Irene Lärmer, affectionately called Reni by her mother Frieda, was born in Dornheim in 1924. She survived the Holocaust and became an important witness to the Shoah in her new American home, being invited to many commemorative events.
Irene Katz
née Lärmer (1924-2017): the only Dornheim survivor of the Shoah
Irene Lärmer, affectionately called Reni by her mother Frieda, was born on 15 February 1924 in Dornheim at number 5. A generation earlier, this house was inhabited jointly by the Jewish families Lärmer and Schönfärber, and the attic served as a village synagogue until the middle of the 19th century. The Orthodox Lärmer family was first documented in Dornheim in 1796, when Wolf, son of Marx, from Demmelsdorf (today belonging to Scheßlitz in the district of Bamberg) married the Dornheim Jewess Feuerle Moyses Levi. In the course of the edict on the conditions of the Jewish co-religionists in the Kingdom of Bavaria (1813), this wolf takes the surname Lärmer.
When Irene was born, almost only older Jewish citizens remained in Dornheim – the younger ones had migrated to the cities. As the only school-age Jewish child in the village, Irene's mother, her unmarried great-aunt living in the household and her maternal grandparents wanted a Jewish education for Irene, and so she came to Fürth to attend a Jewish school at the age of six. There she lives during the week in the oldest Israelite
Orphanage of Germany, which offers a protected area within its walls as its kind of boarding school with observance of the Jewish cult: in addition to the Sabbath commandment and the celebration of the high holidays, this includes kosher food. It was here that Irene experienced the National Socialist pogrom night on 9 November 1938 together with her cousin Marga Loewi from Erlangen, whose widowed mother Rosa, née Lärmer, was Frieda's sister. That night, the institution's synagogue is destroyed by a mob and large parts of the site are severely damaged.
In November 1940, as part of the Youth Aliyah, a Jewish organization that tried from 1933 onwards to bring as many children and young people as possible to safety in the British-administered League of Nations Mandate of Palestine, Irene arrived at the Gehringshof. This estate in Hesse was intended to provide Jewish youths with agricultural skills, which the British demanded as a prerequisite for immigration. In June 1941, Irene returned to Franconia and attended the last Jewish school in Nuremberg, the Jewish elementary and vocational school at Obere Kanalstraße 25. she wants to become a pediatric nurse. She had to move into a so-called "Jewish house" at Steinbühlstrasse 9, where Jewish Germans were forced to live in cramped conditions even before their deportation to the concentration camps.
As a result of the "Final Solution" adopted in Berlin in 1941, the annihilation of Jewish life, Irene and her mother Frieda Lärmer were among the first 1,000 Jews from Central Franconia to be officially "resettled in the East". In fact, the train departing from the Nuremberg-Märzfeld station (part of the Nazi Party Rally Grounds, today Langwasser) goes to Riga, Latvia, which has been conquered by the German Wehrmacht. The entire family of Rosa Loewi from Erlangen is also on the train: in addition to Marga, the children Irmgard and Ludwig. Another sister with Frieda and Rosa's family was also present at this deportation: Fanny Hofmann. In 1922 she had married Siegfried Hofmann from Windsbach in a kind of double double wedding, as Siegfried's sister Anna Hofmann was also marrying Fanny's brother Benjamin (Benno) Lärmer at the same time. The cousins Lydia Lärmer and Alice Hofmann, who emerged from these marriages, grew up like sisters in Windsbach.
The arrival in ice-cold Riga and the quartering in the Nazi ghetto, a kind of concentration camp in the middle of the historic city, means the beginning of a terrible odyssey through nearby concentration camps such as Jungfernhof and Kaiserwald for all Lärmer's descendants. Ludwig and the Hofmann and Lärmer families from Windsbach will not survive the inhumane mixture of draconian forced labor and systematic malnutrition. Irene and her arthritis-stricken mother are separated soon after their arrival in Latvia and they will never see each other again.
In Riga, Irene meets an imprisoned Lübecker, Josef Katz, with whom she shares her last bread through a prison window. When she and the other concentration camp prisoners were transferred further and further west as a result of the military successes of the Red Army, Irene embarked on the death march from her last concentration camp, Stutthof near Danzig, to Berlin and was liberated by the Russians. In the Jewish Hospital (founded in 1756), which still exists today, at that time the only Jewish institution in Berlin that had remained open throughout the Nazi era, she met Josef Katz again. They marry in a completely destroyed Germany and, thanks to a special US contingent for survivors of the Shoah, emigrate to the USA, where Rosa also arrives with her daughter Marga. Irmgard will stay behind the Iron Curtain and marry a Jewish Latvian; It was not until 1959 that the Klawansky family was able to emigrate to the USA via Erlangen. Marga also marries a survivor of the Nazi persecution of Jewish Germans, Otto Hahn from Prichsenstadt.
After some time, Irene and Josef set up their own sweater business and moved to sunny California in the early 1950s, where Josef later entered the real estate business. Their daughter Jeanne was born in Los Angeles in 1952. When she attended the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1970 and took German there, Josef's manuscript, which he had written about his experiences in concentration camps immediately after his arrival in the United States, was rediscovered and translated from German into English. Josef Katz's "One Who Came Back" is one of the best-known eyewitness accounts of the Shoah in the USA.
Her daughter Jeanne Katz Olson accompanies Irene, as she is widowed, on many lectures through the country, because Jeanne organizes the lectures and appearances of the last life speakers for the US Holocaust National Museum in Washington D.C. Irene died at the end of January 2017 in Los Angeles at the age of almost 93 as a highly respected Shoah survivor who was invited to many ceremonies of the culture of remembrance in the USA. At the interfaith Hillside Memorial Park, Irene is born next to her husband
Joseph buried; it rests there almost 9,500 km away from Dornheim.
Hildegard Wiegel