Jaffe, Ida

Ida Poschumenski was born in Vilna/Lithuania on March 3, 1909, the only daughter of four children of the electrician Hirsch Poschumenski and his wife Sofia. She became a saleswoman and moved with her family to Stolp in the early 1920s. There she met Boris Jaffe, a Russian Jew who had converted to Christianity. They married in Berlin in June 1931, and their children were born: Alexander (1931), Tamara (1932) and Jacob (1934). Boris Jaffe worked as a film traveler for Warner Brothers and earned well, the family lived in a 3-room apartment at Hauptstraße 110. When Warner Brothers left Germany in 1933, the family's income decreased drastically. In 1938, Boris Jaffe, as a Russian citizen, received a request to leave the country. He managed to obtain a visa for the USA and was able to travel to the USA via Denmark on a cargo ship. His wife and children were supposed to follow, but due to the beginning of the Second World War this did not succeed. In 1940 Ida Jaffe was supposed to vacate the apartment, on June 22, 1941 the SS took the family out of the apartment and brought them via a police station to Groß-Ziethen, from there on July 2, 1941 by train to Prague, then to the Bulgarian border, and when things did not go further there, to Serbia and the Bulgarian-Turkish border. From there, a transport train with more than 1000 people headed for Moscow. In Ukraine, in the small village of Berlotserkovka, Ida Jaffe and her children had to vegetate in miserable conditions. Because of frostbite, Ida and her son Alexander had both feet amputated; Ida died shortly after the amputation, Alexander in 1944, as did the youngest son Jakob. Tamara also had some toes amputated, she survived typhoid fever but managed to survive thanks to the help of a woman. After the end of the Second World War she was able to leave for her father in the USA
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