Felice Schragenheim

Dr. Albert Schragenheim married Erna Karewski during a furlough in the First World War. Since both were dentists, they opened a joint practice after the war in Flensburger Straße, in Berlin-Tiergarten. Their first daughter Irene was followed two years later on March 9, 1922 by daughter Felice Rachel, who was called by the family only Lice, Fice or Putz. Her uncle was the influential writer Lion Feuchtwanger. The family's friends were liberal, socialist-oriented Jews,

though Felice's father nevertheless remained to some extent tradition-conscious.

When the family returned from a vacation trip on May 4, 1930, the car overturned. Erna Schragenheim died in the accident. Albert married his receptionist Käte Dinnah Hammerschlag, who was only 19, two years after her death. On March 16, 1935, he too died of a heart attack, so Käte moved with Irene and Felice to Sybelstraße, in Berlin-Charlottenburg. On the occasion of the "Führer's birthday", Albrecht Schragenheim was posthumously awarded the Cross of Honor for War Participants - his name is misspelled on the certificate.

Felice found support among her friends. She was considered extremely popular, full of ideas and talented in poetry. Her poems in the modern "style of Mascha Kaléko" (Helga Brinitzer, 1998) appealed to her classmates. Felice liked to spend her free time in the swimming pool Halensee, where she chatted with friends about everyday things.

From the age of six until September 1932, Felice Schragenheim attended the Kleist School at Levetzowstrasse 34. Her leaving certificate confirmed that her performance was sufficient, but also good. After the Easter vacations in 1933, she transferred to the Bismarck Lyceum in Grunewald. When the National Socialists came to power, the Hitler salute was immediately introduced at the beginning of every school lesson. However, the school was considered a secret among parents who wanted to keep their children away from a National Socialist-influenced education. The principal, Dr. Friedrich Abée, was a German nationalist, but not a supporter of Hitler's regime, which is why he preferred to omit the Führer's salute on account of his supposedly rheumatism-ridden arm.

As a good swimmer who mastered 75-minute swims, Felice received the permanent swimmer's certificate of the Wellenbad am Lunapark, which was located at Bornimer Straße 11-13, Berlin-Halensee, during her school years. Jewish women*Jews were not allowed to swim in public open-air pools for much longer - a ban that Felice and her friends were happy to disregard.

During her time at the Lyceum, Felice began to discover her poetic talent. She wrote about her class teacher, the Studienrat Walther Gerhardt, in March 1937:

Mr. Gerhardt [...] Just and punctual, always striving for truth,
. For small weaknesses also a heart in the right place,
When translating sticking to the words,
He lives on in the hearts of his students!

On Nov. 15, 1938, Felice's school days ended, just six days after the November pogroms.

At the end of the 1930s, Irene and Felice had to move out of the apartment in Sybelstraße with their stepmother. They came to live with Kätes parents, who were also Jewish and ran a boarding house at Kurfürstendamm 102. In 1939, Irene emigrated to London, where she first worked in a hospital - She never returned to Germany. Felice also tried to get a visa as well as to leave for the USA, but more and more often the ships failed for various reasons. Nevertheless, Felice continued to prepare for her departure: In mid-March 1939, she successfully completed an English course organized by Cambridge University. On August 21, 1941, her efforts seemed to be rewarded, as she received a letter assuring her of a place on a special transport to Barcelona that was scheduled to depart in a few days - A day later, the Reich Association of Jews wrote to her, "We regret to inform you that your planned departure cannot be carried out because emigration of women and men between the ages of 18 and 46 is prohibited."

From the summer of 1941, Felice Schragenheim lived for a short time with the orthopedist Dr. Kurt Hirschfeld at Claudiusstrasse 14, but just a few months later she moved in with her grandmother Hulda Karewski, with whom she had once planned to leave Germany to live with her relatives in the United States. These had already emigrated in 1936 to escape the Nazi regime.

In October of that year, she received word from the Berlin Labor Office for Jews: Schragenheim had been drafted into forced labor. She worked from October 9 for exactly one year in the bottle cap factory C. Sommerfeld & Co. which was recognized as essential to the war effort and was located at Stromstraße 47. Here she wound wire around bottle caps for eight and a half hours a day. Because of her work, she received a certificate that allowed her to get her groceries outside the shopping time designated for Jews: she had one hour for this. In addition, she had to learn that her good friend Fritz Sternberg was deported.

After her grandmother and her brother Julius Philipp had been taken to the Theresienstadt ghetto on August 6, 1942, Felice also received the deportation notice in early October. Together with her friend Inge Wolf, she took all her belongings from the apartment in Claudiusstraße. Announcing her suicide in a farewell letter, she went into hiding. From then on, she lived with friends and financed herself by selling her possessions. With Inge, she also forged an identity card - her name was now Barbara F. Schrader.

Here in the former Café Berlin, next to the former Ufa-Palast, Elisabeth Wust and Felice Schragenheim met. Inge Wolf, with whom Schragenheim had been living in hiding for some time, had organized the meeting. Even at the age of almost 80, Elisabeth "Lilly" Wust remembered the rust-red costume that Schragenheim wore to their first meeting on November 27, 1942. Felice initially introduced herself to her by her last name, Schrager, because she had gone into hiding in the wake of Nazi anti-Jewish policies. Their acquaintance quickly developed into a friendship: Lilly frequently invited Felice, Inge, and other friends to her home. Her husband Günther was hardly ever at home, and their marriage had long been marked by cheating on both sides - the only agreement was the joint care of their four children.

