Summer Research and the Life Story of Tante Lieschen

Morbidly, perhaps, I've taken to doing family history research journeys during university holidays, taking the Holocaust and Nazi era as my focus.

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Last summer holidays I started by looking at my great-great-grandmother's sister. My father's paternal family wasn't religiously Jewish any more in the 1930s, due to converting to the Protestant faith before the 20th century. Largely they had assimilated — a practice which I gather became controversial amongst 20th century Zionist-leaning thinkers like Gershom Scholem. But, as my grandfather's Ahnenpass reflected, in the 1930s he was considered part-Jewish, and some of his living relatives were considered even more Jewish and thus were in great danger. (In the early 2000s, as he was tidying up and we also went through his sister's papers to see what to keep, I remember that we found both of their Ahnenpässe.)

My grandfather wrote in his memoirs, in the late 1980s or early 1990s, that his 'Tante Lieschen' had died due to the Holocaust. So last summer I was interested in learning more about her life story. It felt especially urgent because of world events: if the Holocaust is only remembered when it is used as a cudgel to justify killing civilians in the Middle East today, or suppressing pro-Palestinian activism in Germany, I am certain that it does the victims of the Holocaust a disservice. Regardless of what my Jewish ancestors and relatives would have thought and felt about the political situation — it is, of course, impossible to know that, although I can say with certainty that in the early 2000s my grandfather sympathized with my father's opinions that Israel's Likud governments went too far — I felt it was important to shed post-World War political interpretations and go back to what we do know about the real people who were affected by the Holocaust.

As others have already researched my family's history in great depth, I found an online biography of Tante Lieschen: her real first name was Elisabeth. She was born into a family of medical researchers at the Charité in Berlin. One of them wrote about transgender identity at a time where I gather it was not often discussed, let alone accepted. After taking care of her sick mother for years, Tante Lieschen ended up (if I remember correctly) in a care home in Potsdam or southwestern Berlin, in her seventies. I don't know if she herself was in the crosshairs of the Nazis early on. But her brother, a politician in Potsdam, incurred the Nazis' ire when he wanted their flag taken off a public building. Eventually a relative of ours found out that she was about to be arrested and transported to a concentration camp. He passed on this information to Tante Lieschen, who took her own life.

My great-great-grandmother, meanwhile, was whisked away to Sweden until it was safe to return to Germany. I felt weird about the situation while reading the biography, and since I've done my research there's been anecdotal evidence to support my doubts. Recently one of my relatives was talking about Tante Lieschen and my great-great-grandmother in a different context. It sounds like the family paid millions of Mark to the Nazis to buy my great-great-grandmother's freedom, but that there wasn't money left over for Tante Lieschen. Perhaps 'Sophie's Choice' is not the right term here, but it is a horrible situation to decide which of two sisters lives and which dies.

To round out the story, at any rate, I found out to my surprise that Elisabeth is buried in Kreuzberg, in a cemetery on the Mehringdamm that I've visited before. It surprised me even more because I thought that the Nazi government buried Jewish Germans in separate cemeteries on the outskirts of the city, or that Tante Lieschen was buried elsewhere in Germany; but it turns out that her remains were transferred to that graveyard years after World War II ended. Visiting the cemetery, I found her resting place: tucked in a black-fenced plot, alongside her siblings and parents, as sunshine and evergreen branches and ivy framed the rather formal monuments. It felt even more personal because my grandfather's cousin, whom I have met, is buried opposite.

Tante Lieschen's story also, however, made me realize the complexity of trying to de-politicize the Holocaust: her brother Ernst's children emigrated to Israel, and one descendant died fighting in a mid-to-late 20th-century war. I can't in good conscience give an interpretation of what her life means for the present day, because it may clash with the interpretations of her closer relatives.