Hüxstraße 110 - The Beutel family

The Beutel family lived at Hüxstraße 110 from 1935 to 1940.  Their apartment was on the second floor.

Rubin Tanchem Beutel, trader and later religious official of the Jewish community, came to Lübeck in 1904. He was born in Boryslaw/Galicia on 27 January 1877.   His wife Frieda Hinda Helene, née Schorr, was born on 22 August 1879 in Letnia/Galicia. Some sources give different dates for their births.

The couple had ten children. Both their eldest sons were still born in Letnia / Galicia: Kalman on 16 December 1903, Moses on 15 October 1906. Frieda Beutel followed her husband with their two young boys. Once in Lübeck the family lived first at St.-Annen-Straße 12. Their eldest daughter Maria Dora was born in Lübeck on 11 January 1908. Israel’s birth followed on 24 April 1909, Cissy’s on 20 May 1910, Aron Salomon’s on 3 August 1912, Abraham Nachum’s on 18 December 1913, Rebecka Sonja’s on 26 December 1915, Simon’s on 7 December 1918 and finally Lea’s on 23 January 1922. Little Lea died on 12 January 1923, barely a year old.

The children attended the city’s nearby elementary schools and afterwards started their vocational training: Kalman in commerce, Moses as a tailor, Aron Salomon took training to be a joiner and cabinetmaker in the firm of August Mühlke, a master carpenter at Hundestraße 17. Afterwards he worked with master carpenter Martin Mars at Schützenstraße 45a. Then, from August 1933 to June 1934, he went to France and afterwards he was back in Lübeck employed as a carpenter’s journeyman. Israel worked as an unskilled warehouseman at the scrap merchants Meyer & Co, as well as later on at Ruben & Co.

The three daughters worked as housemaids, Cissy in Altona near Hamburg starting in 1932 and then in Hamburg in 1933. Finally in 1939 she moved to Berlin, where her elder sister Maria Dora had already lived since 1925. In 1935 Maria Dora and Moses went to Palestine. On 28 January their ship left the port of Trieste for Haifa. Rebecka Sonja, youngest of the three sisters, stayed in Lübeck, where her daughter Rosa was born on 5 June 1935. On 5 March 1937 Rosa’s sister Simmy followed. Rebecka Sonja and her two children lived with her parents.

Like her sister, Cissy Rebekka, Sonja Beutel is said to have also been a member of the Socialist Youth Association.

Abraham Nachum was mentally handicapped and starting in 1924 was cared for in a home in Beelitz south of Berlin and then in 1931 in Lübeck at the home at Triftstraße 139-41. He was 24 years old when he died on 18 May 1937.

Only two weeks later, on 30 May 1937, their father Rubin Tanchem died at the age of 59 years. Ellen F., nèe Meyer, remembers this situation very clearly. She was born in 1929 and lived on the first floor of Hüxstraße 110 with her parents and her brother who was a year younger than she. Both children accompanied their mother on a visit to their mourning neighbours in order to offer their condolences. The deceased was lying there in state, the mirror was covered under a dark cloth, and the men, who were present, were wearing their Kippa.

Ellen F. remembers above all Rosa, with whom she often played, Rosa’s little sister, both girls’ grandparents and two younger men. The Beutels lived very secluded lives. Their apartment had four rooms like that of the Meyer family. The windows on the left in the room where they slept opened to the street, and those on the right were part of the living room. One of the rooms situated in the back had no windows.  

The building at Hüxstraße 110 belonged to Noah Honig, who had his clothing shop on the ground floor. Frau F. remembers him as "very very nice". From the window of a room in the attic, which she and her brother used as a playroom, she could overlook the roof of the lower annex of the building, on top of which a wooden booth was erected. With many branches it was turned into a sukkah, in which the Beutel family celebrated Sukkoth, the Feast of Booths.  From their vantage point they could observe all the men with their braids and kippas entering the sukkah.

After his public schooling Simon Beutel took vocational training at the workshop for Jewish youth in Hamburg in order to become a gardener. The training course took place under the direction of Walter Rosenbaum at Wilhelminenhöhe in Hamburg-Blankenese, Rissener Landstraße 127.

In a letter of the Beratungsstelle für Jüdische Wirtschaftshilfe (an information service for economic aid for Jews) Herr Rosenbaum was informed on 12 November 1939, that "Simon Beutel from Lübeck would subsequently be sent to work at Hachschara in Neuendorf " and therefore would be understood "to have left the training to be a gardener" (Staatsarchiv Hamburg 362-6/10 Talmud Tora).  

