One Is a Person Again

On the twenty-eighth of May, 2022, a rabbinical student from New York stood in a small city in eastern Germany, waiting to sign its Golden Book.

The city was Halberstadt. Daniel and his father had never lived there; his grandfather Dolf had escaped Germany and later returned once, according to family memory. The Reichenbach name appeared in civil and cemetery registers, in the building files of a department store destroyed in 1945, and on deportation lists and memorial stones.

Halberstadt’s Golden Book records its honored guests. At the reception, descendants of the city’s former Jewish residents were invited to sign it, eighty years after the first deportation from the city.

The family had preserved two sheets of Carlton Hotel stationery dated 26 November 1938. Dolf, then twenty-three, had written from St. Moritz to his mother Margarete in Germany, urging her to leave and join her children. Four days earlier, his cousin Fritz had been killed at Buchenwald. Margarete kept the letter until her death in 1966. Its later translation prompted the research presented here.

The research brought together civil registers, passenger manifests, camp records and surviving objects, including a wooden hanger marked with the store’s name. Questions remain. One concerns Stadtarchiv Halberstadt file 944/35, cited in historical correspondence. On 18 September 2026, the archive reported that it no longer holds the file; its present location is unknown.

Its contents remain unknown.

The family itself began every account of its own origins with a widow in Massachusetts who kept papers.

After the Second World War, Margarete Reichenbach lived near her children in Massachusetts. Among the papers she kept was Dolf’s letter.

Her name was Margarete Reichenbach. The 1940 census places her in Brookline with her son Dolf; her daughter Ruth lived in Norwood. Margarete died in 1966 and was buried at Temple Israel Cemetery in Wakefield, Massachusetts. Paul, her husband, was buried in Halberstadt. The letter had crossed the Atlantic with the family and remained in their keeping.

Before emigration, Margarete belonged to the Halberstadt shop household. Nazi persecution forced that household apart. The surviving letter and objects connect her later American life to the family business in Germany, without telling us everything she thought or remembered.

Margarete kept the letter until her death in 1966. She survived Fritz, Jeanette and other relatives murdered under Nazi persecution. For Kurt, Paula and Hans, the archive can trace the transport to Warsaw but has not found a later individual record. The diary entry about the train’s arrival does not name them.

The letter stayed in a drawer.

The town came first, and the town was old.

Halberstadt sits in the flat, fertile country between the Harz mountains and the plain, a city of half-timbered houses crowded beneath one of the great Gothic cathedrals of northern Europe. Jews had lived there since at least 1261, when a bishop’s protective writ first named the community — six centuries before there was a Germany to be Jewish in. Their history ran through the usual European stations: protection bought and revoked, a synagogue torn down by a mob in 1669 — after which the community, in what would become the abiding local style, sued. By 1699 the town held 639 Jews in 118 families, and its golden age was at hand. Berend Lehmann, court financier to August the Strong of Saxony, lavished his fortune on his hometown: a house of Talmudic study in 1707, a complete printing of the Babylonian Talmud, and in 1712 a baroque synagogue so splendid that Halberstadt could claim the largest Jewish community in Prussia. For two centuries the town was a capital of German Jewry, birthplace, within a few streets of each other, of Israel Jacobson, the pioneering spirit of Reform Judaism, and Esriel Hildesheimer, the founding intellect of modern Orthodoxy.

In a letter written in 1935, Paul Reichenbach traced the family’s origins to Gröbzig in Anhalt at the beginning of the eighteenth century. That earlier connection remains under investigation. Halberstadt’s cemetery registers record eighteen Reichenbach burials beginning in 1833, though not every person has been placed in the family tree.

Jacob Reichenbach was the founder whose initial appeared in the Halberstadt firm’s name. Its advertisements gave 1843 as the founding year: Stammhaus gegründet 1843. The clothing business stood on Hoher Weg, one of the town’s principal commercial streets. Jacob married Helene Heinemann. Their family records include the burial of a six-year-old son. Jacob died in December 1872, after the formation of the German Empire and the legal emancipation of its Jewish citizens.

