‘I had returned. Alone.’ – The end of the war and the liberation in 1945 from the perspective of Hamburg survivors of Nazi persecution

‘But as we reached the outskirts of the city, the familiar streets triggered pain and anger in me. I had returned. Alone.’

Cecilie Landau from Hamburg, later Lucille Eichengreen, wrote this sentence in a memoir in 2009, in which she describes the difficult return to Hamburg after her liberation from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945.

Cecilie, who was 20 at the time, had survived the Litzmannstadt ghetto and numerous concentration camps. She and her family had been deported from Hamburg to the Litzmannstadt ghetto in October 1941. Her mother Sala starved to death in the ghetto in 1942 and her younger sister Karin was murdered by the SS in the Kulmhof extermination camp. Her father Benjamin died in Dachau concentration camp in 1940. After her liberation in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on 15 April 1945, Cecilie briefly returned to Hamburg. After death threats, she left the city at the end of 1945 and moved to the United States. Until her passing in 2020, Lucille Eichengreen was a strong advocate of addressing National Socialist persecution.

Open-air exhibition on the end of the war and liberation

The quote by Lucille Eichengreen is one of six testimonies from Hamburg survivors of Nazi persecution about the end of the war in 1945, which are being shown in an artistic open-air exhibition at the ‘denk.mal Hannoverscher Bahnhof’ memorial site. These voices are illustrated by drawings by Paula Mittrowann.

Between 1940 and 1945, over 8,000 Jews, Sinti and Roma from northern Germany were deported to ghettos, concentration and extermination camps in eastern Europe via the Hannoverscher Bahnhof railway station in Hamburg. The majority of them were murdered. The survivors experienced liberation by the Allies in different places and at different times: in concentration camps, on death marches, in hiding, in Hamburg or in exile, where they had fled before deportation. In the temporary open-air exhibition ‘I had returned. Alone.’, survivors describe how they experienced their liberation or their return to Hamburg. They speak about joy and relief, grief and existential worries and continued marginalisation and discrimination.

The installation is part of a series of interventions that will be shown at the memorial site in Lohsepark until the opening of the ‘denk.mal Hannoverscher Bahnhof’ documentation centre. A free brochure with further information is available to download or at the information pavilion on Lohseplatz during opening hours (daily from 12pm to 6pm from April to October).

[Brochure follows]

Johanna Schmied/ Karin Heddinga