Johanna Felsen

Johanna Felsen was born on September 16, 1913, the daughter of Munich merchant Markus Felsen and his wife Anna. Because Markus Felsen came from Poland, he and his family were Polish citizens. Johanna Felsen had a brother, Benno Leopold, who was eleven years her junior, and from April 1923 to March 1928 she attended what is now the Luisengymnasium high school. She subsequently worked as a clerk and typist.
In March 1937, a year and a half after the passing of the “Nuremberg Race Laws”, Johanna Felsen was charged with “suspicion of committing a crime under section 2 of the “Blood Protection Law””. She had been in relationships with two “Aryan” men. Johanna Felsen was imprisoned for a short time in Munich in the prison am Neudeck in der Au and probably in the prison in the police headquarters in Ettstrasse as well. On November 15, 1937 the Reich Ministry of the Interior deported the 24-year-old to Poland. Her request to be allowed to stay in Munich because she had never been in Poland and could not speak the language was turned down. The circumstances of Johanna Felsen’s life in Poland are unknown. All that is known is that she was living in Krakau (present-day Kraków) in 1940; this is attested in the card index register of Jewish residents that the Jewish community had to set up by order of the German occupiers. There is no trace of her after this. Johanna Felsen was probably murdered in the Warsaw Ghetto in late 1942.
Her family survived the Shoah. Markus and Anna Felsen managed to emigrate to London in 1939, then subsequently to the USA, where Leopold Felsen also managed to join them. (Text: Barbara Hutzelmann; editor: C. Fritsche; translation: C. Hales)