Pleskowstraße 1 - Johanna Broell

Johanna Broell lived at Pleskowstraße 1 from October 1935 to June 1942, in the apartment on the first floor. Her daughter Elisabeth Seidel and her family occupied the ground floor.  

Johanna Broell, née Bendix, was the daughter of the Jewish couple Isaac Pius Bendix and Teresia Bendix, née Freudenreich and was born on 5 January 1869 at Zülpich in the Eifel Mountains.

In 1888 Johanna married Johann Ludwig Broell who lived in Cologne. The marriage at the Cologne registry office on 1 September was followed by a church wedding – in the Protestant church of Cologne five years later.  Johann Ludwig Broell wasn’t a Jew. He was born in Kempten in 1861 and a protestant.  

The couple had four, possibly five children: three daughters Elisabeth, Dorothea and Therese as well as a son Franz. The question, whether there was another son called Walter, couldn’t be clarified.

In April 1934 the 65-year-old widow Johanna Broell moved from Hamburg to Lübeck, together with her daughter Therese (b. 1902). Two of her children, Elisabeth and Franz already lived in Lübeck, while her third daughter Dorothea Dekker lived in Holland.  

Franz Broell was born in Rotterdam in 1909, an engineer by profession and was registered in Lübeck since 1931. In 1933 his wife, Meta Ida, née Markurantz from Hamburg, followed him to Lübeck.  She was the same age as him. On 24 August 1934 their daughter Elly Susanne was born in Lübeck. At that time the young family lived at Geniner Straße 35a, together with Johanna and Therese Broell.

Like his sister Elisabeth, Franz Broell worked at the factory of Albert Julius Asch at Moislinger Allee, the Norddeutsche Bürstenindustrie Albert Asch & Co.  Elisabeth Seidel was employed as a clerk. When she arrived in Lübeck Therese Broell declared her job to be "Haustochter," housemaid.

In 1935 Franz Broell, his wife and daughter moved to Ratzeburger Allee 55a, but shortly afterwards his young wife died. The death certificate of 29 November 1935 states the cause of death as "cancer of the right parotid gland and glands of the throat". At this time Therese Broell came to live with her brother, surely to support him in this difficult situation and to look after the little child.

Meanwhile Johanna Broell, Franz and Therese’s mother, had moved to Pleskowstraße 1, where Elisabeth Seidel lived together with Ludwig Reinhard and their daughter Johanna. Johanna was born in 1921 and attended Ernestinenschule, together with her best friend Maria. As Johanna could not become a member of the BDM (short for „Bund Deutscher Mädchen“, the Nazi organisation for girls) because of her Jewish parentage, her girl friend also didn’t join out of solidarity, in spite of being pressured by her teacher. Her friend remembers that Johanna Seidel later left Lübeck and went to Berlin.

Therese and Franz Broell were also registered at Pleskowstraße 1 in 1936/37, though without little Elly Susanne, who was being taken care of in Bad Schwartau. On 26 October 1937 the widower Franz Broell married Bertha Schuster, who was born in Pirmasens in 1907.  They moved to Katharinenstraße 23a, and little Elly also was returned to live with them. On 1 July 1939 the family of three transferred their registrations from Lübeck to Remscheid.

But Johanna Broell stayed with her daughters Therese and Elisabeth and Elisabeth’s family at Pleskowstraße 1 until their deportation. On 19 July 1942 she was deported to Theresienstadt (now Terezin, Czech Republic) with about twenty others, mostly elderly people from Lübeck. Transport VI/2 arrived there on 20 July.

Johanna Broell’s date of death is 11 December 1943. She was 74 years old.

Her children as "Jewish half-breed 1st grade" were spared deportation and indeed being killed, but were not spared from suffering disfranchisement and reprisals. They certainly tried everything they could to keep their mother from the cruel fate of deportation.

• Adressbücher und Melderegister der Hansestadt Lübeck
• Archiv der Hansestadt Lübeck, Staatliche Polizeiverwaltung 109, 110
• Datenpool JSHD der Forschungsstelle “Juden in Schleswig-Holstein” an der Universität Flensburg
• Memorbuch zum Gedenken an die jüdischen, in der Schoa umgekommenen Schleswig-Holsteiner und Schleswig-Holsteinerinnen, hrsg. V. Miriam Gillis-Carlebach, Hamburg 1996
• Ina Schmidt, Widerstand - Protest - Verweigerung von Lübeckerinnen in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus 1933-1945, Lübeck 1995, S.46
• Albrecht Schreiber, Zwischen Davidstern und Doppeladler, Illustrierte Chronik der Juden in Moisling und Lübeck, Lübeck 1992
• Yad Vashem, The Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names
• Zeitzeugengespräche

Heidemarie Kugler-Weiemann, 2009