(No) post for Alice Lesser?
Words of compassion and acts of kindness were a source of strength for the “elderly, highly educated lady” in Ravensbrück concentration camp
“Alive! Full of wonder! Intense! Back from hell, from the depths of dehumanization – but above it all stretched a spiritual heaven of friendship with remarkable women from every country. Because of this, there were inner riches and much love alongside all the suffering.” Alice Lesser wrote these words to her brother Waldemar in September 1945. She was 64 years old at the time and had survived almost six years in Ravensbrück concentration camp. Although her daughters had emigrated to Brazil, they had tried to stay in contact with her through the ICRC. In 1948, Alice finally joined them there. Her letter ends with the words: “Try everything to get me out. (…) I can no longer live among Germans.”
Alice Lesser was born Alice Elise Falckenthal in 1881 in the small town of Königsberg, now Chojna, south of Szczecin. Her parents were estate owners, and she led a sheltered existence. Around the turn of the century, she met – and felll in love with – Max Lesser, who was considerably older than she was. Nearly 50 at the time, he worked in Berlin as a correspondent for the Neue Wiener Tagblatt and moved in intellectual circles as a writer and a man of letters. Theodor Fontane and Gerhart Hauptmann were among his acquaintances. Alice and Max got married in 1900.
After their wedding, they lived in Charlottenburg, an upper-class district of Berlin, and had three daughters within four years. Alice and Max encouraged the girls to be creative. The eldest, Gerda, was already writing poems at the age of twelve. Her father proudly sent some of her verses to Gerhart Hauptmann. The Lessers made regular trips to the Baltic Sea. They felt particularly at home in Neuendorf on the island of Wollin. Their youngest daughter, little Christine, or “Tine” as she was known, was born there in 1919. Shortly afterwards, Alice Lesser decided to open a guesthouse in the village. Her husband was about to retire, and his income as a correspondent was in danger of drying up. Alice charged between five and seven Reichsmarks per night for board and lodging, a high price in those days, which suggests that the accommodation she provided was high quality.
Landlady of a guesthouse on the Baltic coast
The Lessers divided their time between Berlin and the Baltic seaside resort with little Tine. The three older daughters were already grown up by then. But their lives changed abruptly when the Nazis came to power. Max was Jewish, and their daughter Charitas, who was training to become a teacher, was immediately banned from her profession. Her older sister, who held a doctorate in economics, took her own life. Alice herself was Protestant, but remained steadfastly loyal to her Jewish husband. By 1933, she was already under the scrutiny of the Gestapo.
From now on, the Lessers spent all their time in Neuendorf. The pressure on them increased. New “mixed marriages” were banned from 1935 on, while couples in existing marriages were socially ostracized. Many in the village were enthusiastic supporters of Hitler. Before long, streets were being renamed in honor of Nazi figures. Max, who was gradually going blind, still continued to write sharp, literary letters to his intellectual friends, some of whom had already emigrated. Alice corrected and annotated them for him. Their daughter Charitas emigrated to Palestine in 1934, while their other two daughters, Eva and “Tine,” obtained visas for Brazil. In February 1939, they set sail for their new home from Bremen. Alice and Max were left on their own.
Deportation in September 1939
Six months later, shortly after the outbreak of war in September, the Gestapo knocked on their door in Neuendorf. Both of them were probably picked up that day, though only Alice’s arrest is documented. On November 2, 1939, her name appears in a list of new arrivals at Ravensbrück concentration camp. The reason for her internment is recorded as “political.” Max died shortly afterwards in a Berlin hospital. It is not clear when his wife and daughters learned of his death.
Their daughters tried to keep in touch from Brazil. After contacting the Red Cross, they learned that Alice being held in Ravensbrück concentration camp. In 1940, she was 59 years old, “an elderly, highly educated lady,” as fellow prisoners later recalled. Worried, the girls inquired about her state of health and were told by the German Red Cross that she was in “excellent” shape. The Reich Main Security Office cited a medical report: “With an admission weight of 54.8 kg, she now weighs 59 kg.” There is no way of knowing whether this information was true. Her daughters also sent her postcards.
