The Name Carried South

On 24 December 1874 the registrar at Schubin, in the Prussian province of Posen, wrote up the ninth marriage in his book, and the last of the year. The groom was Sally Leibholz, Kaufmann, a merchant, of the Jewish religion, twenty-seven years old, geboren zu Hammerstein, wohnhaft zu Hammerstein: born at Hammerstein and living there. The bride was Friederica Schmul, born and living at Schubin. It is the oldest paper this archive holds for the line, and the move east happens on it.^doc

The same entry names the groom's parents: Sohn des Kaufmann Jacob Leibholz und der H—— geb. Pollnow. Son of the merchant Jacob Leibholz and of H—— née Pollnow. They are the first generation of this book, and this line is all there is of them. Her given name begins with an H, and the rest of the word is past reading. It was once published here as Wilhelmine, and a volunteer index reads Philipine; both were tested against the clerk's own letters in the same register, and both fail. An initial is what this book can honestly print.^doc

Twenty-seven on Christmas Eve 1874 puts Sally's birth between the end of 1846 and the end of 1847. The family's tree gives 7 July 1847, which fits. No register can confirm it: the state archive at Koszalin has answered that the Hammerstein books are gone.^lore

The bride's parents are in the entry too. The portal's index reads them as Juda Schmul and Jette Machot. The archivist at Bydgoszcz, who had the book in front of her, read the words after Tochter der as Gastwirth Juda und Jutta geb. Machol, and said herself that the line is hard to read: on her reading, Juda Schmul kept an inn. A card for an Abraham Schmul of Szubin gives a Jette née Muschll. One woman, read three ways, and the name stays as the index has it until the original settles it.^inf to be confirmed

Ten years on, the household is at Schubin and Sally is there in his own hand. On 11 August 1884 der Kaufmann Sally Leibholz, resident at Schubin, of the Mosaic religion, came before the registrar to report a son born three days before, on 8 August, to Friederike Leibholz geborene Schmul, his wife, living with him. The boy was named Jacob. Sally signed the entry himself.^doc

Two more sons of the house can be dated. Samuel was born at Schubin on 28 June 1877; the death register kept at Auschwitz in 1943 names his parents as Sali and Fridericke, née Schmul. Oskar was born there on 13 May 1887, and the family's tree makes him their son. Only three people in the whole Memorial Book were born at Schubin, and they are these three. The tree adds a fourth son, Georg; he was born at Hammerstein sixty-two days before Jacob, which no one mother can do, and the archive has taken him off the line.^inf

Then the parents go out of sight. Neither Sally nor Friederike is in the index of deaths at Schubin town for 1894 to 1911, and Sally is in no Berlin directory from 1903 to 1920. A death at Schubin before 1894, in years whose index does not survive, is the simplest reading of every absence, and it is only that. No paper says when either of them died, or where.^inf

On 5 January 1924, before the registrar of Schöneberg II, der Kaufmann Jakob Leibholz, born at Schubin and living at Freisinger Straße 19, married die Modistin Auguste Luwinski, born at Sauerbaum and living at Innsbrucker Straße 39. He was thirty-nine and she was thirty. The witnesses were two merchants, Samuel Leibholz, forty-six, of Belle-Alliance-Platz 6, and Walter Wottrich, twenty-six, of Lichtenberg. In the index the clerk wrote a religion beside each name: mos. for him, Jewish, and kath. for her, Catholic. Both their streets lie in the Bayerisches Viertel of Schöneberg; they were living a few streets apart.^doc

They had a son already. Kurt was born in Berlin on 11 May 1912, twelve years before the wedding, and carried his mother's surname, which German law gave a child born outside marriage. The index of births at Standesamt Berlin VIII, in Prenzlauer Berg, has one Luwinski in the whole of 1912: Kurt Myszislaus, entry 963, in the May block, with a second forename no other paper carries. The certificate, which would show whether a father acknowledged him, has not been read. That Jacob was his father rests on the family's record, and the 1924 entry carries no note that the marriage made him legitimate.^lore

Jacob had been in Berlin since at least 1913, when the directory prints Leibholz, Jaques, Kaufm. at Lutherstraße 34, in Charlottenburg. By 1925 he had a firm, Jaques Leibholz & Co., Konfektion, at Krausenstraße 59–60, and it is still in the directory in 1934 and in 1938. The bride was a milliner; Samuel Leibholz sold hats wholesale; Jacob's firm was in ready-made clothing. It was one trade, and the son of the house would follow it.^doc

