2026-04-17T03:29:30Z
https://keydocuments.net/oai
oai:jgo:source-235.en
2021-07-15T00:00:00Z
en
Transcript excerpt FZH / WdE 298, pp. 100-104, based on the slightly shortened audio excerpt from the interview with Steffi and Kurt Wittenberg, Part II, 8.1.1995, 3A, 00:24:00, interviewer: Sybille Baumbach.
https://dx.doi.org/10.23691/jgo:source-235.en.v1
Steffi Wittenberg
Institute for the History of the German Jews
Online Ressource
The source presented is an excerpt from a life history interview given
by Steffi Wittenberg (1926-2015) on January, 5 and 8 and 19 July 1995
for the Workshop of Memory Werkstatt der Erinnerung, the oral history
archive of the Research Centre for Contemporary
History Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg. The 68 or 69
year old talks about how her mother Margot Hammerschlag coped with the
situation in emigration in Uruguay. Steffi Wittenberg’s husband Kurt
Wittenberg, who knew the Hammerschlag family from his youth in the
German-Jewish community in Montevideo, was also present at the
interview. Since their joint return to Germany in 1951, the couple
lived in Hamburg.
The interview, conducted by Sybille Baumbach, has a total length of
245 minutes and is available as audio and transcript. It is preserved
in the Workshop of Memory Werkstatt der Erinnerung with other
documents such as the booklet from which the poem “Familie
Hammerschlag” [Family Hammerschlag] comes.
Steffi Wittenberg grew up in the Hamburg district of Harvestehude as
the child of a liberal Jewish family. Her brother Gerd was two and a
half years older. It was only when the National Socialists came to
power that belonging to Judaism became more important for the family.
Steffi Wittenberg herself experienced early discrimination in 1934 at
the Jahnschule (now Ida Ehre Schule), which she attended. Probably in
reaction to the “Nuremberg Race Laws”, her parents transferred her
to the Israelite Girls’ School Israelitische Töchterschule in
autumn 1935. Here she experienced the so-called Polish Action of
October 1938, the horrors of the November Pogrom and the subsequent
mass flight from Germany. Her father and brother were already in
Uruguay at the time. Steffi Wittenberg was in the 8th grade in school
when she followed them with her mother in December 1939.
2021-07-15