Stumbling Stones Disselhof 36

Stumbling stones / Stolpersteine commemorate:

* Nathan Lebenstein, born 1880, deported 1942 Riga, murdered 23 Februarry 1942.
* Charlotte Lebenstein née Josephs, born 1884, deported 1942, murdered in Auschwitz.
* Alexander Lebenstein, born 1927, deported 1942 Riga, KZ Stutthof, liberated/survived.

Nathan Lebenstein was a cattle trader and a butcher. He married Charlotte (Lotte) Josephs, and they had three daughters and one son, Alexander.

The first daughter died of natural causes in 1932. During Kristallnacht, the family was beaten by a roving gang. They hid in gazebo in the garden. Instead of helping them, neighbours entered their house and threw their possessions out of the windows. The family hid in the cemetery and then at a bed and breakfast but was finally found. They were moved with the town’s other Jews to the Cohen family house on Münsterstraße 28, where they lived for 3 years. Daughters Rosa and Alice Lebenstein (ages 21 and 19) escaped to the US in 1939.

In January 1942, the parents and son were deported to Riga, Latvia. They plus two others were the last Jews in Haltern. Their journey inside a cattle car took six days. Nathan Lebenstein became ill in Riga and was shot by the SS. The details of Lotte Lebenstein’s death are unclear. Information on the Stolperstein shows her taken to Auschwitz; other sources suggest she was shot and buried in a forest near Riga. Alexander survived several concentration camps. He was ill with typhus when the Russians liberated the camp he was in.

When he returned to Haltern in September 1945, Alexander learned that he was the only Jewish survivor among the 19 families who had been there at the beginning of the war. He also learned that his former school friends did not want any Jewish people in his home town. He left and spent the next 2 years in a Bavarian camp for displaced persons. He went to the US in 1947, by his own account an angry young man who wanted nothing to do with anything German. Like his father and grandfather, he became a butcher.

In 1994, children from the Haltern middle school wrote to him, asking him to tell his story because they thought their grandparents were not telling the full story of what happened there during the war. He decided to visit. He found the children feeling guilt and pain over what their families had done. Sharing stories in Haltern in 1995 helped both him and the Haltern children. Their school was renamed in his honour. He continued to teach children in Germany and in the US about hate and bullying until his death in 2010.

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Source

• Text: Anne Palmer
• Photos: Jens-Erik Janke
• Richmond Virgina Times-Dispatch: obituary for Alexander Lebenstein
• The Gazebo, by Alexander Lebenstein
• Stolpersteine.eu