Elsa Traub
* 1883

Elsa Traub, née Markus, born on 20 Oct. 1883 in Harburg, deported to the Lodz Ghetto on 30 Oct. 1941, murdered in May 1942

Harburg-Altstadt quarter, Lüneburger Strasse 2 (formerly Wilstorfer Strasse 35)

Elsa Markus was born as the sixth child of the Jewish couple Julius and Rosa Markus, née Hirsch, at a time when Harburg was experiencing rapid economic and population growth. She was also born into a large family, to which her siblings Max, Hugo, Laura, Siegfried, Franziska, and Richard belonged. Her sister Laura and her brother Richard died early in childhood and they were buried in the Jewish Cemetery on Schwarzenberg.

Julius Markus owned a flourishing bedding store on Wilstorfer Strasse, the main shopping street of the Prussian industrial city of Harburg/Elbe, which still connects Lüneburger Strasse in Harburg’s historic downtown with Winsener Strasse in Wilstorf today, but has long since lost its former glory.

When Julius Markus died in 1925, worse times began for the Markus bedding and ready-to-wear clothing store on Wilstorfer Strasse. Initially, his widowed wife Rosa took over the management of the company, which was still largely unscathed by the global economic crisis at the beginning of the 1930s. However, when her son Max took up her inheritance after the death of his mother in 1935 and the Nazis were in power by then, he could no longer stop the downward trend. The non-Jewish clientele turned to other suppliers. In Aug. 1938, Max Markus had to sell the business and looked for a new home in Hamburg’s Grindel quarter.

His siblings also no longer lived in their hometown. His sister Elsa had married and moved to Cologne. Others emigrated. The Nazi Reich government’s ban on emigration dated 23 Oct. 1941 eventually ended this refugee movement.

Shortly thereafter, the deportations of Jewish men, women, and children to the East began. On 30 Oct. 1941, a special train with Elsa Traub and 1,010 other “full Jews” (“Volljuden”) left Cologne Central Station. One day later, it arrived in the once Polish town of Lodz, which had since been renamed Litzmannstadt and incorporated into the German Reich. Immediately after the occupation of Poland, the Nazis had erected a huge ghetto here, which was soon hopelessly overcrowded with new arrivals from the West. There the newcomers encountered a world that was completely alien to them. They met people who wore ragged clothes, who were marked by hunger and deprivation, and who spoke in a language they did not understand. Wherever they looked, they saw decayed and neglected wooden houses everywhere, and with every step they took, they were confronted with the stench of waste and feces that had not been disposed of.

Less than seven months later, the transition from the Nazis’ policy of deportation to extermination took place there in the Litzmannstadt (Lodz) Ghetto. In May 1942, 10,993 Jews, mainly those deported from Prague, Vienna, Luxembourg, and the Old Reich [Altreich, i.e., Germany within the 1937 borders] to the ghetto in the fall of 1941, were transported to the Chelmno/Kulmhof death camp and murdered there.

One of them was 57-year-old Elsa Traub. Her brothers Max, Siegfried, and Hugo Markus – with his wife Gretchen Markus, née Daltrop – as well as her sister Franziska Simon – with her husband Michaelis Simon – did not survive the Holocaust either (see www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de).

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