The sons expanded and they spread, as the first emancipated generation of German Jewry did everywhere. Adolf stayed with the parent house in Halberstadt and raised the next patriarch. Ludwig worked the business, and his line stayed in the Halberstadt house: his son Kurt, whose possible identification in a 1921 Martiniplan ownership entry remains unresolved between two men of that name; Kurt’s sisters Paula and Antonie; and Paula’s son Hans, still on the shop floor when the lists were typed. In the next generation, Adolf and Goldine’s son Max — Paul and Ernst’s brother — left for Berlin and the world of the Technische Hochschule.

Another son, Salomon Gustav Reichenbach, born in 1848, settled in Wernigerode, where Jewish settlement had long been restricted.

Wernigerode lies twelve miles southwest of Halberstadt, below the Harz mountains. In 1874, under Prussian authority, Gustav Reichenbach was among the first Jews permitted to settle there. His arrival belonged to the wider changes brought by Jewish emancipation in Germany.

In 1883 he married Jeanette Rosenbaum. The documents preserve what that era’s conventions usually erase: the wife as founder. Jeanette’s dowry helped establish the shop that rose at Breite Straße 7, on Wernigerode’s main street. The firm traded, like the parent house, as J. Reichenbach. A photograph survives of the storefront, the family name painted large above the display windows of the town’s principal street, as public as a declaration can be.

Gustav managed the business, while Jeanette worked at the cash desk. She continued after his death in 1928 and into the 1930s. The shop she had helped establish remained central to the household as persecution intensified.

Her son Fritz, born over the shop in March 1884, grew into the business. He married Martha Pohly of Göttingen; they lived above the store; and in March 1914 Martha bore a son, Werner. Nine months later, in Halberstadt, another Reichenbach boy arrived. Two boys of 1914, two shops, one name. Twenty-four years on, Fritz would be imprisoned at Buchenwald and Dolf would flee to Switzerland. A camp file may also belong to Werner; that identification remains circumstantial. Werner and Dolf would live to be old men — one in Portuguese, one in English. Neither father would see it.

Paul Reichenbach, Adolf’s son and Jacob’s grandson, was born in Halberstadt on 20 October 1876. His records document a life in commerce, family, Jewish communal work and mountaineering.

Merchant. Proprietor. Husband, from 1908, of Margarete Liebenthal, a merchant’s daughter from Halle. Father of Ruth Helene, born 1909, and — in the first December of the Great War — of a son, Adolf, named for his late grandfather and called Dolf from the start. Alpinist: in 1909 Paul joined the newly founded Halberstadt section of the Alpine Association, a charter member, and stayed on its rolls for more than two decades; the section’s reports track his routes, in 1931 and 1932, across the Zugspitze region and the Upper Engadine — the high Swiss valley whose most famous address is St. Moritz. The father climbed, for pleasure and in freedom, the valley into which his son would one day run for his life.

His masterwork was the store. Between 1910 and 1913 Paul took the two properties the family had accumulated, Hoher Weg 27 and Martiniplan 10, back to back in the densest commercial block of the town, and had the building firm of Gebrüder Reinecke rebuild them into a single modern Kaufhaus: two tall selling floors, a curved central staircase, and, where a cramped courtyard had been, a glass roof — a Lichthof, a court of light, pouring daylight through iron ribs onto the merchandise below. On the elevation drawing in the municipal files, the departments cross the façade in a proud band of lettering — Herrenkleidung, Knabenkleidung — and beneath them the family name repeats along the lower band like a drumbeat: J. Reichenbach. J. Reichenbach. J. Reichenbach.

The firm’s paper from these years crackles with confidence. A 1902 advertisement boasts 1500 Winter-Paletots — fifteen hundred winter overcoats — in stock. An advertising button declares the house the largest specialist store for men’s and boys’ fashions. The firm held the title Herzoglicher Hoflieferant — purveyor to a ducal court, the Wilhelmine equivalent of a royal warrant. The store issued series of Reklamemarken — little collectible advertising stamps, each a jewel-colored miniature of the house: the façade, the light court, the staircase, the boys’ department, the fitting room, the cutters’ atelier. Customers pasted them in albums. A century later, twelve of them would be among the largest surviving bodies of evidence that any of it had existed.

