James Paul Lusk
Writing on democracy, politics and Christianity
Paul and Paula Seligsohn: the final days
On October 25th , 1941, Paul and Paula were deported from Hamburg to Poland. They died there six months later. Here is the story of their 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.
Deported from Hamburg, Paul and Paula reached Radegast station on 26th October 1941 (now preserved as a museum). At first they were probably housed in the Hamburg Collective. Then on 16th December, their residence card shows them taking a two-person flat with no rooms in Rubenstrasse, whose location is marked in red on the plan of the Łódź ghetto. The site was cleared before 1945 and is now grassed over.
