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Alfred Heymann * 1923

Großneumarkt 38 (vorm. Schlachterstraße) (Hamburg-Mitte, Neustadt)

HIER WOHNTE
ALFRED HEYMANN
JG. 1923
VERHAFTET 22.4.1941
KZ FUHLSBÜTTEL
DEPORTIERT 1941
RIGA
ERMORDET

further stumbling stones in Großneumarkt 38 (vorm. Schlachterstraße):
Hanna Aghitstein, Julie Baruch, Ludwig Louis Baruch, Julius Blogg, Rebecca Blogg, Kurt Cossmann, Mathilde Cossmann, Frieda Dannenberg, Alice Graff, Leopold Graff, Flora Halberstadt, Elsa Hamburger, Herbert Hamburger, Louis Hecker, Max Hecker, Marianne Minna Hecker, Lea Heymann, Wilma Heymann, Paul Heymann, Jettchen Kahn, Adolf Kahn, Curt Koppel, Johanna Koppel, Hannchen Liepmann, Henriette Liepmann, Bernhard Liepmann, Johanna Löwe, Martin Moses, Beate Ruben, Flora Samuel, Karl Schack, Minna Schack, Werner Sochaczewski, Margot Sochazewski, verh. Darvill, Sophie Vogel, Sara Vogel

Alfred Heymann, born on 18 Nov. 1923 in Hamburg, imprisoned in 1941, deported on 6 Nov. 1941 to Riga-Jungfernhof
Lea Heymann, née Salomon, born on 27 Feb. 1886 in Hamburg, deported to Minsk on 8 Nov. 1941
Paul Heymann, born on 10 Feb. 1878 in Hamburg, deported to Minsk on 8 Nov. 1941
Wilma Heymann, born on 18 June 1927 in Hamburg, deported on 8 Nov. 1941 to Minsk

Grossneumarkt 38 (Schlachterstrasse 40/42)

Fanny Salomon, born on 8 Feb. 1882 in Kiel, deported on 6 Dec. 1941 to Riga-Jungfernhof
Rosa Salomon, born on 5 May 1879 in Kiel, deported on 6 Dec. 1941 to Riga-Jungfernhof

Neuer Steinweg 20 (Neuer Steinweg 78)

Through the "generous donation” of a Hamburg insurance company, a maternity hospital for homeless or destitute unmarried pregnant women was founded in 1795 at Pastorenstrasse 15/16. Henriette Heymann gave birth to her son Paul there on 10 Feb. 1878. According to the entry in the birth register, his mother was registered as residing at 1st Marienstrasse 25 (from 1940, Jan-Valkenburg-Strasse) at that time.

Paul Heymann later described his childhood as "quite hard.” From the age of 14, he worked as a hairdresser, apparently also during his time in the USA. For it was from there he returned to Hamburg at the end of 1894 when he was just 16. Nearly ten years later, Paul Heymann left his native city again to seek his fortune in London in 1905. After the start of World War I, he was taken by the British government to an internment camp as an enemy alien and then exchanged with other German civilians for British citizens interned in Germany. Back in Hamburg, Paul Heymann first worked as an interpreter and as an independent merchant.

On 4 July 1919, he married the maid Lea Salomon. His best man was Mathias/Max Hochfeld (see corresponding entry), who had also been interned in Britain and expelled from there. Henriette Heymann, Paul’s mother, had already passed away in Hamburg, according to the entry in the civil marriage register.

Paul lived at Hohenfelderpark 26 in Hamburg-Hohenfelde. His future wife Lea Salomon resided at Greifswalderstrasse 36 in the St. Georg quarter, in the apartment of her sister Rosa Salomon (see below). Lea did not bring her son, born on 23 Feb. 1910, from a premarital relationship with a non-Jewish merchant, into the marriage. Walter Salomon grew up with foster parents and knew his mother only briefly. He survived the Holocaust, in a "privileged mixed marriage” ("privilegierte Mischehe”) with six children.

