Stumbling stones in Chemnitz

Szyja Wulf
Born: 04 October 1881
Died: between 1940 and 8 May 1945

Ettel Laje Wulf, née Buchaster
Born: 15 Oct. 1889
Died: between 1940 and 8 May 1945

Joseph Wulf
Born: 22.12.1912
Died: 10 October 1974

Szyja Wulf lived in Dresden for a while before moving to Mittweida at the beginning of 1910. A few months later he moved to Chemnitz.

What is known about the party goods trader? He was born in the town of Maciejowice (Russian Poland). On 5 May 1909, he married Ettel Laje Buchaster, eight years his junior, in Krakow, which was still part of the Habsburg monarchy at the time. Their son Pinkus Elias was born on 26 August 1909 in the former capital of the Kingdom of Poland.

After Wulf had established himself in Chemnitz, his pregnant wife also moved there. Together with their son Pinkus Elias, she arrived in the city in September 1910. Ettel Wulf gave birth to another son in the house at Uferstraße 9 on 29 December 1910, but he died after only ten minutes. Josef was buried in one of the nameless graves in the children's section of the Israelite cemetery in Chemnitz. Two years later, Ettel Wulf gave birth to another boy. He was given the name Joseph Bär.

No further details can be given about the trading business. It presumably flourished, because in April 1913 Szyja Wulf acquired a residential building with a shop built in 1846, namely the property at Uferstraße 9. The neighbouring house was home to the "Zur Ostbrücke" restaurant at the time.

During the First World War, Wulf, a Russian citizen who was considered an "enemy alien" in Germany, decided to move back to Krakow. In December 1917, he registered with his wife and sons at the Chemnitz town hall. From then on, the sons grew up in Krakow with their grandparents. In the period that followed, Szyja Wulf often stayed in Chemnitz, before finally leaving for Krakow in February 1925, when the city became part of Poland again on 28 October 1918. The Chemnitz house, in which eight tenants lived, remained in his possession.

After the beginning of the Second World War, from 1940/41 at the latest, the house at Uferstraße 9 was managed provisionally by Haus-Verwaltung und -Verwertung GmbH. During the Allied air raids on Chemnitz, the house was "very badly damaged" in March 1945. By this time, Mr and Mrs Wulf, their son Elias, his wife and daughter were no longer alive. They had been murdered in the Krakow ghetto. Only the younger son, who had trained as a rabbi at the Jewish College in Krakow in the 1930s, survived. Neither a death cell in the Krakow Gestapo prison nor the Auschwitz extermination camp could break him.

Joseph Wulf went down in the history of the old Federal Republic of Germany as a "pioneer in the documentation of Nazi crimes". He had lived in Berlin (West) since 1952. As an employee of the "Federal Centre for Homeland Service" in Bonn, he informed the post-war German society about Nazi crimes at an early stage. In 1955, he began publishing numerous books on the history of National Socialism. In particular, his documentaries on specific subject areas of the "Third Reich" (such as theatre and film, press and radio or literature and poetry) were groundbreaking. In 1965, Wulf also launched a campaign to establish a documentation centre in the Berlin Villa of the Wannsee Conference. However, the Berlin Senate refused to provide any support for this project.

Deeply traumatised by his camp experiences and disappointed by the lack of interest in his work, Joseph Wulf took his own life on 10 October 1974 by jumping from the window of his Berlin flat. The historian Wolfgang Scheffler (1929-2008) commented: "The circumstances of his death are reminiscent of the desperate death leap of his fellow sufferers from the windows of the burning houses of the Warsaw ghetto". "A man from Chemnitz survived Auschwitz - but not our time", is how Reinhard Kühn (1937-2011), founding member of the German-Israeli Society in Chemnitz, summarised the tragic fate of the commendable contemporary historian. He left behind a 36-year-old son.

Joseph Wulf was buried in Holon near Tel Aviv.

It is a project against forgetting: stumbling stones have been laid in Chemnitz every year since 2007.

Embedded in the pavement, the memorial stones commemorate the tragic fates of fellow citizens who were persecuted, deported, murdered or driven to their deaths during the National Socialist regime.

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