Chronology of Red Cross correspondence on behalf of Alice’s relatives in Brazil
Small acts of kindness helped keep hope alive
Whether their messages ever reached Alice is uncertain. She had to work in the camp kitchen, which involved rising early and spending long hours on her feet, but it was warm in the bitterly cold winters and she could sometimes smuggle out a piece of bread or a boiled potato when she was unobserved – not for herself, but for other women who were even worse off than she was. She saw how they were bullied and tormented, saw what hard work it was to level the ground for roads and break stones, and she saw how the guards set dogs on them and demeaned them however they could. When women were taken away for medical experiments, some never returned. But there was a strong sense of solidarity between the political prisoners she met in Ravensbrück. With small acts of kindness, they kept themselves – and their hope – alive. Alice began to write poems, both for herself and for the other women.
“Käthe once hummed an old miner’s tune to me (….) and she wrote a poem to go with it. I no longer had it, but the defiant optimism it contained stuck in my mind, so I recreated the verses from memory. But the soul of the poem comes from Käthe,” Alice Lesser later wrote, referring to her poem “Wir schleppen schwere Lasten,” which she had dedicated to socialist Käthe Leichter. Käthe was murdered in the Bernburg killing center in March or April 1942, along with over 1,000 other women from the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Most of the victims were Jewish, but they also included women who were old or seriously ill and deemed “unfit for work.”
Music and verse to keep despair at bay
Alice, by then 61 years old, was spared – and she did what she could to help other women in the camp hold on to some hope. In 1943, she gave a concert on an accordion that had been smuggled out of the personal effects storage room. The music may not have lasted long, but according to the later testimony of some of those who were there, it helped those present to forget, if only for a while, the inhumane violence in the camp. The women danced and sang, and one performed a mime. Alice later wrote a poem titled “Lied der Frauen in Ravensbrück” (Song of the Women in Ravensbrück).
But eventually her strength began to wane. “At the time I mentioned, her strength had run out. Together, we saved her,” Ravensbrück survivor Urszula Wińska later recalled. Alice was not among the over 7,000 women rescued by the Swedish Red Cross in “White Buses” a few days before the end of the war, she was one of the 2,000 women who were too weak to be sent on a death march towards the west and who stayed behind in the camp.
Uncertainty followed liberation
IIn the confusion surrounding the camp’s dissolution and the advance of Soviet troops, Alice managed to take refuge in a nearby forest. “Got away from the SS under the cover of darkness, that stopped them from shooting me,” she later wrote in a letter to her brother Waldemar. “Without food, poorly clothed. Nights spent outside in the thick of battle.” She made her way back to Neuendorf on the Baltic coast. Their house, the guesthouse, was still standing, but its contents had been looted.
“Books, pictures – there’s nothing left. Max’s beautiful library. The attic and the cellar still full of junk, covered in feathers from the feather beds they slashed. Unable to clean up without help (…) Now I’m alone and in limbo, without any documents (…). What is Tine’s surname now? Is her husband Jewish? Do not have addresses of children or friends (…).” She kept in touch with the women who had supported her in the camp. And she did everything she could to be able to leave Germany as soon as possible.
A new beginning in Brazil
In the end, the Hamburg Committee of Former Political Prisoners issued Alice an identity certificate She was living in a retirement home in Neumünster at the time (1946). In 1948, she finally managed to follow her daughters to Brazil. On March 25, she took a train from Frankfurt to Paris, where she caught a flight to Rio de Janeiro on April 3. This is what her friend Katharina Staritz wrote to her cousin in Rio, asking him to find out how Alice was as she had not heard from her since then. “She wrote very beautiful poems. Her companionship meant a lot to me in the camp,” Katharina Staritz emphasized in her letter.
But Alice was alive and well. She had found a new home in Araruama, east of Rio. Her letters to Germany grew fewer and farther between. She wrote one last letter to a friend from the concentration camp, describing the poor conditions in Brazil; to another she sent some poems on behalf of the camp community.
Efforts to obtain compensation payments
In the 1950s, she was still trying to claim compensation payments through the appropriate authority in Kiel. Later she became more withdrawn and only kept in touch with her closest relatives until her death in 1970. How lonely life gets. I cannot get over the fact that the 89-year-old man (note: she is referring to her husband Max) and my 93-year-old mother had to die alone,” she wrote in a letter to her brother Waldemar.
The Ravensbrück Memorial now has the originals of her poems and a small booklet containing poetic reflections on the four seasons.
