,
I have returned to the pavement in front of their old addresses and planted my feet where I imagine my parents and aunts once stood, knelt down and looked closely at the Stolpersteine,
the little brass bricks embedded in the pavement telling the truth about their endings.
Stolpersteine for my three aunts | Photographer: Cécile
Why are white roses laying on the pavement and who is Cécile the photographer?
Instagram!
Cécile and I met on Instagram!
She posted a picture of Koblenz and I messaged her about visiting my aunts in Koblenz.
She asked if I remembered their address.
The postcard Tante Hanna placed in my luggage in July 1939
I sent her the postcard with my aunt’s address. Cécile wrote back, I live on this street!! And these are the first Stolpersteine I noticed.
Yom Hashoah
Yesterday, here in Phoenix, the Jewish community welcomed our neighbors to a solemn ceremony honoring those we have lost and those who survived.
The program brochure included tributes to those we mourn.
Design: Micah Dailey