In January 1934 Kurt, twenty-one, took out a Berlin driving licence and gave his address as Meraner Straße 2, Schöneberg. The census of 17 May 1939 finds Jacob, Auguste and their son Siegfried, born in Schöneberg on 5 August 1925, in that house. On the census's supplementary card the state recorded each person's grandparents. Auguste's reads four times nicht jüdisch, not Jewish, and the record of her persecution gives its basis as collective: as one of a household, not for her own ancestry.^doc

Two notes were later written into the margin of the 1924 entry. The first, dated 5 June 1939, says that under the decree of 17 August 1938 the husband now also bears the forename Israel. The second, dated 4 April 1940, records that by a judgment of the Landgericht Berlin, final on 21 March 1940, the marriage has been dissolved. The court file has not been found, and nothing on the page says who asked for the divorce, or why. A line at the foot of the sheet adds that Jakob married for a second time in 1940, entry 2476 of that year. Whom he married, this archive does not yet know.^doc

By the winter of 1943 Jacob was no longer at Meraner Straße. The list of Transport 30, from Berlin to Auschwitz on 26 February 1943, has him on line 1039: Leibholz, Jakob Israel, 8.8.84, Schubin; occupation ohne, none; married, yes; fifty-eight; address Treuchtlinger Straße 4. An index card of the Berlin office of the American Joint Distribution Committee adds that he was lodging there bei Spier, in the flat of a family called Spier. In the directory of 1938 he had been a merchant with a firm of his own. When he was moved out of the family's flat, and by whom, no paper says.^doc

The German Federal Archives' Memorial Book records his deportation and, deliberately, no date of death; it gives one only where it is certain. The census records, as they are published today, carry him as dead before 8 May 1945, at Auschwitz. The family's tree had 1945, and that has been corrected. There is no Stolperstein for him at Meraner Straße, and an application for one is drafted.^doc

His brothers did not come back either. Samuel died at Auschwitz on 10 April 1943. Oskar was deported to Theresienstadt on 17 March 1943, and from there to Auschwitz on 16 October 1944; the Memorial Book gives that day as the day of his death.^inf

Auguste was not deported. The family's tree places Siegfried at Sommerfeld, in the Osthavelland, where her own family had lived, from January 1943 until 30 April 1945, and has him join the Berlin police after the war and die at Potsdam in 2005. It gives Auguste a second husband, Paul Fricke, who died at Sommerfeld in January 1946, and has her die at Kraichtal, in Baden, on 22 June 1975: in the town where her mother had died twenty years before. She outlived her elder son. His gravestone in Johannesburg names his mother among the people who would remember him.^lore

On 26 July 1939 the German consulate in Johannesburg issued a passport, good for one year, to a man born in Berlin on 11 May 1912. Against occupation the clerk wrote Hutmacher, hatter. The columns for a wife and for children were struck through with a single line. The holder signed it Israel Kurt Luwinski: the name the decree of 1938 had added for Jewish men, in his own hand, at a consulate in South Africa.^doc

When he left Germany is not settled. The family's tree says 1933, the year he turned twenty-one. But on 30 January 1934 the Berlin police issued him a driving licence, giving his address as Meraner Straße 2, and later in 1934 an international permit for driving abroad, whose page of particulars was stamped, given his photograph and left blank. The passport is the first paper that puts him in South Africa. A South African immigration officer stamped it on the eighth of a month; the archive's two readings of the rest of that date disagree.^lore

By the end of 1941 he had a shop. The Government Gazette of November 1941 gives notice that the Piccadilly Hat Company, at Hannah Court, 81 Eloff Street, passed from Ivy Fuchs, a widow, to Walter Oppenheimer and Kurt Luwinski from 1 November. A year later the partnership was dissolved, and Kurt carried on the business alone, under the same name and at the same address. It was still trading there in 1952.^doc

He took the shop over alone at the end of October 1942. Four months later, in Berlin, Jacob Leibholz was put on the transport to Auschwitz. Nothing in the record says what Kurt knew, or when.^doc

On 19 June 1948 he married Ivone de Figueiredo at the Magistrate's Office in Johannesburg, by a special licence taken out ten days before. He was thirty-six, a bachelor, born in Berlin, a shop-keeper; she gave her age as twenty-four and her status as divorced. Both gave their address as 108 Dunottar Street, Sydenham. The two witnesses appear to have been the office's own staff, and the register notes an ante-nuptial contract.^inf

