How I discovered my family’s connection to the Holocaust 79 years later
The importance of communicating memories to keep history alive.
Também escrevi este texto em Português aqui
What I knew growing up, was that the history of my mother’s family started in Berlin. My mother and aunts told me that my Jewish great-grandmother, Paula Ahrendt (born Metz), came to Brazil on December 1936 on a ship with her non-jewish husband Fritz Johann Ahrendt when they sensed that a bad situation in Germany was rising and that her family that stayed in Berlin was killed in Auschwitz.
This is what they had heard from Evelyna, my grandmother, born in São Paulo, in 1939. She was very reserved and didn’t say much more than that. We didn’t even know who these family members were. She and my great-grandmother were estranged for many years, so maybe she didn’t know much herself. We also did not practice the Jewish religion. I never talked about this with her and my family never had the curiosity to know more throughout the years. Evelyna passed away in 2016.
Mid-2021, in São Paulo where I was born and raised, I got a message on LinkedIn inviting me to join a recruitment process abroad. I gave it a go, and two months later got the offer and was given the choice to take a role in Stockholm or Berlin.
Up until that message, moving abroad wasn’t part of my plans, much less to Berlin. I had the opportunity to visit the city 15 years earlier and didn’t really like it. It had such a “heavy” feel, with its tragic history seeming to be present in every corner (at least in the historic center, where I was staying) — and the January weather didn’t help. But it still seemed to beat the cold of Stockholm, so there I went, arriving on August 25th, 2021.
As I began meeting new people in the new city, I got a lot of “You don’t look Brazilian” comments, and I always explained that besides the native people, Portuguese colonization and slavery, Brazil also underwent many immigration waves throughout history, and my German ancestors were part of one. These moments began to spark something in me, I started to wish I knew more about what had happened that led my family there, and who knows, if I still had living relatives.
I was back in Brazil a few months later in December 2021 for the Holidays and went through some old boxes with documents and albums we kept from when my grandmother passed away. I took back with me some postcards addressed to people we didn’t know, photos of people we didn’t recognize, and a notebook that belonged to Paula, in which several people wrote her messages from 1919 to 1929. I had no idea what I would do with them, especially because the cards and notebook were not only in German but in old cursive writing that has not been taught for years.
I got back to Berlin, but got busy with life, and parked this search for some time. As I met German-speaking people, I asked them if they could read what was written on the postcards, but given the old handwriting, we had no luck. Then in Mid November 2022, as winter came and social life slowed down, I decided to dedicate myself to this investigation.
After talking to some friends, they mentioned websites that have huge databases of documents and I decided to give it a go. I created an account on Ancestry.de. It’s quite impressive. There are all types of certificates and the scanning quality is close to perfect. The search was much easier than I expected: I kicked it off looking for with Paula Metz, my great-grandmother, and was easily able to find out through certificates who her mother (Lenchen Metz, born Rothgiesser) and father (Emil Salomon Metz) were, and that she had three siblings (Liesbeth, Alfred, and Fritz). It was so exciting to discover who were the “Emil” and the “Liesbeth” of two of the postcards I had brought with me.
The two first death certificates I found were from Emil and Liesbeth, both stated that they had died before the war; so not victims of the Holocaust. Liesbeth, at the age of 16 in 1911 of an unspecified illness in a hospital in Kreuzberg (one of Berlin’s districts), and Emil at the age of 65, of suicide, in 1932 at his home (also in Kreuzberg).
It was only after further digging that I found the first certificate that showed the impact of the Holocaust on my family. Fritz, my great-granduncle, was deported and murdered in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp in October 1942, after being forcefully taken there in July 1942.
Sachsenhausen was a concentration camp just 35 kilometers from Berlin and at least 30.000 people were murdered there, among them, Fritz Metz, at 39 years old.
This was already the first shock.
My family really was connected to the Holocaust. The whereabouts of Alfred and Lenchen were still to be found, and the trail grew cold on Ancestry.de.
Then, I just typed “Lenchen Metz” on Google, and that’s when things took a turn I never would expect.
What came up was an article from August 28, 2021, posted on the website of Kreuzberg. It reported that 11 new Stolpersteine were laid in the neighborhood that weekend.
“Stolpersteine ("Stumbling stones") are concrete blocks measuring 10x10cm which are laid into the pavement in front of the last voluntarily chosen places of residence of the victims of the Nazis. Their names and fate are engraved into a brass plate on the top of each Stolperstein.” (Project Website)
As of June 2022, there are 9.980 Stolpersteine placed all over Berlin and it’s easy to take a walk through the city and come across one. Anyone can initialize the process of placing a Stolperstein through this institution.
I got goosebumps as soon as I opened the article. The cover photo was the image of four Stolpersteine — three honoring members of the same family, and a single one to the right was for Lenchen Metz.
Only three days after I had moved to Berlin, a Stolperstein was placed for my great-great-grandmother.