At a friendly dinner in late February 1943, attended by Günther, Inge, Lilly and Felice, Lilly observed a kiss between her husband and her friend Inge, who was actually a lesbian. Confused, she returned to the kitchen, where she was pulled towards her by Felice, who wanted to kiss her. Initially reluctant, Lilly showed herself to be completely in love a month later, and the two set March 25 as their symbolic engagement day. From then on, they affectionately called each other Aimée (Lily) and Jaguar (Felice). And so Jaguar wrote the following verse to her Aimée:

From your mouth...
[...] How come, I have no desire,
ever go away again as a vagabond.
Only something I would have terribly like to know:
How does it dream at your breast from your mouth?

After Lilly's hospitalization - she suffered from an ulcerated jaw - in March/April 1943, Felice moved in with her under the pretext that the weakened Mrs. Wust needed help in the household. Later she pretended to look after the four children.

Felice and Lilly had already become engaged on March 25 and were writing love letters to each other. In addition, Felice visited her Aimée, who was in a hospital bed, daily. In 1991, Elisabeth Wust commented on her newly discovered sexual orientation as follows: "I had none of it at all with my men. The men had their fun and I felt used. With Felice it was just totally different. [...] It was complete, love and sexuality, there was just no separation." (Lilly Wust, 1991)

One day after Felice moved in, Lilly talked to her husband about a divorce for the first time on May 3. However, he wanted to keep up appearances and therefore suggested a "separation of table and bed". Shortly afterwards, Felice confided in her that she was Jewish and lived as a "submarine" - Lilly was shocked for a moment, but then promised her: "Now more than ever!"

In the summer, Felice was confronted with the last chance to escape. She decided against it and stayed in Berlin.

Lilly kept arguing with her husband about a divorce. Günther had already been living for some time with his girlfriend Liesel, who also urged him to finally agree to the divorce. For Lilly, it must have been just a formality, since she had been symbolically married to her Jaguar since April 2. Günther Wust finally agreed and took the two older children to live with him, while the two younger ones remained with Lilly. The official divorce followed on October 12, 1943, in which Günther forced her to admit complicity - otherwise he would have betrayed her relationship with Felice. Under such pressure, she admitted that she had not wanted to give him any more children, thus refusing to have "offspring for the Führer." Felice was in her thoughts and wrote for her that day the following verses:

Landgericht
There I have promised, in eternity
. to stand by you always and everywhere,
and already at the first difficulty
you have to go all alone. [...]

Simultaneously, Irene, Felice's sister, married Fritz "Derek" Cahn from Berlin in London. The two sisters had been able to send each other letters again since the end of 1942 through an old school friend. However, their exchange was hindered by censorship, which meant that the letters sometimes took two weeks to reach their destination.

Felice found employment under a false name in the summer of 1944 at the Essen National-Zeitung, which maintained an editorial office in Berlin. As Lilly's supposed sister-in-law, she took her name and from then on stenographed reports.

On August 21, 1944, Aimée and Jaguar had just returned from swimming in the Havel River to their apartment, where Gestapo officers were already waiting for them. After the interrogation, Felice was taken away - It had been revealed that she was Jewish. Her new accommodation became the so-called "Judensammellager" in Schulstraße, which had been set up in the former pathology department of the Jewish Hospital. Lilly came to visit her here and slipped her love letters, while Felice drew up a power of attorney with which she signed over all her possessions to Lilly.

The last visit was on September 7. One day later, they were deported to the "old age ghetto" Theresienstadt, where Felice's grandmother had already died on September 15, 1942. In October, Felice was taken to Auschwitz, and shortly thereafter she was sent on a foot march to Groß-Rosen. Here she and the other Jewish women had to dig tank traps, which soon became impossible due to the -18°C temperatures. In the evenings she told stories to the other women, which made her very popular. Sick with scarlet fever and sent to a hospital, Felice managed to write and receive letters to Lilly there. Every day she hoped for news from her beloved, which did not always reach her: "Yesterday nothing came. And today? Today for sure: - I want to write you so much, my Eva dolorosa."

Lilly received the last message from Felice on January 3, 1945. "Always thinking of me and praying for the brave longing one," reads the closing line. The records of Martin Feuchtwanger, younger brother of Felice's uncle Lion Feuchtwanger, give March 1945 as the date of death. It is possible that she died on a death march. The death certificate gives December 31, 1944 as the date of death and an embolism as the cause.

After the war ended, Lilly searched in vain for Felice. She transferred her poems into her diary, which she calls "Tränenbüchlein". In 1950, she married Willi Beimling to provide security for her children. He did not allow her any visits and the marriage also turned out to be unhappy in other respects, which is why she divorced him three years later. In the years that followed, she lived in very modest circumstances, although she nevertheless enabled three of her sons to study at university. In 1981, at the age of 61, she was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit on Ribbon for providing shelter to those persecuted by the Nazi regime. In the early 90s, she told her story to the writer Erica Fischer - From the reports came the book Aimée & Jaguar, which was made into a film in 1998.

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Two suitcases full of letters, pictures and gifts bequeathed Lilly's son Eberhard Wust to the Jewish Museum Berlin after his mother's death on March 31, 2006. A stumbling stone at Friedrichshaller Straße 23 today commemorates Felice Schragenheim.