Jenny Dreifuss

by Doris

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The article below has been sent in by Richard and is the story of his Aunt Jenny. It was written & told by his sister Doris in the Sussex Jewish News of August last year.

It was by sheer coincidence that my cousin’s son Marc, who lives in Strasbourg, was surfing the internet and noticed that the name of my aunt Jenny Dreifuss came up as having a Stolpersteine set in her memory in the city of Mannheim. Our family had never been contacted and were not aware that Jenny had been commemorated in this way.

I had planned to visit my cousin Laure early in May. She lives in Wissembourg, a beautiful little Alsace town east of Strasbourg and on the French/German border. I was determined to find out more and to visit the memorial site with her. I read on the Mannheim website that a Stolpersteine had indeed been laid in memory of my aunt Jenny in 2008 in front of the main entrance of the Elisabeth-Gymnasium (previously known as the Elisabeth-Schule) where she had been a professor of languages from 1933 onwards. I contacted the headmistress of the school who was overjoyed to hear from us and could not wait to see us.

The teachers were so happy to learn that members of Jenny’s family still existed, despite all the research that they had done to try and trace them in 2007. It had proved to be an impossible task in view of the fact that Jenny never married her sister and family had moved across the border to France and her brother (my father) had emigrated to England.

Since then, of course, with our being the next generation, our names had changed through marriage. It was Klaus Riebel and his wife, both of them teachers at the school and members of the Mannheim Friends of Israel, who had inspired some of the pupils to research and prepare a ‘Book of Life’ for my late aunt. Its public presentation took place on 27 January 2008 at the city of Mannheim’s Holocaust Memorial Day event. He and the headmistress of the school organised the Stolpersteine to be laid outside the main entrance to the school by the artist Gunther Demnig, and here a dedication to honour her memory took place.

Of course when they heard that we were coming, Klaus immediately invited us for lunch, but we declined, thanking him for his generosity, as we felt that we could not insist on the school providing a kosher meal for us. But we did agree to a nice cup of coffee in the canteen.

Laure and I were absolutely overwhelmed by the welcome that we received and to hear how much our aunt had been venerated and loved by her pupils. We were shown the Book of Life and introduced to the teachers and the students who had done the research. Amazingly, they had received a letter from one of Jenny’s pupils who was still alive saying in glowing terms what an exceptionally talented and inspirational teacher Jenny had been. We were shown round the school and then taken to the Glas Kubus (a huge glass cube) situated in the centre of Mannheim, on which are inscribed 2000 names of the Jews from that city who had died at the hands of the Nazis, my aunt’s among them. We also went to the Jewish cemetery to say Kaddish at the gravestone where Jenny is buried. It was a very emotional and traumatic time for us both.

In fact, Jenny Dreifuss, my late aunt, was one of the eight Mannheim Jewish citizens who felt it was more honourable to take the ultimate step themselves on 22 October 1940, than the degradation of being taken by the Nazis on the following day for deportation to the concentration camps.

In 1933 she had come under Hitler’s dictat that, as a Jew, she was not a suitable person to teach German children and was therefore dismissed. However, as there were still some Jewish children at the school, she was reinstated in 1936, but with heavy restrictions and severe discrimination, her life as an upright and honest German Jewish citizen had become for her quite unbearable.

There were just thirteen pupils left in her class in the Elisabeth-Schule and the title of her last lesson was on the subject of ‘Shame’. It is recorded that, after a lively and interesting discussion, she ended the lesson with these last words, “But one day all 13 of you will feel ashamed, because all of you are decent people.”