For greater than two years, Walter Frankenstein and his small household have been among the many estimated 6,500 human U-boats in Berlin — Jews making an attempt to elude Nazis by figuratively hiding like submarines. They took refuge in bombed-out buildings, vehicles, forests, craters, brothels or wherever they may survive for an additional day or week.
One morning in 1944, after sleeping within the shell of a constructing, Mr. Frankenstein was using a practice when a army policeman demanded to see his identification. Years later, in an interview with the Jewish Museum Berlin, Mr. Frankenstein recalled that he advised the officer, in a pretend overseas accent, that he was a pressured laborer and had left his papers in his work clothes.
When the officer insisted on calling his employer, Mr. Frankenstein felt he had no alternative however to confess that he was a Jew, though he risked being deported to Auschwitz. However the officer didn’t report him. As a substitute, he advised Mr. Frankenstein: “Get misplaced. I’m not in search of Jews; I’m in search of deserters.”
That episode illustrated the each day menace confronted by Jews in hiding — generally in plain sight — through the Holocaust, and the luck that saved a few of them alive.
“The typical U-boat modified places on common one dozen instances through the warfare,” Richard N. Lutjens Jr., a professor of recent German historical past at Texas Tech College and the writer of “Submerged on the Floor: The Not-So-Hidden Jews of Nazi Berlin, 1941-1945” (2019), mentioned in an e-mail. “They needed to. The fixed air raids and suspicious neighbors meant that one would not often keep in a single place for too lengthy.”
Mr. Frankenstein, who was one in every of about 1,700 such U-boats who survived the warfare, died on April 21 in Stockholm, the place he had lived since 1956. He was 100.
His dying was confirmed by Klaus Hillenbrand, the journalist who turned an article he wrote in regards to the Frankenstein household for a German newspaper into the 2008 e book “Nicht Mit Uns” (the title means “Not With Us”).
Mr. Frankenstein was born on June 30, 1924, in Flatow, Germany (now Zlotow, Poland). His father, Max, owned a basic retailer that his mom, Martha (Fein) Frankenstein, ran after her husband died in 1929. The household lived above the shop.
Like different Jewish companies, the household’s retailer was boycotted; somebody additionally fired bullets into it. The strangulation of Jewish life beneath Nazi rule meant that Jews have been banned from public faculties; when Walter was expelled from his faculty in Flatow, his mom despatched him to stay on the Baruch Auerbach Orphanage for Jewish Boys and Women in Berlin, the place he might attend a Jewish faculty.
The orphanage, he later mentioned, was a haven for some 200 kids and youngsters. “We lived there as if on a small, sheltered island,” he advised the Jewish Museum. “We didn’t have a lot expertise with persecution till the pogrom of ‘Reichskristallnacht’ in 1938.”
Throughout the Nazis’ coordinated antisemitic violence on Kristallnacht, or the Evening of Damaged Glass, storm troopers burst into the orphanage, bent on burning the constructing down. However Walter and three different boys managed to influence them to not set fireplace to the orphanage as a result of neighboring buildings may additionally go up in flames.
The Nazis turned their consideration to the synagogue subsequent door, the place they extinguished the everlasting flame on the altar and opened the gasoline valve, hoping to trigger an explosion. When the boys smelled gasoline, they turned off the valve and flung open the home windows.
Later that night time, Walter and the opposite boys went as much as the roof of the orphanage to survey the harm wrought by the Nazis. The destruction, which had occurred all through Germany and Austria, led to the deaths of a minimum of 91 Jews, in addition to fires at 1000’s of Jewish companies and synagogues.
“Then we knew: The synagogues have been burning,” Mr. Frankenstein advised The Related Press in 2018. “The subsequent morning, once I needed to go to highschool, there was glowing, damaged glass in all places on the streets.”
He met his future spouse, Leonie Rosner, on the orphanage, they usually left collectively in 1941, subletting a room in Berlin. They married in 1942; Walter, who was solely 17, wanted his mom’s permission.
To assist themselves, he labored as a mason in Berlin, which introduced him into contact with Adolf Eichmann, a pivotal architect of the Closing Answer, who threatened him as he did plastering work in Eichmann’s official residence.
“One speck and also you’re in Auschwitz tomorrow,” he recalled Eichmann saying.
Mr. Frankenstein’s time underground started in February 1943, when he confirmed up for a pressured labor task. After a Gestapo official advised him that the opposite Jewish staff had been deported the night time earlier than, Mr. Frankenstein fled, ripping off the yellow star that Jews have been pressured to put on. He went into hiding along with his spouse and their son, Peter-Uri, who had been born the month earlier than.
For the following two years and two months, the household — which grew with the delivery of a second son, Michael, in September 1944 — eluded the Nazis. At one level, Leonie and Peter-Uri escaped to a farm in Briesenhorst, a whole lot of miles away, close to the Baltic Sea. He took refuge in an opera home, numerous theaters, deserted vehicles and the house of a Christian lady.
Within the days earlier than the warfare ended, the 4 Frankensteins lived in a subway station that had been transformed right into a bunker.
“I lay on a plank mattress with a straw mattress on it, put the youngsters on it, and there we stayed till liberation,” Mr. Frankenstein advised the historian Barbara Schieb for an essay included within the 2009 e book “Jews in Nazi Berlin: From Kristallnacht to Liberation,” edited by Beate Meyer, Hermann Simon and Chana Schütz. “We had no water, no meals, nothing.”
After the warfare, Mr. Frankenstein helped smuggle Jews into the British Mandate for Palestine, when authorized immigration channels grew to become restricted. His spouse and youngsters sailed there in late 1945; he left in October 1946, however didn’t arrive till June 1947, as a result of he was detained by British authorities in Cyprus.
Mr. Frankenstein labored as a mason and tiler earlier than being drafted to struggle within the 1948 Arab-Israeli warfare. He later began an organization that put in irrigation methods on kibbutzim.
In 1956, after practically a decade of tolerating the excessive temperatures and life with out electrical energy, the household moved to Stockholm, the place Mr. Frankenstein earned a civil engineering diploma. He went on to work as an engineer for an organization that constructed nuclear energy vegetation.
Ms. Frankenstein died in 2009, and their son Michael died in 2024. Mr. Frankenstein is survived by their son Peter-Uri and plenty of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
In later life, the Frankensteins recurrently visited Germany, the place Mr. Frankenstein spoke at faculties and museums. In 2014, at his initiative, a memorial was put in on the facade of the constructing that had housed the Auerbach Orphanage. The identical yr, he obtained the Order of Advantage of the Federal Republic of Germany for his function in Holocaust remembrance.
Mr. Hillenbrand, Mr. Frankenstein’s biographer, wrote in an e-mail that “preserving the reminiscence in regards to the Shoah was a mission for him.”
After Mr. Frankenstein obtained the Order of Advantage, he usually carried it with him in its small blue case, together with the yellow star he had been pressured to put on a few years earlier than, figuring out him as a Jew.
“The primary one marked me,” he usually mentioned. “The second honored me.”