Marianne Strauss - Life in Hiding

Life in Hiding

Over the next two years Marianne lived with families of the Bund all around eastern Germany, for short periods of time. This was very unusual as most Jews who were hiding stayed completely in one spot or if they were moving they would have tried to leave the country. But when she was with these families Marianne went out just like a normal German. She was able to do this as long as her papers were never checked. The only time Marianne really ran the risk of her papers being checked was on the trains between the cities that she was staying in. If Marianne boarded and traveled on the train like everybody else, she knew that she would be caught. So she boarded and rode in the carriages with all the Gestapo and SS officers and looked very German. If they ever asked her what she was doing, Marianne would say that she couldn’t tell them because she was under direct command from the Führer, Adolf Hitler. While Marianne was living in relative safety, the rest of her immediate family members were in a Jewish Ghetto or a death camp. Marianne lived constantly with uncertainty about them and wondered whether she would ever see them again. Marianne wrote:

“On 7 June 1944–on my twenty-first birthday, I was… in Beverstedt and heard on the BBC that the occupants of the transport that had gone from Thereinstadt to Auschwitz on 18 December 1943 had been gassed in the last few days. I knew my parents and my brother had been on the transport to Auschwitz.”