Samuel Steinfeld

Samuel Steinfeld was born in Breslau on January 23, 1911. His parents were Israel Steinfeld and Miriam Dina née Langleben. The two married shortly after the turn of the century and moved to Breslau in what was then the German Reich. They ran a wholesale fruit and vegetable store there, where Samuel worked from 1925 at the age of 14. The address of this store was Möwenweg 25, this street is now called Ul. Partyzantów. Samuel moved to Deblin probably around 1928, at the age of 17 or 18, to help his grandfather in his store. His parents followed him a short time later. On the photo of his parents there is a young woman who could be Samuel's sister. There is no information available about this person.

The change of location to Deblin resulted in the Steinfelds losing their German citizenship after living in Wroclaw for decades. In 1978-1980, Samuel Steinfeld attempted to claim "persecution-related expulsion damages" under the Federal Expellees Act. This law was not about National Socialist persecution, but about "German" expellees from the former eastern territories. The trial therefore had to clarify whether his father was to be regarded as German. According to the court, Israel Steinfeld was considered a Jew, not a German. It stated that "the plaintiff's father in Deblin continued to consider himself as belonging to the Jewish nationality. A confession of German nationality cannot be seen in this." From this questionable court decision it can at least be deduced that Samuel Steinfeld lived between Jewish-German, and from the late 1920s also Polish "linguistic and cultural circles". The trial, which went all the way to the Federal Constitutional Court, ended with a settlement. Samuel Steinfeld was granted a stay at a health resort, but no justice in the matter. 

In Deblin Samuel Steinfeld played soccer, we can recognize him on a team photo. In 1933, his grandfather's vegetable business was transferred to him. The information about the time in Deblin comes from various applications for compensation that Samuel Steinfeld filed in the 1950s. He describes in one application what his family suffered in the Holocaust, and that he was the only one to survive. The time and place references in this station also come from documents related to the compensation claim.

In September 1939, Poland was occupied by the Wehrmacht, and Polish Jews were required to wear a star. The introduction of the  "star" was considered in the post-war period in court as the beginning of Nazi persecution.  In 1940, the Steinfelds were forced into the Deblin Ghetto. In the meantime, Samuel had apparently married and had a child. In the ghetto he worked as a forced laborer at the airport in Deblin. The identification tag he had to wear is still in the collection of the Jewish Museum Berlin. From the Deblin ghetto, people were deported to the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps and murdered, which is probably how Steinfeld's wife, child and mother died. His father and he, on the other hand, were deported to Czestochowa.

There they were from January 1942 to January 1944 and were taken to Buchenwald concentration camp. Israel Steinfeld died in Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, shortly after the liberation in April 1945. Samuel Steinfeld was able to escape from a so-called "death march" after the camp was dissolved on May 2, 1945, and survived. In his autobiography Ignatz Bubis, later chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, describes that he went to Berlin with his Deblin friends "Stasiek" Steinfeld and Cyril Stamfater. In the four-sector city the three survivors began to run a trading business with the help of Bubis's uncle. 

In November 1945, Steinfeld, together with Bubis and another friend, went via Dresden to Berlin, where he was accommodated in the Schlachtensee Displaced Persons Camp. The address is given in his DP identity card. After this stay, Samuel Steinfeld moved to Dresden in 1947/48 to regain his footing as a merchant in the postwar period. According to Bubis' statements, the two ran a commission business ("Tauschzentrale") together. This was located, according to his certificate of commercial space allocation, at Schillerplatz 14. It is obvious that the choice fell on Dresden due to connections to his later fiancée Ruth Schwarz (née Ulbrich), who was killed in a car accident in 1949. 

During the years 1948 to 1950, Steinfeld seems to have moved back and forth frequently between Berlin and Dresden: In the documents, his addresses alternate between Dresden (Großhainerstraße 69) and Berlin (Mommsenstraße 20/ Fasanenstraße 61). Bubis himself describes that he had brought goods from the Soviet occupation zone or the GDR to West Berlin, thereby building up a lucrative business. Steinfeld also took part in the racketeering business that flourished in Germany as a whole in the postwar period. 