The marriage was in the courts the same year. Kurt filed for divorce in 1948. In 1950 Ivone brought an action of her own, for restitution of conjugal rights, the step that asks a court to order a spouse to come back. In 1951 he filed twice more, and the marriage was dissolved: when he married again, in February 1956, the registrar entered him as divorced and noted that the order had been filed.^doc

His second marriage, to Frances Sefton, born Hostovsky in Vienna and a buyer for a firm, was on 29 February 1956. On that register he is a dress designer, and he sued her for restitution of conjugal rights the same year. His third wife, Pauline, called Paula, outlived him; the date of that marriage is not known.^doc

Kurt died in Johannesburg on 15 December 1968, aged fifty-six, and was buried the next day at Westpark, block L, grave 211, by the Chevrah Kadisha. His stone gives his Hebrew name, Leib Kalman bar David, and says he is remembered by his wife Paula, his son, his mother and his friends. The father's name on it is David, not Jacob. Jacob may have carried David as his Hebrew name; it may have been supplied by somebody who never knew him; or Kurt's father was not Jacob. The archive does not choose.^inf

There is one more thing the archive has had to say about him. On the evidence set out on the DNA page, Kurt was very probably not the biological father of the son born into his marriage to Ivone. It does not unmake anything in this chapter, and the book comes back to it at the end.^inf

Nome próprio: Ivone. Her birth entry records a girl born at Lourenço Marques on 4 March 1922 in the parish of Nossa Senhora da Conceição, the daughter of Joaquim Júlio de Figueiredo, of the parish of Vimieiro, and Leonia dos Santos Mata, of the parish of Negozela, both married and both living in the town. The entry reaches one more generation back: António Júlio de Figueiredo and Ana Pereira de Figueiredo on her father's side, Augusto Mata and Júlia Durães Mata on her mother's. It survives as a copy of a copy, made at Lisbon in 1987 from a certificate issued at Lourenço Marques in 1974.^doc

Her parents had come out to the colony from that one small concelho before she was born; when, and how, no paper yet says. There is a second Vimieiro, in Évora, and the archive prefers this one because Negozela exists only here. Her mother's surname is written Mata in the entry, twice, and a registrar's rectification of 1987 confirms that spelling over his own signature. Her death certificate writes Mota, and so does the index of a Johannesburg court case of 1948. The archive publishes Mota and has not decided between them.^inf

In the margin of the same entry are the first of her marriages. On 18 November 1939, aged seventeen, she married Frederico Pinto da Rocha at Lourenço Marques, and the marriage was dissolved by a divorce decreed at Beira on 6 December 1945. Her son Henrique, born within that marriage in March 1941, the family's tree says, carried the name Pinto da Rocha; he died in South Africa in 2022.^lore

By February 1948 she was in the Transvaal. On the second of that month, before the magistrate at Germiston, she married Johannes Antonie Oelofse de Witt, an underground miner of twenty-five. She was entered as Yvonne Figueiredo, twenty-two, a spinster and a dressmaker employed by a firm, of 42 Joel Road, Berea, and she signed Y. Figueiredo. She was in fact twenty-five, and had been divorced for two years. De Witt sued for divorce that year, and on 19 June she married Kurt Luwinski.^doc

Her stated age kept drifting younger: twenty-two in February 1948, twenty-four that June, twenty-five in 1953, when she was thirty. She was a dressmaker, and Kurt a hatter with a shop on Eloff Street: the same trade, in the same city, in the same year. That is the plainest account of how they met, and it is only an account.^inf

The divorce Kurt sued for in 1951 was granted, and on 13 February 1953 she married Morris Isaac Salkow in Johannesburg. He sued for divorce the same year. After that, the archive has found no anchor for her in South Africa at all.^doc

Fifty-seven years later she died at home, at Rua Nova das Marinhas 82 in Gulpilhares, Vila Nova de Gaia, on 14 March 2010, aged eighty-eight. The certificate gives her occupation as doméstica and her state, after four marriages, as divorciado. The family names her partner at the end, Jacinto de Araújo Fernandes de Oliveira, who has died since. Where she lived in the years between, and when she came to Portugal, no paper yet says.^lore

Whatever else the DNA unsettles in this family, it does not unsettle her. Three of the closest matches in the test that began this archive's central question are in Portugal, and the archive takes her line as confirmed.^doc