In Hebrew Hakhshara literally means „making fit”. In Neuendorf im Sande near Berlin, like in several other institutions of Zionist organisations, young Jews received training in farm work and other areas in order to prepare them (make them fit) to emigrate to and live in Palestine. For Simon Beutel, however, emigration did not become a reality.

In February 1940 the family had to leave their flat at Hüxstraße 110, a compulsory change of living quarters in the course of the Aryanization of the building. For a couple of months Frieda Beutel, her daughter and both grandchildren found shelter in a back room of another Jewish family’s flat on Königstraße 116, then for a few weeks at the  "Asyl" of the Jewish community on St. Annen- Straße 11 and finally in two rooms in a wing of Marlesgrube 52, the home of the Jewish Langsner family. A „Steuerobersekretär“ (a subordinate tax official) made the following statement during restitution procedures in 1962:

"The household effects of Frau Beutel were at that time auctioned off in my presence by the auctioneer Koch in Lübeck. If my memory is correct the proceeds amounted to about 450.00 Reichsmark. One portion of the household items had to be given away free, as they realized no bids. A portion of the furniture was absolutely worthless. ...The furniture was collected from the flat at Hüxstraße 110..."

(Landesarchiv Schleswig, Abt. 352 Kiel, 8888)

In the Beutel family’s desperate situation the Reichsvereinigung (Reich's Association of Jews in Germany) intervened and in a letter of 25 February 1940 tried to get a Hamburg residence permit for Rosa and Simmy so that they could be admitted to the Jewish girl’s orphanage „Paulinenstift“ "as a change of environment is urgently needed ". In August 1941 Rosa was indeed enrolled in the first form/lowest grade of the Jewish elementary school on Carolinenstraße. There her class teacher was Rebecca Rothschild (Staatsarchiv Hamburg 362-6/10 Talmud Tora). So at that time Rosa would also have been accommodated at the Paulinenstift. Whether her sister was also admitted to the same school we could only guess.

On 6 December 1941 Frieda Hinda Helene Beutel was deported to Riga at the age of 61 years, together with her brother-in-law Isaak Beutel, brother of her late husband, her 23-year-old son Simon, her 26-year-old daughter Rebekka Sonja as well as her little daughters, Frieda’s grandchildren: Rosa, who was just 6 years, and Simmy only 4 years old. Kalman Beutel, her eldest son, was also with them. They all died in Riga. Whether they already died at Camp Jungfernhof from hunger and the cold in the first winter months or if they were among the victims of the two mass shootings in the Bikernieki forest near Riga in February and March 1942 is not known.

Cissy Beutel and her 3-year-old daughter were deported from Berlin to Auschwitz in December 1942 where they were killed.

References in Addition to Standard Reference Materials:

• Adressbücher und Meldekartei der Hansestadt Luebeck (Address and Registration Records of the Hanseatic City of Luebeck)
• Archiv der Hansestadt Lübeck, Staatliche Polizeiverwaltung 109, 110, 124, 126
• Schul- und Kultusverwaltung 375
• Buch der Erinnerung, Die ins Baltikum deportierten deutschen, österreichischen und tschechoslowakischen Juden, bearbeitet von Wolfgang Scheffler und Diana Schulle, München 2003
• Datenpool JSHD der Forschungsstelle "Juden in Schleswig-Holstein" an der Universität Flensburg
• Landesarchiv Schleswig, Abt. 352 Kiel, 8888, 8889 und Abt. 761, 17406
• Memorbuch zum Gedenken an die jüdischen, in der Schoa umgekommenen Schleswig-Holsteiner und Schleswig-Holsteinerinnen, hrsg. V. Miriam Gillis-Carlebach, Hamburg 1996
• Andreas Paetz und Karin Weiss (Hrsg.), "Hachschara", Die Vorbereitung junger Juden auf die Auswanderung nach Palästina, Potsdam 1999
• Albrecht Schreiber, Zwischen Davidstern und Doppeladler, Illustrierte Chronik der Juden in Moisling und Lübeck, Lübeck 1992
• Staatsarchiv Hamburg  362-6/10 Talmud Tora
• Yad Vashem, The Central Database of Shoah Victims Names
• Coversations with contemporaries of the Beutel family

Heidemarie Kugler-Weiemann, 2008 and 2014

Translation:  Martin Harnisch and Glenn Sellick, 2010