Irene Lärmer née Lärmer (1924-2017): the only Dornheim survivor of the Shoah
Irene Lärmer, affectionately called Reni by her mother Frieda, was born on February 15, 1924 in Dornheim at number 5. This house had been jointly occupied by the Jewish Lärmer and Schönfärber families for a generation, and the attic served as the village synagogue until the mid-19th century. The orthodox Lärmer family is first documented in Dornheim in 1796, when Wolf, son of Marx, from Demmelsdorf (today part of 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 Religious in the Kingdom of Bavaria (1813), this Wolf takes the surname Lärmer.
By the time Irene was born, almost only older Jewish citizens remained in Dornheim - the younger ones had migrated to the towns. As the only Jewish child of school age in the village, her mother, the unmarried great-aunt living in the household and her maternal grandparents wanted Irene to attend a Jewish school, so she went to the Jewish school in Fürth at the age of six. There she lived during the week in the oldest Israelite
orphanage in Germany, which, as a kind of boarding school, offers a protected area within its walls 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 Nazi pogrom night on November 9, 1938, together with her cousin Marga Loewi from Erlangen, whose widowed mother Rosa, née Lärmer, was Frieda's sister. That night, the synagogue of the institution was destroyed by a mob and large parts of the grounds were badly damaged.
As part of the Youth Aliyah, a Jewish organization that from 1933 tried 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 in November 1940. This estate in Hesse was intended to teach Jewish youngsters agricultural skills, which the British demanded as a prerequisite for immigration. In June 1941, Irene returns to Franconia and attends the last educational institution open to Jewish students in Nuremberg, the Jewish elementary and vocational school at Obere Kanalstraße 25; she wants to become a pediatric nurse. She is forced to move into a so-called "Jews' house" at Steinbühlstraße 9, where Jewish Germans were already forced to live in cramped conditions before being deported to the concentration camps.
As a result of the "Final Solution", the extermination of Jewish life, which was decided in Berlin in 1941, Irene and her mother Frieda Lärmer were among the first 1,000 Jews from Central Franconia to be officially resettled to the "East". The train actually departs from Nuremberg-Märzfeld station (part of the Nazi Party Rally Grounds, now Langwasser) and heads for Riga, Latvia, which has been conquered by the German Wehrmacht. Rosa Loewi's entire family from Erlangen is also on the train: in addition to Marga, her children Irmgard and Ludwig. Another sister and family of Frieda and Rosa were also included in this deportation: Fanny Hofmann. She had married Siegfried Hofmann from Windsbach in 1922 in a kind of double wedding, as Siegfried's sister Anna Hofmann also married Fanny's brother Benjamin (Benno) Lärmer at the same time. The resulting double cousins Lydia Lärmer and Alice Hofmann grew up in Windsbach like sisters.
Their arrival in freezing cold Riga and being quartered in the Nazi ghetto, a kind of concentration camp in the middle of the historic town, marked the beginning of a terrible odyssey through nearby concentration camps such as Jungfernhof and Kaiserwald for all the Lärmer descendants. Ludwig and the Hofmann and Lärmer families from Windsbach would 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 a prisoner from Lübeck, Josef Katz, with whom she shares her last bread through a prison window. When she and the other concentration camp prisoners were moved further and further west as a result of the Red Army's military successes, Irene set off on the death march from her last concentration camp, Stutthof near Danzig, to Berlin and was liberated by the Russians. She meets Josef Katz again in the Jewish Hospital (founded in 1756), which still exists today and was the only Jewish institution in Berlin that remained open throughout the Nazi era. They marry while Germany is still completely destroyed and emigrate to the USA thanks to a special US quota for survivors of the Shoah, where Rosa also arrives with her daughter Marga. Irmgard remained behind the Iron Curtain and married a Jewish Latvian; the Klawansky family were only able to emigrate to the USA via Erlangen in 1959. Marga also marries a survivor of the National Socialist persecution of Jewish Germans, Otto Hahn from Prichsenstadt.
After some time, Irene and Josef set up their own business selling sweaters 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) from 1970 and also took German there, Josef's manuscript, which he had written about his concentration camp experiences immediately after his arrival in the 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, when she is widowed, on many lectures across the country, as Jeanne organizes the lectures and appearances of the last life speakers for the US Holocaust National Museum in Washington D.C.. Irene died in Los Angeles at the end of January 2017 at the age of almost 93, a highly respected Shoah survivor who was invited to many commemorative events in the USA. At the interfaith Hillside Memorial Park, Irene is honored alongside her husband
Josef; she rests there almost 9,500 km away from Dornheim.