When war came, Paul served the home front, and in 1917 the Prussian government awarded him the Merit Cross for War Aid “for his activity in patriotic auxiliary service” — the award notice addressed simply to him at “Hoheweg 27,” as if the man and the address were one thing. The family kept the notice. It outlasted Prussia.

The building records, advertisements and wartime decoration document the family’s commercial success and participation in German civic life. They cannot tell us what Paul expected of the years ahead.

On 22 October 1926, page 566 of the Central-Verein-Zeitung — the national newspaper of the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith — carried a notice from its Halberstadt branch on the fiftieth birthday of the branch’s long-serving former chairman: “We offer our warmest congratulations to this deserving man, who for years has stood in the struggle against antisemitism with tireless energy.”

The deserving man was Paul Reichenbach. He had organized against antisemitism for years, as chairman, in the largest Jewish civil-defense organization in the country — an organization whose very name, German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, was a battle standard. He was fifty, he was honored, and he had nine years and twenty-nine days left to live.

The Centralverein campaigned against antisemitism through public advocacy and legal action. After 1933, the Nazi regime made racial exclusion state policy. The citizenship and civic standing on which families such as the Reichenbachs had relied were progressively dismantled.

The Reichenbachs were invested to the hilt. Their communal record in the 1920s is a civic honor roll: seats on the boards of the Jewish old-age home and the children’s day-care, and silence on synagogue offices and religious functions. Family memory is candid that no one in the family was notably religious; in Halberstadt, the self-styled capital of German Orthodoxy, they stood nearer the door Jacobson had opened. Theirs was the Judaism of the board meeting and the charity gala. Family memory preserves one less flattering attitude too, and the descendants have kept it in the record precisely because it does the family no credit: the established Reichenbachs looked down on the poorer, more pious Eastern European Jews who came to work in the town, and fretted that such conspicuousness would inflame the very hatred the Centralverein was fighting. The Nuremberg Laws would define the Hasidic dairyman and the court purveyor with the same paragraph.

Halberstadt had 706 Jewish residents in 1933, about 1.4 percent of its population. Across Germany, approximately 522,000 people identified as Jewish by religion, less than one percent of the population. The Reichenbach shops were still operating, and a younger generation was entering the family businesses.

Family papers also record marriages and changes within the household. Ruth married the Berlin physician Martin Pützrath in 1930; a court dissolved the marriage in August 1932. On 3 August 1933 she married Albert Rothschild in Halberstadt. The surviving wedding papers belong to the first year of Nazi rule, after the April boycott of Jewish businesses.

Racial exclusion reached Paul’s mountaineering club in 1934.

In 1934, the Halberstadt section of the Alpine Association adopted the Arierparagraph: members would furnish proof of Aryan descent.

Paul joined the Halberstadt section at its founding in 1909. Its reports record his later routes in the Zugspitze region and Upper Engadine. These records document his long membership and participation in the club before its adoption of racial exclusion.

No personal account of Paul’s response to the 1934 rule has been found. The surviving section records document the rule; the 1936 statute made the exclusion of Jews explicit. Paul had died the previous year.

The club’s racial membership rules excluded Jews from an institution Paul had joined at its founding. His individual departure or removal is not documented in the sources found so far.

Paul’s answer to the gathering dark survives in a single document. In April 1935 — the flags on every public building, the paragraph in his club’s bylaws — the fifty-eight-year-old merchant wrote to a fellow researcher named Rudolf Simonis about genealogy. “It is established,” he reported, with a researcher’s satisfaction, “that our family lived in Gröbzig at the beginning of the eighteenth century.” He meant to visit the cemetery there after Easter. He was tracing his own descent for love, in the same season the German state was turning ancestry into a legal boundary.

