Elisabeth Block should no longer enter this building. “I and Trudi and Arno are no longer allowed to go to school. It was with a terribly heavy heart that I parted from my dear classmates.” This is what the then 15-year-old Elisabeth, called Lisi, wrote in her diary on November 19, 1938. In the November days of that time, she also wrote about the fact that her uncle was killed on that night of November 9, 1938, which is now known as the Reichspogromnacht. At some point in the spring of 1942, the exact date is not known, the Nazi henchmen also deported the Jewish girl Lisi Block, her younger siblings Gertrud and Arno, and her parents to Poland, where they probably murdered them in the Belzec extermination camp or in Sobibor.
On this Wednesday, not coincidentally November 9th, her home town of Rosenheim in Upper Bavaria commemorates Lisi Block by formally giving today’s municipal girls’ secondary school the address Elisabeth-Block-Platz 1. At the same time, the first of the endless loops made of brass and gold leaf will be unveiled, with which the city intends to commemorate the victims of National Socialism in the future.
The city council only decided on this form of individual commemoration in September, after years of debate in Rosenheim about the widespread stumbling blocks by the artist Gunter Demnig. The Rosenheim memorial initiative had also had a stumbling block made for Elisabeth Block, but it was not allowed to be laid on municipal land. Instead, it is in a display case in what is now the Realschule. In recent years, their students have repeatedly dealt with the life and death of Elisabeth Block in various projects.
It is thanks to her diaries that she, who has just turned 19, is now considered the most prominent Nazi victim in the region. The longtime housekeeper and friend of the family kept these books, later a surviving cousin took them to Israel.
The last family picture in the block probably dates from December 26, 1941, when the Jewish family celebrated Christmas one last time.
(Photo: Paula Bauer, Vogtareuth (oh)/Rosenheim City Archive)
The Historical Association in Rosenheim and the House of Bavarian History have the records in 1993 published as a book. The entries give an insight into everyday life in rural Upper Bavaria at that time, because Elisabeth Block did not live directly in the tolerably urban Rosenheim, but in the small village of Niederndorf in what is now the municipality of Prutting, where there has been an Elisabeth Block street for some time . The parents came from Hanover, the father could no longer work as an engineer due to a serious injury from the First World War and took an agricultural course in order to be able to gain a foothold in Palestine with this knowledge. But instead of really emigrating, the couple bought a property in Niederndorf in 1921 and set up a nursery there. In 1941 an attempt to flee to Argentina failed because an entry permit was refused. A year later the whole family was murdered.
Elisabeth, the eldest daughter, started writing a diary as a child. For a long time, that revolved around friends and family, trips and festivals and a comparatively carefree childhood life. Jewish festivals or religiosity in particular play no role in the diaries. For a long time, the young Elisabeth seems not to have noticed what was brewing in Germany at the time. Rather, there are several early entries in which the girl is enthusiastic about films about Nazi party rallies shown at school, about the so-called Anschluss of nearby Austria or about school festivals at which the Horst Wessel song was sung.
Fear grows later. Instead of going to school, Elisabeth Block was now forced to work in agriculture, and her father had to do forced labor in track construction. Parents seem to have kept most of the growing terror away from their children for a long time. In the end, they were unable to save their children or themselves.
The design by the artist Christiane Huber for the Rosenheim commemoration of the victims of National Socialism in the city.
(Photo: City of Rosenheim)
Now Elisabeth Block is the first victim of the Nazi era to whom the city of Rosenheim is dedicating its own new form of individual commemoration. Stumbling blocks in the ground was rejected above all by the Rosenheim CSU, citing Charlotte Knobloch, President of the Jewish Community in Munich and Upper Bavaria, who did not want to see the names of the victims trampled underfoot again.
As an alternative, a work by the Munich artist Christiane Huber was selected in a competition. Their twisted metal Mobius loops are meant to be attached in different ways at different locations around the city. The first loop now winds around the trunk of a young ash tree in front of the girls’ secondary school – from this Wednesday on at Elisabeth-Block-Platz 1.