The article brought a biography on the Metz family, stating what happened to each of the family members, except for Paula (my great-grandmother, who was in Brazil, so no records in Germany). I had found the missing pieces of what happened to the family.
Lenchen (Paula's mother, and my great-great-grandmother), was deported to the Theresienstadt Camp-Ghetto in August 1942 and was murdered there three months later, in December.
Theresienstadt was a ghetto, labor, and transit camp in german-occupied Czechoslovakia. Approximately 140.000 people were deported to Theresienstadt, around 90.000 of these were sent to other ghettos or extermination camps and 33.000 people were murdered there, among them Lenchen, who was 71.
Alfred, Paula's brother, survived the Holocaust.
The text finished by saying that the Stolperstein was initiated by a “committed resident”.
I remember just staring at the screen for a few minutes.
It felt surreal.
79 years after her death, Lenchen Metz and my family were being remembered by someone that I had no clue who could be, and I, four generations later, was able to uncover what happened to them.
They weren’t murdered in the gas chamber in Auschwitz as the story was passed down, but they were victims of the atrocities nonetheless. I was feeling emotional, but somewhat excited by finding out what had happened, and especially after reading that Alfred had survived.
Right away, I wrote to Christiana Hoppe, from the Stolpersteine project, who was responsible for the amazing and thorough research done for Lenchen's biography. I introduced myself, thanked her immensely, and asked if she could introduce me to the “committed resident”. She was also happy to hear from me and gave me the contact for Tal Alon, the godmother of Lenchen’s Stolperstein.
Tal also quickly replied and was just as happy to hear from me as I was to hear from her. She told she got goosebumps reading my e-mail and with the coincidence of me being in Berlin on the day the Stolperstein was placed. Her family moved from Israel to Berlin and they decided to commemorate one of their past Jewish neighbors. She reached out to the Stolpersteine project, and Christiana researched people who had lived close by and Tal’s family chose Lenchen Metz.
Tal sent me photos and videos of the day the Stolperstein was laid. There was a ceremony to which neighbors and friends of Tal's family came, and she read Lenchen’s biography to them. It was so touching to see the footage and crazy for me to think that, at that same moment, I was spending my first Saturday in the city, probably touristing the Brandenburger Tor for the first time.
I visited Lenchen’s Stolperstein for the first time at Reichenberger Straße 151 three days after my discovery, on November 20th, 2022, a Sunday. It was a typical gray and cold Berlin November day and the streets were quiet. There is nothing special about the building. It’s gray-brownish and has graffiti on it, typical of Kreuzberg buildings. The region was not new to me at all, I was actually shocked because I have already walked through that street multiple times. I even took my parents for dinner at a restaurant just 3 minutes away from it when they visited me a few months before.
But now that building and street mean something. I looked at the doorbell and of course, the “Metz” name was not there anymore, but it had been one day. I wondered which floor they lived on, what the apartment looked like, what view they had, and how it felt leaving this place for the last time -for Paula, taking a ship to the unknown in Brazil, and for Lenchen, being forcefully taken away not knowing her fate.
Christiana and I had been exchanging emails that week sending each other all the information we had. I let her know about what happened to Paula, and she was so kind in transcribing some of the postcards I had. On the evening of that same Sunday I visited the Stolperstein, she sent me all the material she had collected to write the Metz family’s biography. Many of them were Alfred’s "Lebenslauf" (documents written by Holocaust survivors, or by their family members, for compensation) and medical records, detailing what had happened to him during the years in the war.
Up until that moment, I was excited and grateful, seeing this discovery as a positive way to not forget those who were deprived of their freedom and ultimately their lives and hopeful to find Alfred's family.
But after reading documents sent over by Christiana, this story shifted emotionally for me.
Below is a part of the Metz family biography written by her:
“Alfred had married the non-Jewess Elsbeth Scholz in 1921, and their son Harry was born in 1926. Like his father [Emil], Alfred had learned to be a hairdresser and had been running a prosperous barber shop for men and women since 1924 at Georgenkirchstraße 24a, northeast of Alexanderplatz. On the night of the pogrom [also known as the Kristallnacht] from November 9th to 10th, 1938, his shop was stormed by the mob and the SA, the windows were broken, the contents of the shop were looted and the inventory was completely smashed. He was deprived of his trade.
It was not until May 1940 that Alfred Metz received permission to work again in retirement homes and in the Jewish community hospital. Later he also worked as a hairdresser in the assembly camps where the Jews were held before their deportation. He helped the detainees by smuggling in mail, food, and clothing, and carrying messages out of the camp. For this, he was severely beaten up by the Gestapo.
His wife Elsbeth had to do forced labor but resisted the pressure to divorce her Jewish husband and was thus able to protect him from deportation”.
In the many documents, he spoke about places and events I had heard about in history classes, books, and movies. I also learned that he had fought in World War I, and he had a son — Harry Metz, who was sent to do forced labor during World War II, but survived.
