For any of you who have done or are doing research about relatives who were persecuted or killed in the Holocaust, you may want to check out the newly organized database released by the Arolsen Archives in May, 2019. In the press release they issued on May 21, 2019, they wrote:
People from all over the world can now conduct research online to discover thefates of victims of National Socialist persecution: the Arolsen Archives havepublished a new online archive in partnership with the World HolocaustRemembrance Center, Yad Vashem (https://collections.arolsen-archives.org/en/). The database contains a comprehensive collection of documents from concentration camps, including prisoner cards and death notices. The more than 13 million documents featuring information on over 2.2 million people persecuted by the Nazi Regime are part of the UNESCO’s World Documentary Heritage and are a key focus of the collection of the Arolsen Archives. This database is the first of several large collections scheduled to go online in future.
I first learned of this new resource from my cousin Wolfgang Seligmann, who emailed me on May 28, 2019, about new discoveries he’d made by searching the newly updated Arolsen Archives.
This post will be about the first—documents he found about Martha Oppenheimer Floersheimer, the daughter of Pauline Seligmann and Maier Oppenheimer and granddaughter of Moritz Seligmann, my three-times great-grandfather. Pauline was the younger sister of my great-great-grandfather Bernard Seligman and Wolfgang’s great-grandfather August Seligmann. So Martha was Wolfgang’s first cousin, twice removed, and my first cousin, three times removed.
Although I have written about Martha before, since I last wrote about her, additional documents have become available on Ancestry that provide more details of her life before the Holocaust. Martha was born on March 1, 1876, in Offenbach, Germany. She married Heinrich Floersheimer on September 18, 1902, in Butzbach, Germany. Together they had two children: Trude, born January 24, 1904, in Gross-Gerau, Germany,1 and Paul, born August 9, 1906, in Wiesbaden, Germany.2 Martha and Heinrich were divorced in 1913.
Martha Oppenheimer birth record, Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv; Wiesbaden, Deutschland; Bestand: 918; Laufende Nummer: 323, Ancestry.com. Hesse, Germany, Births, 1851-1901
Martha Oppenheimer marriage and divorce record, Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv; Wiesbaden, Deutschland; Bestand: 924; Laufende Nummer: 323, Ancestry.com. Hesse, Germany, Marriages, 1849-1930
From Yad Vashem and other family sources, I’d earlier learned that both Trude and Paul were murdered during the Holocaust. Trude was deported from Frankfurt on June 11, 1942, and sent to the Sobibor concentration camp where she was murdered; she was 38.3 Paul was deported on June 10, 1942, to the concentration camp at Majdanek, Poland, and was murdered there; he was 35.4 As for their mother Martha, she was sent to Thereisenstadt and somehow survived.
What Wolfgang found at the Arolsen Archives website were forms that Martha completed after she was liberated from Thereisenstadt in 1945. These were forms used by the International Refugee Organization to help displaced persons obtain assistance after the war. The first page in Martha’s file is a form she submitted to the International Tracing Service; it’s heartbreaking to read this because it reveals that at the time Martha filled out this form, she still had hope that her two children were still alive.
CM/1 files from Germany for the family FLÖRSHEIMER, envelope F-3042, 3.2.1.1 / 79088827, ITS Digital Archive, Arolsen Archives
The second form is a questionnaire that the US Army asked displaced persons to complete. One question was, “Fuehren Sie de Namen irgendwelcher anderer naechster Familienangehoeriger auf, die sich zur Zeit in Deutschland aufhalten.“ In English—List the names of any other family members currently in Germany—and again, Martha listed her two children. Since the form was created on June 1, 1946, this indicates that Martha still believed her children could be alive a year after she was released from Thereisenstadt.
CM/1 files from Germany for the family FLÖRSHEIMER, envelope F-3042, 3.2.1.1 / 79088828, ITS Digital Archive, Arolsen Archives
The next two pages of that questionnaire ask numerous questions about Martha’s background. Of most interest here are two responses. One question asks whether she wants to return home, and she responded yes. Another question asked whether she had ever been persecuted for her race, religion, or political views, and she answered yes to race and religion; asked to describe how she was persecuted, Martha wrote that she was sent to Thereisenstadt concentration camp from September 2, 1942 until July 8, 1945.
CM/1 files from Germany for the family FLÖRSHEIMER, envelope F-3042, 3.2.1.1 / 79088828, ITS Digital Archive, Arolsen Archives
In February 1948, Martha filled out a third form, this one a Request for Assistance. On this form Martha described herself as a widow and wrote that she had been living back in Wiesbaden since July 1945.
CM/1 files from Germany for the family FLÖRSHEIMER, envelope F-3042, 3.2.1.1 / 79088829, ITS Digital Archive, Arolsen Archives
CM/1 files from Germany for the family FLÖRSHEIMER, envelope F-3042, 3.2.1.1 / 79088829, ITS Digital Archive, Arolsen Archives
CM/1 files from Germany for the family FLÖRSHEIMER, envelope F-3042, 3.2.1.1 / 7908889, ITS Digital Archive, Arolsen Archives
The saddest part of this form is the last page where Martha was asked whether she wanted to remain in Germany, to which she answered yes, and then whether she had any relatives living in Germany. Now her answer was no. By this time she must have learned that her children had been murdered.
I don’t have any other records for Martha after this point, but what I know from my cousin Angelika Oppenheimer and the Seligmann family tree is that Martha continued to live in Wiesbaden until her death on November 16, 1967, when she was 91 years old. That she survived almost three years at Thereisenstadt when she was almost seventy years old and then another twenty-two years in Wiesbaden after losing her children is amazing to me.
