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On 12 November 1941, Martha Hahn, née Katz, b. 1889 in Themar, was deported from Frankfurt am Main to Minsk Ghetto in Belarus, 1672 km to the east. Martha was a member of the Adolf & Meta (née Schwab) Katz family, one of the founding families who had helped establish a Jewish community in Themar in the final decades of the 19th century.
Martha probably lived in Themar until around 1910. We do not know much about her life once she left Themar: in December 1938, she registered the addition of ‘Sara’ to her name in 1939 with the Themar Standesamt/City Register, and from this form, we know that she was married, Martha Hahn, geb. [= née] Katz, and that she was living in Frankfurt at Herbartstrasse 9.
And we know that she was deported from Frankfurt am Main on 12 November 1941. She was 52 years old. We do not know if she was alone and we will probably never will, the exact date of her death. Few people survived the 12 November 1941 transport and the sources suggest that the few survivors were male.
Between November 1941 and October 1942, approximately 20,000 Jewish people from the „Old Reich“ (Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia) were deported to the Minsk ghetto. By October 1943, most of them were dead.
We honour the memory of one of these people, Martha Hahn, née Katz, born 1889 in Themar.
Update, 03 December 2014: A list of the Jews of Frankfurt deported to Minsk on 11/12 November 1941 has entries (see below) for Martha Hahn, geb. Katz, living at the same address as Hugo Hahn, b. 15.5.1884, and a R Hahn, b. 30.10.1923. This suggests that these three comprised Martha’s family. The German National Archives Memorial Book has entries for three people with the same birth dates, etc., with the one difference that the young woman born in October 1923 is identified as Margot R. Hahn.
See as well the research material provided by Yad Vashem in its „Trains to Extinction“ database, „Transport Train Da 53 from Frankfurt am Main, Wiesbaden, Hesse-Nassau, Germany to Minsk, Minsk City, Minsk, Belorussia (USSR) on 11/11/1941“