Sophie Stern
* 1894

Sophie Stern, b. 3.11.1894, deported to Riga on 12.6.1941, date of death 12.15.1944 in the Stutthof concentration camp

Schlüterstraße 14

We know almost nothing about Sophie Stern. Neither her occupation nor her income is noted on her communal religion tax record. An entry on the card indicates that until 1940 she lived with her sister Marianne S, also a spinster, at Bundesstrasse 35.

The sisters moved in 1941 to Bundesstrasse 43, a “Jew house.” Why Sophie S. then moved to Schlüterstrasse 14, her last Hamburg address, is not known. For the room in the left wing of the house, which the sisters shared, the John R. Warburg Foundation advanced 10 RM in rent, to be paid from the “proceeds of their furnishings.”

Marianne S. was – presumably because of her age – deported to Theresienstadt on 23 September 1942, and then to Minsk, where she was murdered.

Sophie S. received her deportation order for Riga in December 1941. When the Riga ghetto was dissolved in June 1943, a portion of the inmates who were able to work, among them Sophie S., were sent to the Kaiserwald concentration camp. During the day, they were marched in columns from there to outside work sites, or they were housed at the camp in makeshift shelters.

With the approach of the front, the SS intensified its selections in the summer of 1944, hauling the remaining (more than 47,000) prisoners out of the Baltic states into the Stutthof concentration camp. According to an entrance list, Sophie S. reached there on 1 October 1944. Hunger, illnesses, cold, and hours‘ long marches to forced labor sites produced many fatalities. Apparently, Sophie S. could join in the death march to the West, which the inmates had to undertake during the winter. Her death, still n Stutthof, was registered as 15 December 1944.

Translator: Richard Levy
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.