On 15 September 1935, from the party rally at Nuremberg, the regime proclaimed the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood. Paul — court purveyor, decorated veteran of the home front, Centralverein chairman, charter Alpinist — was no longer a citizen of the country his family had served since Jacob’s day. On 14 November, the First Regulation supplied the racial arithmetic, defining exactly who would count as a Jew before the law that was coming.

Six days after that, on the evening of 20 November 1935, at half past seven, Paul Reichenbach died at home at Sedanstraße 52. He was fifty-nine. The family recalled the cause, ever after, as a heart attack.

The death register records the fact; it cannot record the connection, and neither can anyone now. Hearts fail for a thousand reasons. But the family kept the arithmetic: sixty-six days after Nuremberg, six days after the decree. His gravestone in the Halberstadt Jewish cemetery says what could be said in 1935, in the formula of the tradition: “Suddenly he departed from this world, to the sorrow of his wife and children, his family and all who knew him.”

Paul was buried in Halberstadt’s Jewish cemetery. His gravestone survives, preserving both his name and the family’s words of mourning.

He left a widow of forty-six, a married daughter, and a son of twenty — one month short of his majority, heir to a firm the new Germany had already marked for seizure.

The family papers show journeys between Germany and the United States before November 1938. Departure was not a single event: travel, citizenship applications and the shipment of possessions left different records.

Passenger records place Margarete aboard the S.S. Manhattan in 1937. A fellow passenger wrote a playful verse in her honor, which the family kept. Mother and son also appear on a 1937 arrival of the S.S. Washington and a May 1938 arrival of the S.S. Paris. The records establish travel before the November pogroms; they do not by themselves establish the purpose of each journey.

Then they began, methodically, to breach the wall. On 12 August 1938, in Massachusetts, Margarete filed a declaration of intention — the first paper of American citizenship — naming, in the space for a spouse, her Paul, three years dead. On 15 September, Dolf filed his own. The dates sit against the calendar of the catastrophe: the Évian conference had just ended in July with thirty-two nations wringing their hands and closing their doors; the Reich’s April decree had forced the registration of Jewish property, the inventory before the confiscation. Two months before the pogrom, mother and son had both formally declared, in an American courthouse, their intention to become citizens of the United States.

And yet that November they were back within the Reich’s reach — Margarete recorded in this period as a widow in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, holding a property interest there alongside her brother-in-law Ernst. Leaving Germany was a siege: exit taxes to negotiate, property to salvage from a confiscated firm, a household to fight through the export inspectors piece by piece — the walnut chest, the sugar caster, the silver box. Someone had to wage the German front in person. The family was threading a needle whose eye was closing at the rate of a decree a month.

What they still believed they had was the one resource that kind of work consumes first.

Time.

The regime called it Arisierung — Aryanization. A Jewish firm’s suppliers grew hesitant; its bank grew formal; its customers grew afraid to be seen at its counters. A buyer appeared, offering a fraction of the firm’s worth, and the offer was understood as the good version of what was coming. Lawyers drew the contracts. Notaries stamped them. Everything was legal, in the sense that the law had been rebuilt around the theft.

In Halberstadt the process left its usual half-erased trail. As late as 1933, Paul’s women’s fashion house was advertising at Martiniplan 10 under the proud old line Stammhaus gegründet 1843; by 1938 a firm called Menningen & Co. sat at the same address. Between those two directory entries, ninety-five years of ownership dissolved into transactions whose surviving files do not explain every transfer.

But in Wernigerode a single document survives that shows how the machine worked. On 26 August 1938, Fritz Reichenbach signed a notarial deed selling Breite Straße 7 — the shop his mother’s dowry had built — and among its numbered clauses stands one stipulating that the transaction required official approval because the seller was Jewish, under that April’s property-registration decree. There it is, in a notary’s prose: the coercion as a compliance requirement, initialed and stamped.

