“Does anybody have information…?”

In summer 1945, only a few weeks after liberation from the Nazi dictatorship, Georg Marcuse filed a missing person inquiry at the Berlin Jewish Community. He had not heard anything from his younger brother Erich and his family since the fall of the previous year. The mother of the two brothers had returned to Berlin from Theresienstadt feeling weak, but safe and sound. Meanwhile there was still no trace of Erich Marcuse, his wife Johanna and their six-year-old son Peter.

Erich and Johanna Marcuse had been married for eight years. They probably met while they were working for the social welfare service. Erich’s brother Georg Marcuse and a colleague of Johanna’s acted as witnesses at their wedding in May 1937 at Berlin Registration Office. Johanna herself had no close family: she was born out of wedlock and her mother stayed single all her life.

For all their intense efforts, the Marcuse family was unable to leave Germany in time. Georg Marcuse was at least able to avoid deportation to a concentration camp because he was married to a non-Jewish woman. He had to do forced labor and was arrested during the so-called Factory Action on 27 February 1943, but was released shortly afterward. But his mother Rebecka was deported to Theresienstadt ghetto in March 1943. Erich Marcuse and his family arrived there just three months later.

The Theresienstadt ghetto was liberated in May 1945. 67-year-old Rebecka Marcuse was among the survivors. It took several months, however, until she could return home to her family in Berlin.

When she finally returned to Berlin, Rebecka Marcuse could embrace only her son Georg and his wife Margarete. The few survivors who returned from the concentration camps had no news of Erich, Johanna, and Peter. Georg Marcuse began actively to look for them. He started with the missing persons notice in the Jewish Community but it brought no results. In April 1945, the International Red Cross set up a tracing service and other organizations soon followed suit. In the subsequent years, the Marcuses focused all their hopes on the work of these services.

The family finally established the fate of Erich Marcuse with absolute certainty in 1972. The Red Cross International Tracing Service reported that Erich Marcuse was separated from his wife and child and deported to Auschwitz in September 1944. Around the same time that Johanna and Peter also arrived in Auschwitz, he was deported again, this time to Dachau. He spent the last months of his life in Kaufering, a network of subsidiary concentration camps of Dachau. The exact circumstances of his death remain obscure.

Georg Marcuse died in 1994 at the great age of 93, and was buried in the cemetery in Berlin-Weissensee. No grave exists for his brother Erich and Erich’s wife and child. Today, however, they are commemorated by three stumbling stones placed on the street at their last home address, Gipsstrasse 3 in Berlin.