Helmut Loeser

Helmut Loeser, a tradesman, was born on 22 April 1899 in Berlin-Lichtenberg. After the premature death of his first (non-Jewish) wife, he tried to find a way for himself and his daughter Ruth to escape Nazi Germany. They lived at Mühlenstraße 30 in Pankow from 1933 (when they first appear in the Berlin directory) to 1939 (the time of the population census). Previously, the Loeser family had lived in Rosenthal, at Hauptstraße 174 and Mönchmühler Straße 9. Like many girls and boys, Ruth was banned from attending regular schools and received her schooling at the Jewish orphanage after 1935. In 1939, her father managed to get her a place on a children’s transport to England. Helmut Loeser did not manage to escape. He was sent to perform forced labour for the company Warneck & Böhm in Weißensee. On 13 January 1942, he was deported with the “8th transport to the East” to Riga, where he was killed. In a letter of 22 September 1945, Ruth’s friend Margot Aufrecht, who had survived Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, wrote to her in England: “My dear Spider! … I’m going to send a tracer note round all the camps to find your dear daddy. I spoke to him shortly before I was sent to the camp (14.11.1941). He had remarried. A wonderful woman. I don’t know if you know that …” Helmut Loeser and his second wife were never found. His granddaughter, Ruth’s daughter, dedicated a triptychon to him, “Kaddisch”, which today hangs in the prayer hall of the Jewish orphanage in Berliner Straße.