Ida Silber, geb. Falk

Ida Falk came from a religious family. Her father Salomon Löw Falk was a teacher at Jewish schools in Olnhausen and Hohebach. Ida Falk attended a lyceum (secondary school for girls) and a practical work school for women. In 1894 she married the insurance agent Salomon Silber. The couple had six children between 1899 and 1910. In 1899 the Silber family relocated to Munich, eventually moving into the ground-floor apartment at Bürkleinstraße 16 (today 20) in 1916. Ida Silber and her siblings owned the building. Ida Silber’s daughter Karola emigrated to Palestine in the 1920s. Her eldest daughter, Centa Gitl Silber, stayed with her parents in Bürkleinstraße. She worked for the Jewish community and died on November 25, 1937, aged just thirty-six. A few months later, on April 21, 1938, Ida Silber’s husband Salomon also died, and like his daughter was buried at the New Jewish Cemetery in Munich. After the “Kristallnacht” pogroms of November 9, 1938 Ida Silber was exposed to increasingly severe repression. Like all Jews, she was subject to the “decree of the usage of Jewish assets” of December 3, 1938 and had to hand over her valuables, silverware, and jewelry to the Städtisches Leihamt (municipal loan office). In 1939, the building at Bürkleinstraße 16 was turned into a “Jew house.” Up to 72 Jewish men, women, and children, driven out of their own apartments, were forcibly billeted there. On April 1, 1942 the Gestapo (Secret Police) removed Ida Silber from her apartment and transferred her to the Jewish retirement home in Mathildenstraße 9. A little later she had to move to the “Judensiedlung” (“Jewish Quarter”) Milbertshofen in Knorrstraße 148. From there she was deported by the Gestapo to Theresienstadt ghetto on July 15, 1942. Ida Silber died there on February 27, 1943 from the unimaginable living conditions. Her three sons survived the Shoah. Siegfried and Bruno Silber had already emigrated to Palestine in 1933, while Dr. Fritz Silber escaped to the United States in 1941. (text Felicia Englmann, editor C. Fritsche, translation P. Bowman)