Jeanette was seventy-eight when her son signed. She had sat at that till since Bismarck ruled. The deed’s ink was ten weeks dry when the men came for Fritz anyway. The regime’s bargain — sell and be spared — was a receipt the victims were made to sign: first the property, then everything else.

The pogrom came by telephone. On the night of 9–10 November 1938, orders from Munich raced down the party’s wires into every German town that held Jews, and by morning the country’s synagogues were burning — the fire brigades standing by, under instructions, to protect the buildings next door.

In Halberstadt the mob came to the Bakenstraße, to Berend Lehmann’s synagogue — the baroque jewel of 1712, crown of what had been the largest Jewish community in Prussia. It was broken open, desecrated, and looted; some ninety Torah scrolls were dragged into the streets and defiled — each one a year of a scribe’s hand, dressed in velvet and crowned in silver, danced with on festivals by ten generations of the town’s Jews. Roughly forty Jewish men of Halberstadt were seized and shipped south to a hillside above Weimar, to Buchenwald, where 9,845 Jewish men were imprisoned in the special camp after the November pogroms; about 30,000 were sent to concentration camps across Germany. Among the forty was Kurt Reichenbach of the family firm, registered as prisoner 30536. And on 18 November, with the ruin still standing in the town’s midst, Halberstadt’s building police ordered the desecrated synagogue demolished, the costs to be borne by the Jewish community. The congregation was billed for the erasure of its own sanctuary. By the following June the site was cleared ground.

Fritz Reichenbach was taken from Wernigerode to Buchenwald as prisoner 23976. A file names Werner Reichenbach as prisoner 23938, thirty-eight numbers away. The shared name and proximity are circumstantial evidence, not proof that this was Fritz’s son. The surviving file does not establish that father and son were seized or imprisoned together.

The camps of November 1938 were not yet the death machine of the coming decade; their purpose was terror in the service of expulsion, to break men so thoroughly they would sign anything, sell anything, queue anywhere, and drag their families out of Germany at any price. Most of the thirty thousand came out within weeks or months. Kurt came out. Werner would reach Brazil with his wife in 1939 and carry the Wernigerode line across the equator; the uncertain camp identification does not establish what he had experienced before that escape.

Fritz did not come out. The camp’s ledger records his death on 22 November 1938, at four o’clock in the morning, in the Arrest — the punishment bunker. He was fifty-four: twelve days a prisoner, twelve weeks past the deed with the numbered clause, a man who had done everything the extortion demanded and was murdered in a cellar anyway.

His mother had now outlived her husband, her town’s tolerance, her shop, and her son. His wife Martha was a widow. And in Halberstadt, in those same days, a telephone rang.

The morning after the fires, Halberstadt’s Jews woke in a town where the air itself had changed. The synagogue stood gutted at the heart of the old quarter; men were disappearing from their houses into police vans; and every Jewish family in Germany was performing the same calculation at the same hour — who has been taken, who is next, who can still move.

Dolf Reichenbach was twenty-three. He had filed his American declaration of intention that September. His daughter Susan remembers a warning delivered by a non-Jewish friend as a question:

Was Dolf planning to ski in Switzerland that weekend?

In the family account, Dolf understood the warning and left that afternoon. The authorities came looking for him a day or two later.

The friend’s name is unknown. No contemporary record yet found documents the call or the reported search. The account survives through family testimony, recorded in Susan Reichenbach Heyman’s oral history.

On 26 November 1938, Dolf wrote to his mother on Carlton Hotel stationery from St. Moritz. The surviving letter is the contemporary record of his appeal to her.

Dolf dated the letter 26 November 1938. Its two sheets bear the Carlton Hotel’s St. Moritz letterhead. Four days earlier, Fritz had been killed at Buchenwald. Dolf does not mention him. He writes to his mother about leaving Germany and being together again.

In German (transcription)

Geliebte Mutti,

dieses sind nun die letzten Zeilen, die ich an Dich sende, bevor wir wieder ganz zusammen sind. Lasse Dir den Fortgang nicht schwer fallen. Es ist draussen auch schön ohne Geld, man ist wieder Mensch, bedenke das immer. Deine Kinder haben Dich so lieb, dass es für Dich ein 1000 Mal besseres Leben mit uns sein wird.

