Moers

12/10/1941

Moers residents persecuted as Jews wait in front of the "Steinschen" restaurant to be transported on the Krefeld streetcar. Karl Coppel is standing by the right-hand window. 13-year-old Leo Mandelberger looks in the direction of the person taking the photo. The two were identified by survivor Werner Coppel.

Image: Stadtarchiv Moers

Annotations

Moers, 12/10/1941
Leo Mandelberger
Karl Coppel
Helene Bähr
Luggage

Historical context

De­por­ta­ti­on von Mo­ers nach Riga am 10.12.1941

On the morning of December 10, 1941, more than 80 members of the Moers synagogue community had to present themselves at the "Steinschen" streetcar stop. From there, they were taken to Krefeld on a streetcar operated by the Krefeld Verkehrs AG. Together with Krefeld deportees, the Jewish residents of Moers continued their journey by train to Düsseldorf main station. From Düsseldorf main train station, the deportees had to walk to the Derendorf slaughterhouse before everyone’s eyes- a 45-minute walk. They had to spend the night there. The next morning, the train departed at 10:30 a.m. with 1,007 deportees on board. The cars were overcrowded, and there was neither food nor drink. On December 13 at 11:35 p.m., the deportees arrived at Skirotava station, Riga. Not until the next morning were the unheated cars opened and the people taken to the Riga ghetto. Only two deportees from Moers survived the Shoah. Of the others, some were murdered in Riga and the surrounding woods, while the rest either succumbed to the fatal living conditions in the ghetto or were transferred to labor and concentration camps and killed there after the ghetto was dissolved in March 1943.

About the image se­ries

Three reproductions of the black-and-white original photographs in 17 x 12 cm format have survived. They show the transport of the deportees from Moers: One picture shows people waiting in front of the "Steinschen" restaurant in Hülsdonker Straße in Moers, two others show people boarding the streetcars provided by the Krefeld Verkehrs AG. The photographer took the pictures from only a short distance away to have a good view of what was happening. The quality of the pictures is low, the photos are blurred. This might hint to the photographer’s having either little experience or no opportunity to take a picture openly and adjust the focus.

Photographer

Un­known,

Provenance

Stadtarchiv Moers (the Moers municipal archives) made reproductions of the three deportation photographs at an unknown date. Johanna Meyer was recorded as the owner of the originals. Johanna Meyer came from a Jewish family and was married to Karl Meyer, a non-Jew. She survived in hiding in Moers and continued to live in the town until her death in 1981. The whereabouts of the negatives and the historical prints are unclear. Stadtarchiv Moers handed prints of the first of the two photographs showing the deportees boarding the streetcar to the archive of the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem in 2003.

Call num­ber at source ar­chi­ve

StA Mo­ers, Be­stand 60, Nr. 470

Tit­le at source ar­chi­ve

War­ten auf den Trans­port an der Hal­te­stel­le „Stein­schen“ der Kre­fel­der Stra­ßen­bahn (Kre­fel­der Stra­ße)

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Alena Saam from Stadtarchiv Moers for her dedicated support in describing and cataloging the images.

Text and re­se­arch by Lisa Pa­duch und Mar­cel Lay­her.

Kooperationsverbund #LastSeen.
Bilder der NS-Deportationen

Dr. Alina Bothe
Projektleiterin

c/o Selma Stern Zentrum für Jüdische Studien Berlin-Brandenburg
Freie Universität Berlin
Habelschwerdter Allee 34A
14195 Berlin
lastseen@zedat.fu-berlin.de