By Andreas Vollbrechtshausen
Rosenstrasse 2-4 on Shabbat, February 27, 1943, 4 degrees, cloudy. Hundreds of women are demanding the release of their Jewish husbands and sons.
Elsa Chotzen is one of them. The fifty-year-old is fighting for the lives of two of her four sons. The Nazis imprisoned 5,000 to 6,000 men in the building that previously belonged to the Jewish community in order to deport them to extermination camps.
The women have one thing in common: they live in so-called mixed marriages, have converted to the Jewish faith, but are considered Aryan by the Nazis. The Gestapo drives up heavy equipment and intimidates the women. But they don’t give up.
Elsa Chotzen (1887–1982) survived the Holocaust, her husband, three of her sons and their daughters-in-law were murdered Photo: Private
And really: On March 6, 1943, the men from Rosenstrasse were released. But 35,000 Berlin Jews were deported and murdered in 1943.
80 years later, Elsa’s descendant, Israeli artist Inbar Chotzen, stands in the same spot to commemorate these brave women. The Berlin Rabbi Yitzhak Ehrenberg and the Ambassador of Israel, Ron Prosor, will also speak next to her. White roses are laid at the sculpture group in Rosenstrasse.
Inbar Chotzen seems composed on this cold winter day: “I try not to think about my great-grandmother, who was deported from here to an extermination camp.”