Jaffe, Jacob 'Jascha

Jakob (Jascha) Jaffe was born in Berlin on December 4, 1934, the youngest son of Russian citizen Boris Jaffe and his wife Ida née Poschumenski; his sister Tamara was born on October 22, 1932, and his brother Jakob (Jascha) on December 4, 1934. The family lived at Hauptstraße 110. The father Boris Jaffe was a film traveler and when the Warner Brothers company left Germany, he lost most of his income, and the family lived in poor conditions. In 1938, his father 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 join him, but due to the beginning of the Second World War this did not happen. 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 there was no further way, 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 both feet of Alexander and his mother were amputated, Ida died shortly after the amputation, Alexander in 1944 from pneumonia, Jacob died in 1944 because he was left all alone. Tamara also had some toes amputated, she survived typhoid fever, but thanks to the help of a woman she was the only one of the family to survive. After the end of the Second World War, she managed to emigrate to her father in the USA.