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Holocaust survivor Inge Deutschkron dies at 99 in Berlin

Inge Deutschkron, a Holocaust survivor who hid in Berlin during the Third Reich to escape deportation to Nazi death camps and later wrote an autobiography, has died. She was 99.

Ms Deutschkron died on Wednesday in Berlin, her foundation said in a statement. No cause of death was given.

“A long life of fighting for justice and against anti-Semitic and right-wing tendencies in our society has come to an end,” the Inge Deutschkron Foundation said in a written statement. “We are losing a combative friend.”

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier expressed his sadness over Ms Deutschkron’s death.

“The death of Inge Deutschkron fills me with deep sadness,” Mr Steinmeier said in a statement, adding that she “rendered outstanding services to our country, to her country. We will never forget her”.

“Despite everything that was done to her by Germans, Inge Deutschkron did not turn her back on Germany. She worked tirelessly to ensure that we learn the right lessons from the crimes committed during National Socialism,” Mr Steinmeier said.

“As a contemporary witness, she helped keep the memory of those persecuted and murdered alive and helped form a generation of witnesses of the witnesses.”

Ms Deutschkron became known to a wider audience when she published her autobiography “I Wore the Yellow Star” about her dramatic survival story as a Jew in Berlin. She also visited countless schools into old age to tell the younger generation about the horrors she experienced under the Nazis.

“With Inge Deutschkron, we have lost an important Jewish contemporary witness of the National Socialist terror in our city,” said the president of Berlin’s House of Representatives, Dennis Buchner.

Then-German president Joachim Gauck welcomes Ms Deutschkron to the Otto Weidt Workshop for the Blind in Berlin, in November 2013 (Britta Pedersen/dpa/AP)

He added that Ms Deutschkron “brought the strength to tell her story and to shake us awake with it”.

Ms Deutschkron was born in 1922, in Finsterwalde, a town about 60 miles south of Berlin. She moved to the German capital when she was five.

When it became increasingly difficult for Jews to get work after the Nazis came to power in 1933, she found employment in Otto Weidt’s brush workshop for the blind in 1941, using forged papers.

Mr Weidt supported mainly deaf and blind workers, many of whom were Jews, and it was with the help of Mr Weidt that Ms Deutschkron managed to evade deportation. From January 1943, Ms Deutschkron lived illegally in Berlin and its surrounding area and hid with her mother in order to survive.

They had to move from hiding place to hiding place to escape the Nazis — including a former goat shed and a boathouse on the Havel river, according to Germany news agency dpa.

At one of her hiding places she watched from her window as other Jews were taken out of their homes by Nazi secret police and forced to climb onto wagons.

“That was terrible. The feeling of guilt never leaves you. It makes you think, ‘How could you let the others go and you tried to hide?’” she later remembered.

After the war, Ms Deutschkron first moved to London and later to Tel Aviv, where she worked for daily newspaper Maariv. She returned to Berlin in 2001 and lived there until her death.

No details on funeral arrangements or survivors were immediately available. 

Reference: By Kirsten Grieshaber, Associated Press