toby sonneman
Images of the Grey Folder project
WHEN I FIRST BEGAN an in-depth search for my family's hidden Holocaust, these were the only photos I had of the two women I was named for, Toba (left) and Frieda (above, right). They were both sisters of my grandmothers and both victims of the Nazis. I would discover more.
MY FATHER in Germany in 1933, the year that Hitler came to power. Dad was 22 or 23 in this photo.
IN OCTOBER OF 1940, Frieda was deported, along with more than 6,500 other Jews from the southwest region of Germany, to the concentration camp of Gurs in Vichy France. Many of the victims were elderly.
Note the onlooker at the window
Images above courtesy of Photo ©Stadtarchiv Mannheim - Institut für Stadtgeschichte. Ludwigshafen a. R., 1940.
MY FATHER (center, with bottle) joined this festive gathering of leaders of the German-Jewish Youth League in 1934. He was the Mannheim leader of the organization.
FORBIDDEN.
The sign reads: "Jews are not allowed to use city swimming pools."
photo ©MARCHIVUM
THE ILSENSTEIN, the ship that my father took from Holland to the United States in 1939.
FRIEDA LIVED with her sister, Berta, and family in Mannheim. From left: Berta (my Oma), Erich, Kurt and Max Sonnemann; right, Frieda Berger
BY THE OCTOBER, 1940, DEPORTATION, the rest of the family had left for the United States. Frieda was alone, still waiting for an appointment at the Stuttgart consulate. It came too late.
BY THE TIME my grandparents received U.S. visas, war had started and they couldn't get a passenger ship leaving Western Europe. There was only one desperate option left: the eastern route through Russia, Siberia and Asia.
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Edith Arshack, 1940. She married my father in 1941.
I FOUND THIS LETTER, in the envelope at left, in the Grey Folder. My mother handed it to my father on July 8, 1942, just before he boarded a train to Washington, D.C. for a meeting with the State Department, to plead with authorities for a U.S. visa for Frieda -- which could have saved her life.
THE KAGAN FAMILY in Dubno, Poland, c. 1924. Only Genya (later known as Sheindel) --the girl on the left of the photo, with the bow atop her hair--survived the Holocaust, as she later joined a Socialist-Zionist movement and went to live on a kibbutz in Palestine/ Israel.
I was named for Toba, the mother in this photo, my Baba's sister. Both of the sons went to university in Belgium and were later arrested in France. I learned what happened to them.
I am still searching for the names of the other three daughters.
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BEFORE KRISTALLNACHT
Sisters Berta Sonnemann (my Oma) and Frieda Berger, near their home in Mannheim. Photo by Eric Sonneman.