Paul and Paula Seligsohn: the final days

So far, in our story, we have known Paul and Paula’s life in Hamburg in their ‘garden house’ apartment in Beim Schlump from letters, photographs and the testimony of their daughter Inge.

We know them as individual personalities with friends and neighbours – some Jews like the Seligsohns, some not. Neighbours, none of them Jewish, are warm, curious, concerned, popping in for coffee and news. Paula works, their eyes and teeth receive skilled attention, they are pleased to lose one lodger and find another; despite ferocious racist discrimination, they still belong in a society where they choose where and among whom they live. They can appeal to the courts, and a judge, dispensing ‘mercy’ for the crime of writing to their daughter Inge in England, notes their particular need, as Jews, to observe carefully the rules on correspondence which apply to all. Inge grasps the greater danger that lies ahead, but they, as far as we can see, do not. They look forward to seeing their Inge again, after this war ends, just as did the last one.

Now we come to a time when there is no such voice for us to hear, and we track their remaining life through administrative records and the now well-documented history of horror that shapes the times through which later generations have lived.