The Luwinski Archive

Sauerbaum and Allenstein

The Catholic half — Joachim Luwinski, Johanna Thimm, and their daughter Auguste

The Luwinski name in this family does not come from a father. It comes from a nineteen-year-old dressmaker who was not married when her son was born, and whose people farmed in the Ermland, the Catholic pocket of Protestant East Prussia.

Three generations

Anton Thimm
b. 16 July 1840
Elisabeth Thimm
b. 15 March 1845
Joachim Luwinski
b. 21 October 1865 at Allenstein (Olsztyn). Landwirt — a farmer. d. before 1955 at Sommerfeld, Osthavelland
Johanna Thimm
b. 25 March 1871 at Sauerbaum, Kreis Rössel. d. 30 October 1955 at Zeutern near Bruchsal, Baden-Württemberg. Cause: heart attack
Auguste “Lizzy” Luwinski
b. 28 August 1893 at Sauerbaum. Schneiderin und Modistin — dressmaker and milliner. d. 22 June 1975 at Kraichtal, Baden-Württemberg
Hilda Luwinski
Auguste's sister. Married Böttiger. No dates recorded

Where these places are

Allenstein and Kreis Rössel lie in the Ermland — the old prince-bishopric that stayed Catholic when the rest of East Prussia turned Lutheran, and which is Polish Warmia today. Farming country, German-speaking, Catholic, and about as far from Jewish Berlin as a family could be and still be in the same empire.

Johanna's recorded addresses make the family's century legible in four lines: the Hohenbrucher Chaussee at Sommerfeld until July 1932; Richard-Wagner-Straße 42 in Charlottenburg from 24 July 1932; and at the end, Besingstraße 110 at Zeutern in Baden-Württemberg, where she died in 1955. Out of East Prussia, into Berlin, and after the war into the west — a displacement the record states without ever naming it.

Auguste

She was nineteen when Kurt was born in Berlin on 11 May 1912, and unmarried. The child took her name. She did not marry his father, Jacob Leibholz, until 5 January 1924 — nearly twelve years later — and their second son, Siegfried, was born the following year at Martin-Luther-Straße 60 in Schöneberg.

Then the marriage ends. The tree records the divorce without a date. What it does record, plainly and in the order it happened, is this: the divorce; the ex-husband's death at Auschwitz in 1945; her second husband Paul Heinrich Bernhard Fricke, born at Magdeburg-Buckau on 15 April 1887, dead of cancer at Sommerfeld on 31 January 1946.

An undated divorce in a mixed marriage Open

A German woman not counted as Jewish, married to a Jewish man, in Berlin in the later 1930s, was in a Mischehe — and the pressure on such wives to divorce was official, sustained, and well documented, because divorce stripped the husband of the limited protection the marriage gave him. Some women held out; the Rosenstraße protest of February 1943 was made by wives who had.

This archive does not know when Auguste divorced Jacob, or why, and will not guess at a motive it cannot see. The date is the thing to find. A divorce before 1938 and one in 1942 are different histories, and the Berlin records can tell them apart.

What she did that can be seen

Her younger son was at Sommerfeld — her own family's place — from January 1943, weeks before his father was deported, and he was still there on 30 April 1945. Whatever else is unclear, a half-Jewish seventeen-year-old was got out of Berlin at the right moment and kept out.

She outlived both husbands by three decades and died at Kraichtal in Baden-Württemberg on 22 June 1975, having buried one son in Johannesburg six years earlier and leaving the other in Potsdam. Her trade passed to Kurt: she was a Schneiderin und Modistin; he was a dress designer.

Still to find