Wir geben viel auf und lassen noch mehr an traurigen und schönen Erinnerungen zurück. Für uns bleibt es nun vorwärts-sehen. Wir wollen es schaffen und werden es schaffen. Der liebe Gott wird uns nicht verlassen. Grüsse und küsse alle Verwandten nochmals recht fest von mir. Kopf hoch, nicht weinen, immer daran denken, dass es uns vergönnt sein wird zusammen zu bleiben, davon soll uns nichts abhalten. Nun auf Wiedersehen und Küssen.

Dein Dich innig liebender Sohn Dolf.

In English · translation by Rabbi Dr. Esther Jilovsky

St Moritz, 26/11/38
Carlton Hotel
E. Scherz, Dir.

Dear Mum,

These are now the last lines that I’m sending to you before we’re all together once more. Don’t let the progress be too hard for you. It’s also nice outside without money, one is a person again, always keep that in mind. Your children love you so much, that it will be a thousand times better life for you with us.

We’re giving a lot up and leaving more and more sad and nice memories behind. For us that means only looking forward. We want to make it work and will make it work. Dear God will not abandon us. Greetings and kisses yet again from us to all relatives, nice and tight. Hold your head high, do not show, always think that it will be granted for us to stay together, nothing should keep us from that. Well, goodbye and kisses.

Your you-ever-praising,
son Dolf

He asks her to leave. The letter acknowledges money, possessions and memories without setting them against her children’s love. It does not tell us precisely what delayed Margarete or record her reply.

There is no mention of Buchenwald, Fritz or the warning call. The appeal is intimate: life together, even without money. Bedenke das immer. Always keep that in mind.

His reassurance becomes a shared resolve: Wir wollen es schaffen und werden es schaffen. He invokes God, sends love to the relatives, and asks her to hold her head high. These are a son’s words to his mother, not a public declaration.

Margarete kept the letter. The family’s 1939 shipment of household goods documents another part of the departure, but her final route out of Germany remains untraced. By the 1940 census, mother and son were living together in Brookline.

They were together. The letter survives; the part it played in her decision cannot be measured.

While Dolf, Margarete and Ruth established lives in the United States, other relatives remained in Germany. The circumstances that prevented their departure are not fully known.

Jeanette, seventy-nine the month of the pogrom, was moved to Berlin, into the city where the Reich was compressing the provinces’ Jews; so was Martha, Fritz’s widow, reduced to a factory worker and subtenant, her property inventoried by the Gestapo while she still lived among it. Ernst — the last of Paul’s brothers, whose whole working life had run inside the family’s shops — was at Normannenstraße 2 in Berlin with his wife Rosalie. Max, released from Sachsenhausen in December 1938, died in Berlin thirteen months later, at fifty-seven. And in Halberstadt remained Ludwig’s children: Kurt, back from Buchenwald into a country that had merely deferred him; his sisters Paula Wollenberg, widowed in 1938, and Antonie Weiss; and Paula’s son Hans, the last of the shop floor’s third generation. The community’s remnant was herded into designated Jew-houses — Kurt to Dominikanerstraße 23, Paula and Hans to a converted community building at Westendorf 15.

On 1 September 1939 the war began and the exits narrowed to threads. In October 1941, with roughly 165,000 Jews still inside the Reich, their emigration was banned outright. The state that had spent eight years expelling its Jews now locked the doors from within, because the policy had changed and the trains were rolling. The Jewish school in Halberstadt closed. The yellow star went on. In the town hall, lists were typed.

The list that concerns this family survives, down to its cell. Page 14, row 176: Kurt Reichenbach, of Dominikanerstraße 23.

