#IngeBerner hashtag - Bluesky

@archivtier.bsky.social

3 months ago

Inge Gerson was a member of the Herbert Baum Group until 1938 , a secret anti-fascist communist resistance group consisting mainly of Jewish youths. Inge's school friends Marianne Joachim (née Prager, pictured), Hildegard Loewy , and Hella Hirsch also belonged to the group. Gerson had already left the group due to political differences by early 1942, when following an arson attempt its members were arrested. Marianne Prager was executed in 1943. On September 30, 1941, three women from the resistance group— Eva Mamlok , Inge Gerson, and Inge Lewinsohn— were denounced for possessing and distributing banned books , arrested, and taken to Alexanderplatz Prison. According to Berner's later recollections, a Nazi court sentenced them to death for " undermining the war effort ." However, the death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment in a concentration camp.

With a three-month delay due to a typhus epidemic in the prison, the three young women were deported on January 13, 1942, with the 8th Eastern Transport to the Riga Ghetto in Latvia, where several forced labor camps existed at the time. These camps were merged into the Riga-Kaiserwald concentration camp in 1943 after the ghetto's liquidation. 10 months later the rest of her family, still in Berlin were deported to Auschwitz and murdered. In Riga's ghettos and camps, Inge and her friends continued to resist the Nazis via their underground network. Inge's testimony is particularly significant because she was the only member of the group sent to Riga who survived. It was not until the 1990s that she herself came forward with her memoirs under her own name. Among other work the group did in Riga, they smuggled in a camera hidden inside a cake, and documented in photographs life in the ghetto. To this day, though, the location or the existence of the photographs remains unknown.

Marianne Prager, on the left, with her friend Inge Gerson, late 1930's. Both were members of the Baum resistance group. Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Once again many thanks to the Leo Baeck Institute New York, which is commemorating Inge Berner and her friends Marianne Prager & Eva Mamlok. @lbilondon.bsky.social @leobaeckjeru.bsky.social

What we remember becomes the future!
#IngeBerner #MariannePrager #EvaMamlok

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