But Martha was wrong about one thing when she answered the questionnaire in February, 1948. She did have relatives who survived the war. Our cousin Angelika Oppenheimer, Martha’s great-niece and the granddaughter of Martha’s brother Moritz James Oppenheimer, remembers visiting her in Wiesbaden with her family when she was a child. And Wolfgang’s father and uncle were also still alive and living not far from Wiesbaden. Perhaps in some way Martha found the strength to survive from those family members who remained.
- From the Yad Vashem website at https://yvng.yadvashem.org/nameDetails.html?language=en&itemId=11497651&ind=1 ↩
- Paul Floersheimer death record, Personenstandsregister Sterberegister; Bestand: 926; Signatur: 333, Ancestry.com. Hesse, Germany, Deaths, 1851-1958 ↩
- See Note 1, above. ↩
- https://yvng.yadvashem.org/nameDetails.html?language=en&itemId=11497658&ind=1 ↩
Brotmanblog: A Family Journey 
After reading the article on Theresienstadt at Wikipedia, I am amazed how Martha Oppenheimer was able to survive the ordeals at the concentration camp. She was quite old at the time. How she found out about the murder of her two children remains a mystery. Perhaps knowing that the children were deported to other concentration camps, where death was almost a certainty, made her make the right assumption.
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Unfortunately, for so many of the Holocaust victims, there is no definitive proof as their bodies were destroyed and no identification was left behind. But if someone entered a camp like Sobibor or Auschwitz and did not survive, there is no doubt that they were murdered there or died from starvation, disease, and mistreatment.
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It is remarkable how much poignancy can be found in simply looking at documents if you have the context to understand what they mean. Martha must indeed have been a strong woman.
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Thank you, Laura. Yes—I am always amazed by the fact that many Holocaust survivors lived into their 90s.
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Such a sad story. I agree with Peter that it is amazing she survived the ordeals of the concentration camp.
Thank you for sharing the link to the Arolsen Archives. I found my 3C2R Pierre Fournelle who died at the Mauthausen concentration camp (Ebensee) in 1945. I knew he was one of the Luxembourg men and women who were “enrolé de force” (forced into recruitment) and was aware he died while imprisoned and buried in Ebensee. Now I have his death record found in the Arolsen Archives.
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I am so glad that that proved useful to you. It’s also important for me to be reminded that not only Jews were victims of the Nazis.
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Excellent post and research. I have been on the site and it is amazing. Such a sad story in so many ways and yet such a wonderful story of strength and resilliance.
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Thanks, Sharon. This is really a terrific new resource, but it will break our hearts every time we find something.
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Dear Amy I am fascinated and moved by each and every post. Initially,as you began posting, I was too busy and stressed to dive in and get involved. Now that we are in Coronado and the family has all gone home I have thoroughly decompressed. Now I am going back to the early posts and absorbing not only the moving stories but also grasping the incredible sleuthing involved. I am in awe. Thank you and bless you. Cousin Gayle
Be well and have a good day
>
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Hi Gayle—thank you so much for your kind words and for reading and commenting. I am so glad that you are reading. And I sure wish I could find as much about our mutual ancestors as I’ve found out my father’s ancestors. xo—Amy
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Laura’s comment about the poignancy of documents strikes such a chord with me, though I have never had to read such terrible documents as those relating to the Holocaust.
Martha must have been a very strong woman to have survived, but perhaps belief that her children might also still be alive would have given her a little strength and comfort each day.
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Maybe, Su. It’s so hard to know what keeps people alive. Some who wish to die don’t, others who wish to live die.
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Thank you for the info about the new source. I don’t know how Martha did it. She maybe have dreamed about home when she was at Thereisenstadt. It could have been a mental survival thing for her. Then when she returned her life had become so small that she couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. I can see that happening. Or am I misunderstanding something?
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No, I think what you are saying makes a lot of sense. Obviously many Jews never returned to Germany, but a number did. Perhaps the fear of the unknown was greater than the fear of living in a place where they had been persecuted.
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I imagine it would be a combination of personality and exact circumstances that would determine. But I have to wonder how many got any kind of therapy (and who would do the therapy?) afterward, ESPECIALLY in Germany.
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Probably not many. For that generation, getting therapy was embarrassing, a sign of weakness, even here in the US.
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This is true, plus what they had been through was so truly unimaginable that they might assume a therapist wouldn’t understand.
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From what I know of Holocaust survivors, most did not want to talk about their experiences at all.
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That’s what I have heard from children of survivors, as well as what I have read.
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I’m almost afraid to look even though I have no one to specifically look for. I’d like to live in my own little world where none of my ancestors were murdered. I do find it interesting that Martha knew the exact dates she was in Theresienstadt – you’d think the days would all run together and people would lose track of all time.
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I don’t think you forget those things. Or maybe she wrote it down!
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More just surprised that she even knew the date or the year. Maybe they had a way to keep track of those things. But you’re right, not something you would ever forget.
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Heartbreaking. I struggle to say more than has already been said about the atrocities of the Holocaust. I feel for her, her hope that her children had survived and were out there somewhere. Perhaps she returned home in the hope that her children would be freed and come back home to her – the place they knew. But that after a couple of years perhaps her hopes faded and she had to assume the worst. So many people would have been in a similar situation. I can’t imagine how that would feel.
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I think many survivors returned home for a time in the hope that family or friends would return. Eventually most of them left for Israel or the US or other countries. But some, like Martha, must have felt attached enough to the place where their families once lived that they held on to that place.
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