On Sunday, 12 April 1942, the Jews selected for Halberstadt’s first deportation were ordered to assemble on the Domplatz — the cathedral square, the widest open ground in a city whose Jews had lived under those towers since the bishop’s writ of 1261. Among the assembled, with their permitted luggage, stood Kurt, fifty-two, whose possible identification in the Martiniplan 10 property record remains unresolved; Paula, sixty-four, widow of a partner in J. Reichenbach; and Hans, thirty-four, her son.

On the thirteenth they were moved to a collection camp at Magdeburg. On the fourteenth their cars were coupled, in the Berlin region, to a longer transport gathering the Jews of central Germany. On the morning of 16 April 1942 the train reached occupied Warsaw.

Adam Czerniaków, chairman of the Jewish council in the Warsaw ghetto, recorded the arrival of a train from Germany in his diary on 16 April 1942:

“At 6 the train with newcomers from Germany arrived.”

The transport records place Kurt Reichenbach, Paula Wollenberg and Hans Wollenberg on that arrival. Czerniaków’s diary does not name them individually, and no later record of their lives has been found.

No ghetto registration, ration card or death entry has been found for Kurt, Paula or Hans after their arrival. Antonie Weiss, also deported on the April transport, is last traceable in Poland in July 1942. The Warsaw ghetto suffered severe hunger and overcrowding; deportations to Treblinka began that summer. This history cannot establish the individual fate of any of these relatives.

Other records give different degrees of certainty. Jeanette was deported from Berlin to Theresienstadt on 11 September 1942, on transport I/64, and died there on 25 October, one day before her eighty-third birthday. A death card records Ernst’s death in Berlin on 27 November 1942 without giving a cause or place of custody. Martha was deported on the 33rd Osttransport (Berlin wave 47) of 3 March 1943, whose destination was Auschwitz. No intake card or prisoner number has been found for her. The account that she died in a Berlin air raid conflicts with the deportation record and remains identified as a separate account. Rosalie, Ernst’s widow, was taken from the Berlin flat in August 1944 and survived.

Of Halberstadt’s Jewish community, 186 people were deported between 1939 and 1942. None returned. Of Germany’s Jews, between 160,000 and 180,000 were murdered, inside the six million of the European whole.

On 8 April 1945, Allied bombing destroyed much of central Halberstadt, including the Reichenbach department store. The synagogue had already been destroyed under Nazi rule. The Jewish cemeteries survived, as did photographs, documents and objects kept by relatives abroad.

We’re giving a lot up, the letter had said, and leaving more and more sad and nice memories behind. He had been writing about a household.

The family remembers Dolf’s first American job as packing boxes at Raymond’s department store in Boston. His alien registration form, filed in December 1940, records his residence at 3 Netherlands Road, Brookline, and his employer as the F & M Skirt Co. He was again working in the clothing trade, now as an employee in the United States.

The family also preserved household objects: a walnut-veneered chest, a sugar caster and a silver box. They document what was carried out, not the whole life left behind. The object records distinguish the surviving pieces from what is known about their shipment and ownership.

After 1 January 1943, Dolf married Susan “Subie” Ulmer. Her nickname appears beside her Bachelor of Science degree in Simmons College’s 1943 yearbook, the Microcosm. She grew up in Cleveland Heights, the daughter of Fan and Jacob Morton “Yank” Ulmer. Yank, originally from Shreve, Ohio, worked in law and the family firm’s affairs in Cleveland. His father Solomon had emigrated from Hungary and founded S. Ulmer & Sons; he died in 1937.

Dolf received Certificate of Naturalization no. 6354892 in Boston on 15 May 1944. His declaration of intention was dated 15 September 1938, before his escape to Switzerland that November. Later American records use both Dolf and Dolph. The 1964 Boston directory lists “Dolph Reichenbach, president” of Banner Sportswear Inc., at 116 Harrison Avenue, eighth floor. His family remembers his work as a clothing designer.

Margarete lived to see all of it: the firm, the grandchildren — a son, Paul, named into the family’s oldest habit, and a daughter, Susan — twenty-eight American years from the letter that begged her to come. She died on 7 August 1966 and was laid in Temple Israel Cemetery on Lakeside Avenue in Wakefield, under the pines.

