Rosa Regina Bloch geb. Lion
ROSA REGINA (also Regine) BLOCH was born on November 20, 1873. She lived with her family in Ihringen until the beginning of the Second World War. Then she moved to Freiburg with her daughter and son-in-law Gustav Judas. They lived with their children Carl and Anneliese at Poststrasse 6. ROSA REGINA BLOCH lived in Freiburg-Herdern at Starkenstrasse 39 with JETTE JUDAS, the mother of her son-in-law.
Her grandson Carl Judas called himself Carl Jaburg after successfully escaping with his family in New York. He then fought as a soldier on the American side against the German Nazi troops. He changed his name at the time so that if he was captured by the Germans there would be no indication of his Jewish origins. His family kept the new name after the war.
Carl Jaburg attended the compulsory Jewish school in Freiburg from 1936 to 1940 because children of the Jewish religion were no longer allowed to be in the same class as so-called „Aryan“ children. At first, this compulsory school was housed in two rooms of the Lessing School. After Kristallnacht in 1938, school lessons had to take place in the rooms of the Jewish community center on Werthmannplatz. The grandson still remembers ROSA REGINA BLOCH well. In a letter dated July 18, 2005, he wrote to Marlis Meckel:
“ My grandmother was a housewife, as was common in those days. She was very warm and not easily upset. I loved it when she lived in Ihringen and we lived in Freiburg. We often visited her. In the 1930s, Ihringen was a place where I didn’t have to be afraid. When she moved with us to Freiburg at the beginning of the war, we had a wonderful relationship, my sister and I really liked her very much. She was very intelligent, we had many, many discussions with her. „
In 1938, after Kristallnacht, his father Gustav Judas was to be arrested and deported to the Dachau concentration camp, like all other men of Jewish religion from the city of Freiburg. He had fought as a soldier for Germany in the First World War, but received a warning from a war comrade who was a policeman in Freiburg. With the help of his soldier friend, Gustav Judas organized a clinic and surgery appointment and had a long-overdue goiter operation performed. This meant that he was spared the terrible experiences that all prisoners in the Dachau concentration camp had to endure.
Then he was warned again by this man. This man, the former war comrade Fritz Schaffner from Freiburg, was a policeman and thus knew in good time about the October 1940 deportation and the fate that threatened the Judas family. Together with their children Carl and Anneliese, the couple were able to hide and thus evade deportation to Gurs. But when they were no longer able to receive food stamps, the Schaffner family tried to help feed the Judas family. Apparently the Judas family had been applying for visas for the USA for some time. Fritz Schaffner also arranged train tickets so that the Judas family could leave Germany via Berlin. Carl Judas‘ parents did not leave the house again until they left in 1941. Carl Judas was the one who maintained contact with the Schaffners. When the family was finally able to leave Germany, they had to travel from Berlin in a sealed train across Europe to Lisbon to board a ship to New York.
ROSA REGINA BLOCH and JETTE JUDAS, Carl’s other grandmother, would also have liked to have fled to the USA. „They did not get a visa because the US State Department had completely stopped issuing visas. There were some anti-Semites in this department. Of course they wanted to live with us, even in the USA, but we could never imagine that these old ladies would not be allowed to live in peace,“ Carl Jaburg reports in his letter.
However, on August 22, 1942, ROSA REGINA BLOCH, aged 69, was arrested and deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp via Stuttgart on transport XIII/1. In this terrible concentration camp, she had to fight for her daily survival for almost two years. But things got even more cruel: on May 16, 1944, the German Nazis took ROSA REGINA BLOCH from the Theresienstadt concentration camp on the so-called elderly transport Ea with 2,499 other prisoners to the Auschwitz concentration camp. There, ROSA REGINA BLOCH was murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau at the age of 71.
The STUMBLING BLOCK for ROSA REGINA BLOCH was laid by pupils from the Lessing Secondary School on May 28, 2003 with the help of Dieter Saier from the Freiburg Civil Engineering Department. Together with their teacher Rosita Dienst-Demuth, they had researched the Jewish compulsory school in the history workshop – and thus also the life and escape of Carl Jaburg, born in 1926. They had researched and also learned about the tragic fate, murder and death of his two grandmothers.
Carl Jaburg traveled from New York to Freiburg with twelve family members to see the STUMBLING BLOCKS in front of his childhood home and to pay his last respects to his grandmothers. He also wanted to show his children and grandchildren the house where he had often visited and lived as a young boy. Marlis Meckel, the initiator of the Freiburg STUMBLING BLOCKS, tried in vain to get permission from the tenant of the house for this family visit. Carl Jaburg later managed to take a look inside the rooms, albeit alone. His children and grandchildren had already left by this time. When the owner of the house later found out that his tenant had refused to show the Judas family the house, he gave his tenant immediate notice to evict him.
We owe some of the extensive information on the fate of ROSA REGINA BLOCH and her family to Dr. Christiane Walesch-Schneller, chairwoman of the Association for the Former Jewish Community Center in Breisach. She also made contact with the grandson Carl Judas, later Carl Jaburg. Unfortunately, Carl Jaburg has since died.
