Autor/Autorin
The estate of letters and photos of Adele and Wilhelm Halberstam and their family was handed over to the historian Irmtrud Wojak by their granddaughter Lore Hepner (Santiago de Chile) in the 1990s. These are numerous letters written in Sütterlin script by the Halberstams from the Netherlands to Chile from 1939-1944. Adele and Wilhelm Halberstam fled Berlin after the pogrom of 9/10 November 1938. They travelled by ship to Rotterdam and from there took the train to Amsterdam, where they arrived in April 1939 and where their son Albert Halberstam had already found refuge in November 1933.
Wilhelm Halberstam, born in 1866 and a successful businessman, was 72 years old at the time of the escape, his wife Adele five years younger. Their daughter Käthe, a chemical laboratory assistant by profession, met the lawyer Dr Heinrich Hepner in 1920, who had become the youngest lawyer admitted to the Berlin Court of Appeal. He had been a partner in the law firm of Berlin lawyer Eugen Fuchs, former president of the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, since 1912. Käthe and Heinrich married in 1921 in the Great Synagogue in Berlin’s Fasanenstraße, and their daughter Lore Hepner was born in 1929.
Lore Hepner and her two older brothers were sent on a Kindertransport from Berlin to Rotterdam on 7 February 1939. There they were accommodated in a camp for refugee children. In the first few days of May, their parents picked them up to continue their journey to London. They stayed behind in Berlin until Heinrich Hepner recovered. Heinrich Hepner was arrested on 10 November 1938, deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp and finally released on condition that he emigrate. The last meeting of the Hepner-Halberstams took place in Amsterdam in May 1939.
The Halberstams’ letters are an extraordinary source. They fought for every day of their lives, which became increasingly cramped and oppressed. Indirectly, we learn a lot from their letters about the German occupation of the Netherlands and their collaboration with the National Socialists. The letters travelling from Amsterdam to Santiago, each with a few weeks’ delay, hinted at much of what had just happened in the Netherlands.
Wilhelm Halberstam died in 1944 from the cruel prison conditions in the Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands; his wife Adele, like their son Albert Halberstam, was murdered in the Auschwitz extermination camp in 1944.
Lore Hepner and Irmtrud Wojak published a selection of the Halberstams’ transcribed letters in 1996; the volume is out of print. The story can be read in more detail in the interactive Fritz Bauer Library, and a new edition in the Fritz Bauer Library book series is already planned.
Lore Hepner and Irmtrud Wojak published a selection of the Halberstams’ transcribed letters in 1996 under the title “Geliebte Kinder. Briefe aus dem Amsterdamer Exil in die Neue Welt” (Klartext Verlag, Essen); the volume has been out of print for some time.
The story can currently be read in more detail in the interactive Fritz Bauer Library, and a new edition of the letters is planned in the Fritz Bauer Library book series.
Translations have been published in Spanish and Dutch.
The estate of Adele and Wilhelm Halberstam is currently being catalogued with a finding aid.
The letters, some of which are written on both sides of wafer-thin airmail paper and some of which have been censored (parts have been cut out), are being digitised and will then be accessible to archive users.
Duration: 1938-1948
Extent: 4 archive boxes