His mother Lea was the youngest child of the Altona-born merchant Adolf/Abraham Wolf Salomon (born on 28 Nov. 1838, died on 16 Feb. 1924) and his wife Sophie Selig, née Lewin (Levy) (born on 19 Aug. 1845, died on 4 July 1924). Their parents had lived for some years in Kiel, the birthplace of their mother, where the older siblings had been born. In 1884, they settled in Hamburg, and two years later, Lea was born at Peterstrasse 4. In 1913, the Salomon family had moved to the Jewish Marcus-Nordheim Stift, a residential home, at Schlachterstrasse 40/42, House 1. Lea’s brothers had not only left their parents’ home, but also Hamburg: Sally Salomon (born on 2 Aug. 1869) had emigrated to the USA at an early age and lived as a merchant in Houston, Texas. Max (born on 12 May 1872) had settled in London; Ludwig (born on 11 Sept. 1875) lived in Lübeck and Hermann (born on 9 Mar. 1877, died on 30 Jan. 1960) in Frankfurt/Main. Unlike their sisters Rosa (born on 5 May 1879), Fanny (born on 8 Feb. 1882), and Lea, they survived the Nazi era. A fourth sister, the office clerk Frida Creutzmann, née Salomon (born on 5 May 1884), had drowned in a boating accident in the Outer Alster in the summer of 1921.

Lea and Paul Heymann’s oldest daughter Hilda Henriette had been born at Niederfelderstrasse 7 in the Veddel quarter on 16 Mar. 1920; Alfred followed on 18 Nov. 1923, and the youngest child, Wilma, on 18 June 1927. After the death of Lea’s parents, who died shortly after each other in 1924, the family apparently took over their apartment in the Marcus-Nordheim-Stift. Paul Heymann became caretaker there, also opening a barbershop at Peterstrasse 2 in 1926. As his Jewish religious tax (Kultussteuer) file card kept by the Jewish Community reveals, he was only assessed for Jewish religious taxes in 1925 and 1927. During his internment in a British field camp, Paul Heymann had fallen ill with severe pulmonary apicitis, and in Dec. 1924, he was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis. After a lengthy stay in the Edmundsthal-Siemerswald pulmonary sanatorium in Geesthacht, Paul Heymann gave up the barbershop in Oct. 1930 for health reasons. In order to maintain a certain financial basis for his family, the following year he took over the lease for the sanitary facilities in the "Libelle” pub, later those of the Hotel Esplanade. Suffering from severe rheumatoid arthritis, Paul Heymann became unfit for work in 1936.

The oldest daughter Hilda Heymann worked as a domestic servant after her school years and she was engaged to the machine builder Kurt Werner Neumann (born on 22 Oct. 1918). When their son Sally was born on 5 Sept. 1938, his father Kurt was in "protective custody” ("Schutzhaft”) in the Fuhlsbüttel police prison (see Fanny and Siegfried Neumann). He was released on the condition that he leave Germany immediately. Hilda and Kurt married on 10 Mar. 1939, and fled to Shanghai via Italy on 12 April with their son Sally.

Hilda’s younger brother Alfred Heymann first attended the Jewish Community’s daycare center on Johnsallee and then the Talmud Tora School, from which he was dismissed at Easter 1939. Since being Jewish, he was already excluded from apprenticeship placements, he registered for the entrance examination in the carpentry workshop of the German-Israelitic Community at Weidenallee 10a. He began a two-year apprenticeship with the apprentice workshop supervisor Jacob Blanari (Stolpersteine at Weidenstieg 8, see www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de), which was also recognized as hachshara, i.e., preparation for life in Palestine. At the beginning of Mar. 1941, Alfred worked as a "carpenter’s helper” at the Reichert carpentry shop in Altona. With his weekly earnings of 32 RM (reichsmark), he contributed significantly to the livelihood of his family.

His sister Wilma first attended the "waiting school” ("Warteschule”) on Mühlenberg and in 1935, she became a student at the Israelite Girls’ School on Carolinenstrasse, where Gerda Henschel (born on 10 Nov. 1927), a playmate from Schlachterstrasse, also went.

On 21 Apr. 1941, the 14-year-old schoolgirl Gerda Henschel was summoned to the Gestapo. She was to provide information about "German-blooded girls” who had been in contact with Jews. During her interrogation, the name of Wilma’s brother Alfred Heymann, who had previously been friends with Gerda’s brother Erwin Henschel (born on 29 Sept. 1923), was mentioned, among others. Although the 17-year-old Alfred had no connection with "Aryan” girls, he was interrogated the next day and placed in police custody overnight to "obtain a confession.” Whether Alfred Heymann was mistreated that night in order to extort a confession can only be surmised. The next day, during his interrogation, he admitted to first sexual contacts among neighbor children, which Alfred, back then only eleven years old, and his sister Wilma, having been seven at the time, had taken as childish play. When the Hamburg District Court (Amtsgericht) sentenced him to a one-year prison term on 19 June 1941, calculating his pretrial detention against the sentence, it was for "crimes of immorality and racial defilement [Rassenschande].”

