The Luwinski Archive
An evidence-first archive for the family of Lynn Derrick Luwinski — Berlin, Schubin, Sauerbaum, Lourenço Marques, Johannesburg, Porto.
Four of this family's men were deported from Berlin between 1941 and 1944 and did not come back. One young man got out in 1933 and became a dress designer in Johannesburg. A woman born in Portuguese East Africa married four times in that city and was buried in Porto. This archive sets down what can be documented about all of them — and one finding that unsettles how they are joined together.
The spine
Lynn Derrick Luwinski is living, and this archive names him and says nothing else about him. Everything narrated here is about the dead behind him.
| Generation | Who | Where | What happened |
|---|---|---|---|
| Great-grandparents | Sally Leibholz & Friederike Schmul | Hammerstein; married at Szubin, 1874 | A Jewish family of the Posen–West Prussia borderland |
| Joachim Luwinski & Johanna Thimm | Allenstein and Sauerbaum, East Prussia | Catholic farming people of the Ermland | |
| Grandparents | Jacob Leibholz | b. Schubin 1884; Berlin-Schöneberg | Deported to Auschwitz, 26 February 1943 |
| Auguste “Lizzy” Luwinski | b. Sauerbaum 1893; d. Kraichtal 1975 | Dressmaker and milliner. Survived | |
| Parents | Kurt Israel Luwinski | b. Berlin 1912; d. Johannesburg 1968 | Left Germany in 1933, aged 21 |
| Ivone Mota Figueiredo | b. Lourenço Marques 1924; d. Porto | Four marriages, three countries |
The finding this archive cannot avoid
Kurt Israel Luwinski is very probably not Derrick's biological father Inferred
If he were, Derrick's DNA would carry about a quarter Ashkenazi Jewish from Jacob Leibholz and about a quarter East Prussian German from Auguste. It carries 0.0% and 1.4%. His nearest matches are British and Portuguese, and there is no German or Jewish cluster anywhere near the top of a list 5,464 long.
And the Y-DNA now agrees. Derrick's paternal haplogroup, read on 14 September 2026, is R-S11477 — R1b, branch U106/Z381, the North Sea lineage that peaks in the Netherlands and England. It is not a lineage characteristic of Ashkenazi paternal descent. Two independent systems, the same answer, and they agree on direction as well: the autosomal cluster is British, and the haplogroup's largest European population is England.
The evidence, the arithmetic, what the Y can and cannot prove →
That does not make the Berlin history untrue, and it does not make it less his. Jacob Leibholz died at Auschwitz; his brothers Samuel and Oskar died there too, and Georg at Chełmno. Kurt escaped in 1933 and carried the name. It is the family Derrick was born into and named for. Whether it is also the family he descends from is a different question, and this archive keeps the two apart rather than pretending they are one.
Where to start
Four men, four entries in the German Federal Archives' Memorial Book. Two corrections to the family tree fall out of them.
Born at Lourenço Marques in 1924. Married a da Rocha, a de Witt, a Luwinski and a Salkow. Buried at Porto.
Two marriages four and a half months apart, and a divorce filed before the child was born.
The Catholic half: a farmer, a milliner, and a son born twelve years before his parents married.
Every person in the source, labelled — including the hundred who are a surname index and not ancestry.
What “documented”, “inferred” and “disputed” mean here, and why living people are absent.