Jakob Hirschkorn and Halina Zylberberg: The fortunes of a Jewish family from Łódź

Jakob Hirschkorn was born in Łódź on 1 January 1914. After the First World War, his parents emigrated to Germany, first to Darmstadt, then to Wawern near Trier, close to the border with Luxembourg in 1919/20. The family, which was originally called Herszkorn, came from the south of Russia. Around 1860, they moved to Łódź to escape famine and anti-Jewish pogroms. Jakob’s father Aron Hirschkorn was born there in 1885. In 1887, he married Sara Lachmann in Drzewica near Radom in what is today the Voivoideship of Łódź. The family worked in the textiles trade. Through this work, they developed relationships with Darmstadt, where one of Jakob’s uncles lived. In Wawern, the father Aron built up a modest existence as a mobile shoe salesman. He knew the area because he had been a prisoner of war there during the First World War and after the end of the war he had got to know the local Jews in the synagogue. Jakob Hirschkorn had four siblings. The year of his older sister Sophie’s birth, who was also born in Łódź, is not known. Paula was born in Darmstadt in 1919, followed by Norbert in Wawern in 1921 and Erna two years later.

In Saarbücken, Jakob Hirschkorn learnt a butcher’s trade and returned to Wawern in 1935 after the Saar plebiscite. From that year on, the family was subjected to constant harassment there. The Nazis regularly besieged the Hirschkorns’ house and shattered windowpanes at least three times. The SA forced entry into their house and extorted money, shoes and other things by threatening them. In 1936, Aron Hirschkorn had to close his shoe business.

To Luxembourg

After his arrest by the Gestapo and brief imprisonment in Trier in August 1938, Jakob made the decision to flee to Luxembourg. He was 24 years old. At this point, it was nigh on impossible to emigrate legally to neutral Luxembourg because the number of Jewish refugees to the country had grown significantly, particularly as a result of the “annexation of Austria”. There was a lot of resentment there, particularly towards people from Poland. For example, a report by the Gendarmerie states:

“It is to be noted that Hirschkorn is a Jewish refugee who, according to his passport, only has a residence permit limited to a specific date. He is working here below the rate of a standard wage. His employer does not want to provide a guarantee for a possible transport home to Poland. Because the country is swamped with Jewish refugees - who can no longer find accommodation in other countries – and is also otherwise overrun with foreigners, and the State currently has enormous costs to maintain a border crew to stem the tide of refugees, the request cannot be assessed here.”

Migrant workers

In the period that followed, the judicial authorities tolerated Jakob Hirschkorn in Luxembourg because he had applied to the Jewish aid organisation ESRA for migration to Paraguay, where his uncle lived, or to England. He worked in agriculture on different farms in Echternach, a small town in the east of Luxembourg, close to the German border. By all accounts, Jakob Hirschkorn was a kind of migrant worker employed by a different farmer each year. Because there was a lack of farmworkers, it was almost the only area in which the Jewish refugees had a chance to get work. But they were often paid only a pittance.

In May 1940, the German armed forces invade neutral Luxembourg. In September 1941, the Nazis imprisoned Jakob Hirschkorn together with 53 more Jewish forced labourers from Luxembourg in a labour camp for the “Reichsautobahn” in the Eifel. Back in Luxembourg, the German occupiers deported  Jakob Hirschkorn on 17 October 1941 to “Litzmannstadt”.

In the Litzmannstadt Ghetto

Jakob found his parents (Sara and Aron) and his brother Norbert again in the Litzmannstadt  Ghetto. Aron and Norbert had been expelled from Germany at the end of October 1938 along with a further 17,000 Polish Jews from Germany. From Cologne-Deutz, they were deported in a closed train to the German border station of Neu-Bentschen (now Zbąszynek) to the west of Poznań and forced by the SS to go the last few kilometres on foot to the border. His father Aron was part of a larger group which the Polish border guards did not allow to enter the country. These people had to stay in German detention camps. His mother Sara, who had had to watch how Nazi henchmen ravaged her house during the November pogroms of 1938, left Wawern with her youngest daughter Erna in June 1939 to be with her husband in Neu-Bentschen. The Germans later deported the couple to the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. The SS murdered both of them in Auschwitz in 1944.

