Moshe, Toni, Ruth and Edith Bukspan |

The Frankfurt Family Moshe, Toni, Ruth and Edith Bukspan

“In eternal memory”

By Martina Faltinat

Moshe Bukspan emigrates about the year 1920 to Frankfurt, hoping to find a life more comfortable and more safe. His brother Shimon comes to Germany as a soldier, stays and becomes a tradesman in Frankfurt. Both brothers, the elder one Shimon born in 1894 and the younger one Moshe born 1903 come from Galicia which in those days belonged to the Austrian-Hungarian-Monarchy. Shimon has the Polish citizenship by which he and his family are driven into exile in 1938, an act which finally saves their lives. Moshe comes to Frankfurt around 1920 as stateless citizens. He dies in a concentration camp, his wife and two daughters are deported and killed.

„Zur ewigen Gedechtnis“– „In eternal memory“: Greetings from Frankfurt into exile

An autograph book in exile

Regina Bukspan quoted this poem of her cousin Ruth in Tel Aviv, where the autograph book together with further objects had been sent from the Bukspan’s flat in Frankfurt Uhlandstraße. Regina and her family and to leave their flat in a rush at the end of October 1938, had been forcefully deported into no-man’s land between Germany and Poland and luckily could emigrate to Palestine at the beginning of 1939.

The brother of Shimon, Moshe Bukspan, Ruth’s father, had been able to get some objects out of the Bukspan’s flat in Frankfurt Uhlandstrasse which the Bukspans had left behind, books, photos and records and sent them into the exile of Regina and her family in Tel Aviv.

From Galizien to Frankfurt

Moshe Bukspan was married to Toni Laufer. They had two daughters, Ruth, the author of the above poem, born in 1928, and Edith, born in 1935.

Both were born in Frankfurt. Her parents came from Galicia. Her mother, née Toni Laufer, was born in Cwitowa in 1903; father Moshe Bukspan was born in the town of Brzesko in Galicia in 1902.

When Moshe Bukspan and Toni Laufer were born in Galicia in the beginning of the 20th century, they lived under the reign of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy. As inhabitants of one of the crown countries they had no status as citizens but were subjects. By the end of world war I in 1918 the double monarchy dissolved, in 1919 Galicia was allocated to the reestablished state of Poland. Moshe and Toni Bukspan were stateless in this new state of Poland.

Stateless

What did it mean to be stateless? After World War I more and more international borders could not be crossed unless you had valid passports, many states demanded visa which were granted only on the basis of national passports. Undesired minorities as the Jews from Eastern Europe were refused those passports and therefore the right of liberalness. Germany in those days, during the Weimar Republic, was one of the few countries open to migrants from Eastern Europe.

The Bukspans seized that possibility and emigrated to Frankfurt about the mid-twenties. Here brother Shimon lived with his family, and in Frankfurt they could hope for a better life. But their status of statelessness did not change. Not even, when their daughters Ruth 1928 and Edith 1935 were born in Frankfurt. They did not get the German citizenship, but were stateless as their parents.

The policy of the town of Frankfurt towards the immigrants was ambiguous. On the one hand there were hardly any naturalizations, as those were granted only after 10 to 20 years of residence in Frankfurt, on the other hand the immigrants were very welcome as workers and employees.

Everyday life in the Frankfurter Ostend

1933 – 1942: Boykott – Arrest – Deportation

As for everybody else, after 1933 nothing remained as before for Moshe, Toni, Ruth and Edith Bukspan. First the economic livelihood of the family was destroyed by the boycott of the shoemaker business. At the end of October 1938 they had to witness the sudden and violent deportation of their relatives to Poland. In June 1939 Moshe secretly took some important objects out of his brother’s flat in Uhlandstrasse and sent them to the family’s exile in Tel Aviv. Among them also the autograph book into which his daughter Ruth had written the memorial poem for her cousin Regina. That was, as far as we know, the last contact between the two girls.

In the months after the November pogrom of 1938 family Bukspan moved to Rechneigrabenstrasse 15. Probably they didn’t move voluntarily but were forced to move there. We don’t know, whether they were no longer able to pay the rent in Mainstrasse because of their bad economic situation or whether their landlord gave them notice to leave the flat because they were Jewish.

Moshe Bukspan

Toni’s, Ruth’s and Edith’s Fate

Toni and her daughters Ruth and Edith, then 14 and 7 years old, were deported „eastwards“ two months later, on September 24th 1942 in the 10th deportation from Frankfurt and probably shot in the dunes of Raasiku in Estonia, together with 237 other people.

At the train station of Raasiku/Estonia, about 35 kilometers from Tallinn, SS people probably evacuated the sagos on September 30th 1942 and separated the passengers. Old people, mothers and children are loaded into buses prepared to drive them into the dunes. There a ditch has already been dug for the planned massacre.

“The people were deported from the station of Raasiku in groups. In order to calm them down they were told they would be taken to a bath house. In the dunes, about 15 metres away from the ditch hidden by coppice the bus stopped, the people were pushed out, shouted at all the time, ordered to undress as fast as possible, so that there was no time left for consciousness. The people must undress, throw their valuables into a suit case. At a distant place their gold teeth are pulled out while they are still alive. Also, they already heard shots and the screams of people dying. Then they were forced to go into the three-meter deep ditch on some kind of ramp. They had to lie down on the corpses of those who had already been shot und were executed by an Estonian commando of six to eight men. The adults were shot first, then the children. The ditch filled up with corpses more and more, in the end the people still alive were shot from the edge of the ditch. The site of the crime afterwards is covered with sand, heather grew over it. In order to smudge the traces of their crimes the Germans started to dig out the corpses of the killed in 1944 and to burn them. Bones uncharred were crushed to flour and buried in or spread across the fields together with ashes.“ (Monica Kingreen, ed., After crystal night, Frankfurt 1999, p. 381)

The persons left over from the transport – about 250 women and 100 men were taken into a forest camp guarded by Estonian police and were separated according to gender. Again and again there were selections and transfers into other prisons or camps, e.g. to Kaiserwald near Riga. Some have to do forced labour with the company of „Philipp Holzmann“ in Reval. In 1945 only few prisoners reached Bergen-Belsen, where they were liberated by the British army. According to the present state of knowledge seven people from Frankfurt survived their deportation to Estonia. (after: Monica Kingreen, ed., After crystal night, Frankfurt 1999, p. 382/83)

Remembrance