What moves us to stand up and speak out against evil? What does it take for ordinary people to stare down the weapons of tyranny and say “this is wrong”?
This is the story of the Rosenstraße protests, when, in 1943 love prevailed over evil, and the Nazi death machine was halted by the extraordinary protest of ordinary people - at least for a moment.
“Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.”
Things did not look good for the Nazis in February of 1943. Earlier that month, they had experienced a devastating defeat at Stalingrad, with over 700,000 Axis casualties (at the lowest estimate).
Certainly, the defeat at Stalingrad, though not made public to the German people until after the war, was in Goebbels’s mind when he spoke on February 18th about the danger of a second betrayal at the hands of Germany’s Jews. Once again, he- repeated the “stab-in-the-back” myth that had helped propel the Nazis to power.
Many of the Jews remaining in Germany were Jewish spouses of “Aryan” Germans, and their children (called mischling). There were 16,760 intermarried Jews in Germany, about 8,800 of whom lived in Berlin. My own great-great grandmother was among them, recorded in the 1939 German minority census with her non-Jewish second husband. At first, the Nazi regime pushed these “Aryans” married to Jews to divorce their spouses, often by threatening the children. The couples who divorced usually saw the Jewish partner deported, never to be seen again. The Nazis hesitated to deport the rest, fully aware of the PR disaster that could result. But on January 22, 1943, the decision was made for the rest of Germany to finally become “Judenrein”, or free of Jews.
The factory building at Rosenstraße 2-4. Photographed 1930s by Abraham Pisarek. Photo via University of Denver Libraries (click through for link)
In the early hours of Saturday, February 27th, the Fabrikaktion (factory action, although the term only began to be used after 1946) began. Jews were pulled from their beds and workplaces and brought to processing centers. Within the first weeks, over 11,000 people were deported to Auschwitz. But in Berlin, about 2,000 people, mainly Jewish men married to non-Jewish women, were separated from the other prisoners and interned at the former Jewish community building at Rosenstraße 2-4.
Their families gathered outside, demanding to see their imprisoned loved ones. Days passed and the crowd grew, made up mainly of the wives and children of those imprisoned.
43 years earlier, in 1900, a young man named Berek Pisarek would marry a woman named Sura Szajnik in her hometown of Warta, now in Poland. Both were from religious backgrounds; Berek would become a shochet, a kosher butcher. They would eventually come to identify with the Aleksander Hasidic movement.
The young couple had their first child, a boy they named Abraham Isaac, in Berek’s hometown of Przedborz. The little family would then move to the far bigger city of Lodz, where four more children would be born: Moszek in 1904, Chaskiel in 1905, Esther in 1907, and finally, the youngest, Ruchla in 1915.
The registration card filled out by the Pisarek family, as was required by all residents of Łódż. Courtesy of the Łódż Archive; click through for direct link.
Berek and Sura deeply valued their children’s education, and would send their oldest child, Abraham, to Germany to study in 1918. He worked in a factory while studying photography, which he pursued professionally. In 1924, he emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine, where he stayed for three years, returning to Europe after contracting malaria. After a short stint in Paris, he returned to Berlin, where he met a young woman named Berta Alma Luise Isigkeit.
Berta’s background was night and day from Abraham’s. She was the ninth of eleven children born to Heinrich Eduard Isigkeit and Nathalie Bertha König, an ethnically German couple who, at the time of the births of their children, were living in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
The couple were married on July 18, 1928; Berta, according to the family, had converted to Judaism. Two children would follow: Georg in 1929, and Ruth in 1931. And on February 27, 1943, Abraham was among those taken to the factory at Rosenstraße 2-4, a location he had, ironically, photographed in the decade before.
The families of those imprisoned, even without exact details, had some idea of what likely awaited their loved ones should they be deported. All of them would have had extended family without “protected” status. The Pisareks had lost contact with Abraham’s family in Lodz the year before when they were interned in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, and had no information as to their fates.
And so Berta, who had not admitted to her conversion when asked by the enumerator in 1939, joined the growing throng of women who stood there, mostly silently, outside of the factory at Rosenstraße 2-4. Their very presence was a protest; any gathering not sanctioned by the Third Reich was forbidden under law. Occasionally they would shout “Bring us back our men” and “If you take them, you must take us!”
They were threatened by SS men ordered to break up the protest, but when dispersed, the crowd simply reformed. Machine guns were set up and pointed at the gathering. But the women stood their ground, refusing to leave until their husbands were returned to them. The only stop to the protest was on March 1, when Berlin was bombed by the Royal Air Force. After the bombing, the crowd re-formed.
Meanwhile, conversations raged about what to do with the protestors. The Reich Security Main Office advocated shooting them all. Goebbels rejected the plan, pointing out that they simply could not keep it quiet if they massacred thousands of “Aryan” women in the heart of Berlin.
On March 6, all but 25 of those interned at Rosenstraße were released, including Abraham Pisarek. The remainder, who had no family in the crowd, were deported to Auschwitz.
The rest of Abraham’s family was not so fortunate. While his youngest sister, Ruchel, by then the only one of the siblings without children, was able to flee east, the rest of the family were sent to the Litzmanstadt (Lodz) Ghetto.
A year before the protests, Abraham’s parents, Berek and Sura, received notice that they were to be “resettled”. Their daughter, Abraham’s sister Esther, did not want her parents to be alone in a new home. And so on February 20, 1942, Esther, her husband Ruvin Weissberg, and their two children, Jakob (who had just turned five), and little Ascher, a month shy of his third birthday, joined Berek and Sura to be “resettled”. But as we all know, there was no resettlement, and this train was no exception - the family was instead deported to Chelmno, the Nazis’ first extermination camp, where they were murdered upon arrival.
Abraham’s brother Moshe died of starvation in the streets of the ghetto; Moshe’s wife, Esther Beila and their four children, 13-year-old Hersz Juda (who was, according to the family, something of a musical prodigy), 11-year-old Jankiel (like his cousin Jakob, named for their grandfather), 9-year-old Mendel, and the youngest, 7-year-old Rachma were sent to Chelmno. There, they too were murdered.
His brother Chaskiel, Chaskiel’s wife Roszja Feiga, and their 7-year-old son Jankiel would suffer the same fate.
The factory building itself is long gone, destroyed in another RAF bombing. A rose-colored column with information about the protests marks the spot where it once stood. There is a memorial, erected in the 1980s, called "Block der Frauen", and yet, the memorial itself does not explain what it is actually about.
The Rosenstraße protest memorial entitled “Block der Frauen”. Photo by Dr. Avishai Teicher https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50314277
Perhaps this protest is so readily resigned to the mists of time because it brings up so many difficult topics. It speaks to a wider trend, of safety in assimilation, of intermarriage in a time that we don’t typically imagine it (although, as any scholar of Jewish history knows, intermarriage has occured for as long as we have records).
It brings up many inconvenient questions. What would have happened if thousands more had protested, years before? Would we be having this conversation today? The arguments of the helplessness of the everyday citizen in the face of Nazi atrocities fall away when faced with a crowd of housewives who stood down Nazi guns in order to accomplish a simple goal - preventing the deportation and deaths of their loved ones.
Even faced with machine guns and knowing the fate that could await her, that the secret of her conversion could doom her and her children along with her husband, Berta Pisarek chose to stand up and speak out against evil alongside thousands of everyday citizens. Just as she did in the past, others today must decide if they are willing to stand against a violent, autocratic regime, regardless of the risks, and establish themselves on the right side of history, voicing their opposition to genocide as it is carried out in their names.