The fortunes of the siblings

Jakob’s brother Norbert was taken out of the Cologne train in Schwedt/Oder and taken for forced labour in a stone quarry. After the invasion of Poland by the armed forces, he and 200 other Jewish prisoners of a “Sonderkommando” had to empty factories, farms, businesses and homes so that everything could be taken “to the Reich”. When the unit reached Łódź, Norbert Hirschkorn stayed with his parents in the ghetto. From 1941, he was a forced labourer on the Reichsautobahns that ran from Frankfurt (Oder) to Poznań and from Wrocław to Kraków. After 30 months of ongoing slave labour, the Germans took him to the Auschwitz concentration camp where the forced labour continued. On 17 January 1945, the SS forced 3,000 prisoners west to the Blechhammer concentration camp where Norbert Hirschkorn was able to escape along with other prisoners. He managed to return to Wawern near Trier via Luxembourg in a transportation of former Belgian deportees. In 1951, he abandoned his plans to emigrate to Argentina or Canada when he opened a men’s and ladies’ knitwear business in Trier. In Brussels he had met Rita Weinmann, who had fled from the Nazis in Berlin. They married in 1953 and had two children Sonia and Ronnie. Norbert Hirschkorn was elected to the Board of the Jewish community in 1963. He died on 14 June 2002.

Jakob’s eldest sister Sophie, who left Wawern for Cologne with her husband Jakob Schimmel in 1937, was also brutally deported to Poland by the Germans during the so-called “Poland campaign” at the end of October 1938. To date, her fate has not been able to be determined; it is possible that the couple was murdered in Majdanek. The younger sisters Paula and Erna Hirschkorn were able to be saved by going to England. Paula Hirschkorn arrived in Dover on 20 February 1939 after obtaining a visa two days before. At first, she lived with an aunt in London’s East End. Erna then also found accommodation there. But because the home was too small for the family, the two sisters moved to their own lodgings. Shortly after the end of the war, Paula met Chaim Berlin who was from Vilnius. He was the only survivor in his family. Chaim had been a Polish prisoner of war in Stalag VIII A near Görlitz. After liberation, he and many others went to Scotland. There had been Polish military units in Scotland since September 1939 to support Great Britain in the fight against Nazi Germany. When Chaim Berlin married Paula Hirschkorn in 1946, he was still a soldier. Many of his Polish colleagues who were stationed in Scotland came to the celebrations. Paula and Chaim had three children – Alan, Hilary and Sophie. Chaim Berlin became an engineer and died in 2006 at the age of 92. Paula Hirschkorn-Berlin died in 2016 at the age of 96.

In Neu-Bentschen, Erna Hirschkorn found out that she had been given a place on a Kindertransport to England which meant that she was also able to flee Nazi Germany on 13 August 1939. She met her sister Paula again in London. She later married the Englishman Edward (Eddy) Binki. The couple also had three children – Adrian, Leslie and Raymond. Edward Binki worked as a car mechanic and died in 1995. Erna Hirschkorn-Binki died in 2014.

Marriage in the Ghetto

On 13 June 1943 in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, Jakob Hirschkorn married Halina (Chaja) Zylberberg, born on 30 October 1925 in Łódź. Halina was initially sent to work in the fields and had to then work in a factory which made and repaired shoes and boots for the armed forces. She was later deployed loading and unloading cargo in Radegast, the train station in Łódź. At the station she met Jakob Hirschkorn who had been working there since the end of 1941. At the end of August 1944, after the Germans had deported around a further 75,000 people to the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Chełmno extermination camps, Jakob and Halina were sent to the so-called “clearance commando” that was supposed to remove all traces of the Nazis in the ghetto. In mid-January 1945, Halina and Jakob were considering whether they should hide in the freezing cold in the almost empty ghetto, or whether to flee. Before they could decide, an SS squad appeared and took both of them and others to the Gestapo prison. Soviet soldiers freed the couple a few days later on 19 January.

