Stumbling stones Eutritzscher Straße 45

These stolpersteine (stumbling stones) commemorate:
* Friedrich Teutsch, born 1882, fled 1938 to Holland, interned in Westerbork, deported 1943 to Auschwitz, murdered 3 September 1943.
* Elisabeth Teutsch née Teutsch, born 1898, fled 1940 to Holland, interned in Westerbork, deported 1943 to Auschwitz, murdered 3 September 1943.
* Kurt Teutsch, born 1921, fled 1938 to Czechoslovakia, 1939 to England, USA.
* Hans Josef Teutsch, born 1923, fled 1939 to England.

Each member of this Teutsch family left Germany before the war. The sons separately managed to get to England and survived, but the parents, who escaped to Holland, were swept up there and murdered.

Friedrich Teutsch opened a wholesale textile business in Leipzig in 1914 and 6 years later he married Elisabeth Babette Teutsch. Their two sons were born within the next 3 years. The boys were athletes, but were hindered by their being Jewish.

In August 1938, when the boys were ages 15 and 17, Friedrich went alone to the US to organize visas for his family. But he only managed to get the boys on a visa waiting list. On the way back to Europe, he was informed that the Gestapo had tried to arrest him at the apartment on Eutritzscher Strasse on November 11, 1938. He stayed in Rotterdam.

On the morning after Kristallnacht, the Gestapo warned Hans that if he was still in Leipzig in 6 months, he would be arrested and taken to Sachsenhausen. In that time he managed to get a place on a Kindertransport to England and in May 1939, his mother took him to the station, expecting never to see him again. He stayed in England, changing his name to John Toyne. He studied, worked and married.

Kurt Teutsch had studied smelting in Germany and then went to a Technical College in Sudetenland in 1937. The following year he fled to Prague, then in 1939 to England and finally to the United States, where he became a psychiatrist. He died in Los Angeles in 2005.

In the spring of 1940, Elisabeth (still in Leipzig) was forced to move to a "Judenhaus". Then in December, she was sent out of Germany -- to her husband in Assen in the Netherlands. In October 1942, both were sent to Westerbork camp. At the end of August 1943, they were deported to Auschwitz where they were immediately murdered. Friedrich Teutsch was 60 years old; Elisabeth was 45.

The German artist Gunter Demnig started placing the first Stolpersteine in 1997 in Berlin's Kreuzberg district. Meanwhile there are Stolpersteine in many countries. They commemorate the victims of the National Socialism (Nazism).

A Stolperstein is a 10cm concrete cube with a brass plate on top, on which the name, year of birth and date and place of death are engraved. Stolpersteine are placed in the pavement in front of the last residence where the victims lived by choice. By doing this, Gunter Demnig gives an individual memorial to each victim. His motto is: 'A HUMAN BEING IS FORGOTTEN ONLY WHEN HIS OR HER NAME IS FORGOTTEN'.

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Source

• Text: Anne Palmer
• Photos: Sunjo
• geni.com
• Stolpersteine Leipzig: Familie Teutsch