Paul is buried in Halberstadt; Margarete is buried in Massachusetts. Their graves mark the separation of a household whose surviving members built their later lives across the Atlantic.

Ruth lived on in Norwood until 26 November 1987. She died forty-nine years, to the day, after her brother sat down at the Carlton Hotel and wrote.

The family recalls that Dolf rarely discussed his experiences in Germany. The letter remained among the papers passed down to his children.

Once, in the 1970s, an old man now, he went back.

Halberstadt lay in East Germany then: a gray border-district town with a bombed-out heart, the site of the synagogue a cleared lot, the site of the store rebuilt past recognition, and not a single Jew of the old community living in it. The Jewish cemetery had survived its congregation. Dolf went to his father’s grave — the stone that says suddenly he departed from this world — and stood there, and, as the family remembers it, said Kaddish in silence.

Kaddish is traditionally recited with a minyan. The family remembers Dolf praying alone at his father’s grave. That testimony does not establish whether a minyan could have been assembled elsewhere.

Then he went home to Massachusetts. He did not go back again. He died on 28 December 1979 and was buried at Temple Israel in Wakefield, near the mother he had gotten out.

The two sheets of paper passed to his son.

Paul J. Reichenbach grew up in Massachusetts and spent summers at Camp Zakelo on Long Lake in Maine. At seventeen, in 1969, he attended the Reform movement’s Kutz Camp in Warwick, New York. He entered New York University in 1970 and joined the movement’s professional youth staff in 1975. Over forty-four years he worked in Jewish youth education, camps and Israel programs. From 1978 he directed Israel programs that brought more than thirty thousand teenagers to Israel and Europe. From 2002 to 2019 he supervised the Union for Reform Judaism’s camping system as it grew to eighteen camps.

Paul’s work in Jewish education became an important part of the family’s American history. Camps and Israel programs connected his own children, as well as generations of participants, with Jewish communal life.

The next generation carried the family name forward.

The boy was named Daniel Dolph.

The pen moved, and the family’s name went down.

Daniel and the other descendants signed Halberstadt’s Golden Book at the 2022 reception. Their visit included conversations, presentations and time at the Berend Lehmann Museum.

On 5 May 2024, Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion ordained Rabbi Daniel Dolph Reichenbach. He had grown up in the camp community his father helped build. His work in teaching, worship and congregational life continues the family’s involvement in Reform Judaism, a movement whose early pioneer Israel Jacobson was born in Halberstadt in 1768.

Halberstadt keeps what it can. The Berend Lehmann Museum tends the community’s memory from the restored ritual bath on the Judenstraße; the Klaus of 1707 houses an academy named for Moses Mendelssohn; memorial stones on the Domplatz carry the names of the deported. Since 2005 there is a Jewish community in the town again — some thirty families from the former Soviet Union, no thread of descent connecting them to the old congregation.

Four Stolpersteine outside Breite Straße 7 in Wernigerode name Jeanette, Fritz, Martha and Werner Reichenbach. They commemorate the family at the address of its former shop and home. Werner escaped to Brazil in 1939 and lived there until 1992. The family’s history continued there, far from Wernigerode.

File 944/35 is named in the family’s historical correspondence. On 18 September 2026, Stadtarchiv Halberstadt reported that it no longer holds it. Its present location and contents remain unknown.

Several questions remain unresolved: whether a copy of file 944/35 survives elsewhere; Margarete’s final route out of Germany; and the fates of Kurt, Paula and Hans after their arrival in Warsaw. The archive presents its research in three languages. Dolf’s letter is reproduced in German and in Rabbi Dr. Esther Jilovsky’s English translation.

Margarete’s preservation of the letter made this later research possible. Other papers kept by the family continue to provide names, dates and questions for investigation.

Writing from St. Moritz on 26 November 1938, Dolf asked his mother to remember:

One is a person again, always keep that in mind.

The family continues to preserve the letter and research the lives it connects.