Between the end of 1950 and the beginning of 1951, Steinfeld finally moved to Fasanenstrasse 61 in Berlin-Charlottenburg, although he had been registered in Berlin since May 1949. The reason for his move must have been - as his girlfriend Hertha Kretschmann later described in her application for political asylum - persecution by the authorities in the GDR. In 1950 Steinfeld was remanded in custody in Radebeul (near Dresden), where he stayed from September to the end of December 1950 (released at Christmas). Only through the help of Bubis and legal assistance was he able to be brought to West Berlin, where he  took over Bubis's apartment in Fasanenstrasse.

In the official indictment of the public prosecutor's office at the Dresden Regional Court, Bubis and Steinfeld are accused of racketeering and tax evasion in the GDR s. The time in Dresden until 1953 seems to have been difficult for Steinfeld with the private indictment as well as another U detention in 1953. From Bubis' autobiography it can be read that Bubis had warned Steinfeld to audition at the presidium before his arrest. Herta Kretschmann's letter also reveals that the Soviet secret police (GPU) wanted to arrest Steinfeld. She herself was accused of being connected to "West Berlin Jewish circles." Whether these interrogations and also threats were related to the 1952/53 anti-Semitic campaign in the East can only be conjectured.

Since the early 1950s, Samuel Steinfeld had been in a relationship with his former Dresden employee Herta Kretschmann. Since Herta was a war widow, she would no longer have been paid a widow's pension if she had remarried. For material reasons, therefore, the couple did not marry. They had a daughter together since 1952. Samuel Steinfeld received a compensation payment for the ghetto and concentration camp imprisonment he suffered. The compensation was later extended to include the time spent in the ghetto and "carrying stars." Steinfeld suffered a "loss of freedom" of 65 months and 1 day, for each full month he received 150 DM compensation, he also temporarily received a monthly pension due to disability after the long period of imprisonment.

The success from the "legal black market"-as Bubis called it-under Soviet occupation apparently could not be transformed into long-term stable business activity. In the early 1950s, Steinfeld had registered a company in Berlin-Wedding. He was a partner and employee in a clothing store owned by Icek Prajs until April 1958. Around this time he probably also ran a bar in Bruchmühlbach near Kaiserslautern, it was called "Femina". We see him on a photo standing in this bar. The address of this station comes from a matchbox of the bar "Femina". In Berlin-Charlottenburg he was also part owner of a bar, the "Club 007" from 1969.

Samuel Steinfeld was a member of the Jewish Community of Berlin since 1953. Its community center is still located at Fasanenstraße 79-80 in Charlottenburg, very close to Samuel Steinfeld's former residence. Some of the documents and pictures in the collection suggest that Steinfeld regularly attended events there. A few photos show him with friends* at a Seder evening on Passover and with his daughter at a Purim celebration.

A membership card for the Jewish Community's Youth Children's Center has also been preserved from his daughter s visit. This indicates that Samuel Steinfeld and his wife Herta encouraged their daughter's Jewish education. Also not far from Steinfeld's apartment, at Pestalozzistrasse 14 in Charlottenburg, was and is the Pestalozzistrasse Synagogue of the Jewish Community, for which Steinfeld held an annual pass for the year 5724 (1963/64) in order to attend services there. Samuel Steinfeld was issued a Mifkad Olim in 1948 - a document that allowed Jews* to immigrate to Palestine or the state of Israel, which was founded in 1948. Even though Steinfeld never emigrated to Israel, he apparently entertained the idea at times and also later supported the Jewish state through his membership in the Zionist Organization in Germany.

Steinfeld's possessions also included a folding card from the Jewish National Fund, on which the Yiskor prayer is printed and the importance of building Israel as "the only refuge of persecuted Jewry" is emphasized. Accordingly, his Jewish identity was very conscious and important to him. After his death in 1987, Samuel Steinfeld was buried in the Jewish Cemetery on Heerstrasse.