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Their Voices Live On

There has been no Jewish community in Themar since 1942 and the deportation of the Jews to Belzyce Ghetto and Theresienstadt Ghetto. We know of seven members of Themar’s Jewish families who survived the concentration camps: only one, Otto Baer, born in Themar in 1895, survived Auschwitz. Otto Baer had spent most of his life in Berlin and was deported from there to Auschwitz on 9 December 1942. How he survived 2 ½ years in Auschwitz is a story yet to be told. After the war, he returned to Berlin and in 1947 was living in the eastern part of the city. Perhaps someone reading this page will be able to tell us more about him.

The others had survived Theresienstadt: 73-year-old Minna Frankenberg, née Gassenheimer, Helene Gassenheimer, née Hirsch; Hulda Grossmann, née Bär; Hulda Grünbaum, née Schlesinger; Meta Krakauer (née Frankenberg), her niece, Doris Lorenz, née Frankenberg; and four members of the family of Salomon & Karolina Müller’s eldest child, Dina Walther, née Müller. Two of her daughters, Gertrud Heim, née Walther, and Rita Dressel, née Walther, and two grandchildren, Walter and Marga Dressel, returned from Theresienstandt.

But Jewish voices were actually heard in Themar at the time of liberation. With the irony of fate, a great-nephew of Meta Krakauer, née Frankenberg, Ludwig Mühlfelder, was one of the American soldiers who liberated Themar in April 1945. These pages tell something of the story of reconnections made in the years since then.

1945 – 1989

1990 – 2007

2008 –