Contacting the Stolperstein Organisation

I have just spent about an hour writing to the Stolperstein organisation in Stuttgart. I confirmed that Clara Lehrs was deported to Treblinka in 1942 – they had only presumed this in their description. I also suggested a reason why the Hilfsklasse school in Clara’s house may have survived. This relates to a story my mother-in-law used to tell us about a school in Stuttgart. The home guard refused to burn it down. The Hitler Youth did as well. The BDM had to do it in the end – and they would have been severely punished if they had not – but not before they’d got all of the children out and rescued all of the books. The school opened again immediately after the war. It actually did rather better than the normal Waldorf School.

And thank goodness my German is fluent. Yes, I had my big dictionary at my elbow as I worked.  I haven’t done that for a while and I quite liked the familiarity of it. I’m also rather pleased that I only had to look up two words – one of which wasn’t in the dictionary so I had to improvise and the other which I’d guessed right in the first place.