These are the posts I have been dreading. We begin to track all known close relatives of Opa as they are deported. In these "Tracking Family" posts, you as the reader will learn on the day that they are arrested, deported, murdered (or died due to illness in camps). Remember that Opa would have none of this information. It is possible some of the information I share with you on these matters, that he would never find out. Many of the tracking/tracing methods that we have now to find out what happened to people are newly formed due to archives and search engines made possible by the internet.
Remember that millions of people disappeared. It's a logistical nightmare to find out what happened to them all, and even 70 years later, some people still don't have a clear answer, only an assumption.
On July 9th, 1942 - Ella's Aunt Julie Fraustadter Simson was deported to Theresienstadt. This camp was located in what is now the Czech Republic, just east of Germany. If you read the article by the Holocaust Museum that I linked a few blogs ago, you'll note that this camp was designed especially for elderly and WWI veterans (who were Jewish).
I don't know if Ella would have known about this. I assume she would have at least heard that her aunt had been deported or was no longer writing.
It has begun for Opa's family.
At age 18, Tom Doeppner was smuggled out of Nazi Germany. He was 26 before he saw anyone in his family again. Tom was my Grandfather, “Opa.” Cleaning out my Grandmother’s desk ten years ago, I found a small box where Opa had kept letters from his family, written as early as 1938. When I opened that box, I found a story that I never knew. This blog tells the story of what happened to Tom and his family in that decade of separation.
Do you know if most of the family was murdered as soon as they reached the camps?
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