In the meantime, his parents Lea and Paul Heymann had had to leave their apartment on Schlachterstrasse; they were quartered in the "Jews’ house” ("Judenhaus”) at Kielortallee 24. From there, they were deported to the Minsk Ghetto on 8 Nov. 1941, together with their daughter Wilma. Also in this transport were the former playmates of Wilma and Alfred Heymann, Gerda and Erwin Henschel (Stolpersteine at Von-Hess-Weg 4, see www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de) and Alfred’s apprentice workshop supervisor Jacob Blanari with their families (see Jenny Hirsch). None of them survived.

Alfred was serving his sentence in the Fuhlsbüttel police prison when his aunt Rosa Salomon, his mother’s sister, wrote to the public prosecutor’s office on 19 Nov. 1941, "Since I have to leave Hamburg in the near future, I would like to take the convict with me. The father of the convict has already been evacuated. He has no other relatives here.”

When Rosa and Fanny Salomon, Alfred’s unmarried aunts, received their so-called evacuation orders, the notification of imminent deportation, they shared a small Stift [residential home] apartment in the backyard of Neuer Steinweg 78, House 7. Fanny Salomon had occupied it for many years. Her other nephew, the aforementioned Walter Salomon, described his aunt Fanny as a small, delicate, and misshapen person who was financially supported by a relative living in Denmark. She had not learned a trade, although her Jewish religious tax (Kultussteuer) file card indicated seamstress as her occupation.

Rosa Salomon, on the other hand, must have received a good education; she had learned six languages and worked as a secretary, translator, and foreign correspondent at various banking houses and international trading companies. When she became unemployed for three years in Apr. 1931, she could no longer keep her apartment, which she had occupied since 1914 at Greifswalderstrasse 36. For the next year and a half, she lodged with her sister Fanny. However, since the statutes of the "Lazarus-Samson-Cohen-Eheleute und Levy-Hertz-Eheleute Stift,” a residential home, did not tolerate subtenants in the long term and the sisters lived there in very cramped conditions, Rosa moved to Admiralitätsstrasse 21 as a subtenant. She received welfare support from the welfare office and changed her accommodations several times within Hamburg-Neustadt and Hamburg-Altstadt. In June 1934, Rosa Salomon moved into her own two-bedroom apartment at Elbstrasse 86 (today Neanderstrasse), after finding a job as a foreign language shorthand typist at C. Bromberg, Export von Eisenwaren, Maschinen und Werkzeugen, a company specializing in hardware, machinery, and tools located at Bleichenbrücke 10. Her last job was at Benzian & Co., which traded in mining products, located at Hohe Bleichen 8/10, from 1937 to 1938; the businesses were "Aryanized” one after the other. In the summer of 1939, Rosa again moved into the small Stift apartment with her sister Fanny, this time for the next two and a half years.

The Hamburg public prosecutor’s office "approved” Rosa Salomon’s application and thus Alfred Heymann was placed on the deportation list, as a person who had "volunteered.” On 6 Dec. 1941, he accompanied his aunts to the abandoned Jungfernhof farming estate, six kilometers (nearly 4 miles) from Riga, where the Hamburg transport was diverted and where all traces of them disappear.

Translator: Erwin Fink
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: August 2021
© Susanne Rosendahl

Quellen: 1; 6; 9; StaH 351-11 AfW 3727 (Heymann, Paul); StaH 351-11 AfW 9117 (Heymann, Lea); StaH 351-11 AfW 3322 (Salomon, Hermann); StaH 351-11 AfW 42086 (Neumann, Kurt); StaH 351-11 AfW 43639 (Neumann, Hilda Henriette); StaH 351-11 AfW 46276 (Heymann, Alfred); StaH 351-11 AfW 36014 (Salomon, Walter); StaH 351-14 Arbeits- und Sozialfürsorge 1823 (Salomon, Rosa); 332-5 Standesämter 3333 u 447/1919; StaH 332-5 Standesämter 1928 u 750/1878; StaH 332-5 Standesämter 882 u 100/1924; StaH 332-5 Standesämter 2125 u 1409/1886; StaH 332-5 Standesämter 882 u 365/1924; StaH 213-11 Staatsanwaltschaft Landgericht - Strafsachen 1176/42; StaH 314-15 OFP, FVg 5683; StaH 522-1 Jüdische Gemeinden 477 Statistik der während des Weltkrieges unterstützten Personen; StaH 522-1 Jüdische Gemeinde Nr. 992 e 2 Band 3; Lohmeyer: Stolpersteine, Band 1, S. 101; Thevs: Stolpersteine, S. 120; o.A.: Hamburg, S. 291; Lungenheilanstalt Edmundsthal-Siemerswald, http://www.geesthacht.de, Leben und Kultur in Geesthacht (Zugriff 7.10.2015).
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