In a moving interview, Halina later also reported that her family were driven out of their grocery store by the invasion of the German armed forces in Poland and taken to the ghetto. Her father died there of malnutrition in 1940. The Nazis deported her brother to Auschwitz in 1941, her mother and one of her sisters in 1944, and murdered them there. Her younger sister was shot when she tried to help a fellow prisoner who was abusing a German soldier. Only her older sister survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and went to Buenos Aires.

Back in the Trier region

On 11 June 1945, Jakob and Halina Hirschkorn-Zylberberg arrived in Wawern via Berlin, Leipzig, Halle and Trier. They did not receive their meagre financial support and ration cards until November. Because Jacob’s parent’s house was uninhabitable, they crudely renovated it, living with family friends whilst they did so. In the reparation proceedings, Jakob later explained that “all the furniture and objects [had been] pilfered” from his parent’s house. A former policeman was ordered by the French military government to hand over furniture and furnishings to the Hirschkorns. In 1946, their daughter Ruth was born in Trier, three years later their son Remon was born. Life in the first years after the war “was fairly wretched”, said Jakob Hirschkorn later. Halina worked as a harvester. The situation improved somewhat when he got a commercial licence to trade in shoes and livestock.

Reparation

In 1951, Jakob Hirschkorn received reparation from the Federal Republic of Germany for 39 months’ “deprivation of liberty”. However, the authority offset any previous subsistence payments. The Commission recognised a 30% reduction in earning capacity for the severe abuse suffered in the ghetto in 1943 at the hands of the SS resulting in massive head and facial injuries, Jakob Hirschkorn did not receive any reparation for the forced labour on the Reichsautobahn because he was not able to provide any written proof. He did, however, receive a settlement for the “damage to his professional advancement” that he suffered. Halina received an orphan’s pension and a pension due to reduced earning capacity as well as reparation for wrongful imprisonment for 62 months in the ghetto.

To London

In 1952, Jakob moved to Konz with his family and opened a textile business. In 1955, they became German citizens. In the London interview, Halina said that one morning after the popular uprising in Hungary in 1956 red swastikas were smeared across two of her shop windows. In April 1960, the Hirschkorn family went to London because Halina felt ill at ease in Konz; their daughter Ruth remembers the racist abuse. Jakob Hirschkorn initially travelled to England on his own in order to find an apartment. When he returned home, they wound up the business and sold their house. After five years’ residency, the Hirschkorns became British citizens. In London, Jakob worked in a kosher butcher’s shop until his sudden death in 1976. Halina married again in 1983. She died in 2001.

Wolfgang Schmitt-Kölzer, January 2022

 

 

 

Sources:

Alan Berlin and Ruth Hirsch (London): Emails 2020/21.

Eberhard, Pascale (publ.): Der Überlebenskampf jüdischer Deportierter aus Luxembourg und der Region Trier im Getto Litzmannstadt, Briefe Mai 1942, Saarbrücken 2012.

Heidt, Günter: “Ich wollte nur nach Hause, immer nur nach Wawern.” Die zweifache Integration des Auschwitz-Überlebenden Norbert Hirschkorn. Jahrbuch Kreis Trier-Saarburg, 2017.

Regional Financial Authority (Rhineland Palatinate), Office for Restitution in Saarburg (LfF-AfW): Reparation files LEG a 175, VA 71 215  (Halina Hirschkorn, later Kahn), VA 132 878 (Jakob Hirschkorn)

Central State Archive Koblenz (LHA Ko) Order 584,2, No. 177, 183 and 745 – 746.

National Life Stories, Living Memory of the Jewish Community, in partnership with British Library: Interview Halina Kahn, formerly Hirschkorn (18/12/1989-08/01/1990), C410/060.

National Archive of Luxembourg (ANLux): J-108-0397715.

Schmitt-Kölzer, Wolfgang, Zeimetz, Ferd.: Verfolgt und unerwünscht: Aus dem Leben des Jakob Hirschkorn. Tageblatt (Luxembourg), 11/6/2020.