In some of his first accounts, he writes that his brother Fritz and mother Lenchen had both been gassed in Auschwitz (in others in later years, he wrote about Sachsenhausen and Theresienstadt, probably after having had more information about them). He named a Gestapo officer that beat him, and that I later looked up to discover was Adolf Eichmann’s (one of the major organizers of the Holocaust) “right hand” and became one of the most-wanted Nazi criminals, but escaped all attempts of capture and died in Syria in 2001.
I thought about the courage Alfred and his family had during these years of uncertainty and no visibility of the future. The courage Alfred had to risk his life helping prisoners, despite the constant fear he wrote he felt. The courage Elsbeth had, submitting herself to probable social reprehension, in resisting to divorce her husband. The courage of both of them to keep going, despite the pain and helplessness they must have felt by seeing their son being also persecuted because of religion.
In a matter of days, Berlin had changed for me. His detailed account, in his own words, broke my heart.
I don’t work far from one of the transitory concentration camps Alfred had been forced to work in, and actually have walked through it without being aware of the history.
I’ve been meters away from Lenchen’s house countless times, and still go there almost on a weekly basis to go to restaurants, bars, cut my hair or go to the bouldering gym.
There is a sign 300 meters from my house in Richard von Weizsäcker Platz, where I go grocery shopping, that says “Places of horror we must never forget” and lists Sachsenhausen and Theresienstadt, where Fritz and Lenchen lost their lives.
Coming across Stolpersteine are part of everyday Berlin life.
Thinking about stories like the Metz's family is awful by itself, but knowing this was somehow connected to me, and being often reminded of it while walking around, brought up feelings I couldn’t quite place. I knew I was sad, angry, shocked, but there was more. I felt a type of anguish, and not knowing how to phrase it, made me feel it more.
I also questioned if I was even entitled to my feelings. Up until 10 days prior, I wasn’t even aware of the names of the people and I am not connected to the Jewish religion. But on the other hand, I couldn’t help but reflect on how I wouldn’t even have been given the chance to have a life, had my great-grandmother not had a different fate than her mother and brother.
On Thursday of that same week, I flew to Brazil for the holidays again. It was good timing, as staying in Berlin after the discovery was hitting a bit hard for me, given the constant reminders.
Arriving in Brazil, I went back to the family albums. Now knowing who the family was, maybe the photos would gain new meaning. One of the pages of the album had photos of a child, and “Harry Metz” was written below them, as well as behind a photo of a young man. I was able to recognize Alfred in some photos because of one of the documents Christiana had sent me. Unfortunately, no photos explicitly named Lenchen, Emil, or Fritz.
I consider myself quite a skeptical person and I don’t follow any religion. But the coincidence of the timing of placement of the Stolperstein and my — not really planned — move to Berlin had me reflecting.
Despite persecution and her family trying to be erased, it seems like a circle was meant to be closed, with I, one of Lenchen’s descendants, occupying a space that was taken from her.
And hopefully, this story doesn’t end here.
Paula moved from São Paulo to Frankfurt (Germany) in the late 1960s. Maybe she and Alfred met up in Berlin, or wherever he might have lived then, and he told her about Lenchen and Fritz being murdered in Auschwitz, and that’s what was passed down to us. I wonder how seeing each other after so much time, after so much tragedy, must have been.
She and my grandmother Evelyna weren't exactly close (she didn’t approve of her marriage to my grandfather), but they sent each other letters between São Paulo and Frankfurt. I found one Paula wrote to Evelyna in 1981, in which she mentioned that she would travel to the city of Köln (Germany) to visit her nephew and his new girlfriend. This was a new clue — Harry had moved to Köln, maybe he married, had children, grandchildren that could be my age nowadays.
(I think) I’ve reached a dead end for now on how to find out more about him. But maybe, eventually, hopefully, someone from his side of the family will start their own search and find me. Maybe they'll be able to tell me things I don't know, like if Fritz and his wife had a child, or if Alfred also left them photos and letters, or if he told them about how their life was before the war. And I’ll be able to tell them how photos of Harry Metz ended up on the other side of the world and then back to Berlin after so many years.
History is composed of memories. What motivated me to write this was to shed light on how precious it is to pass them down. Had I not looked into my family’s history, this crucial part would have been lost for another generation. Not only was I lucky to find some information online, but it also only happened because of Christiana and Tal. Two women whose beautiful gesture enabled Lenchen, and as a consequence all Holocaust victims and survivors, to be remembered — even though they had absolutely no connection to her.
My grandmother and I were not close, and it felt uncomfortable for me to ask her about her history, but looking back, I regret not doing it. If I could give whoever is reading this advice: talk to your parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents. And if it’s too late, nowadays there are many resources and with luck, you can easily find more about your history too.
Such an important part of my family remained buried for years. But now, 80 years after her death, Lenchen’s Stolperstein gets a flower put next to it every now and then.
Thank you Christiana, Tal and my friends in Berlin, for supporting me through this journey.
Tal also wrote a beautiful post on how a gesture can have an impact on someone’s life. You can read it clicking here.
More documents and photos:
