Henriette (Henryka Zuckerberg-Krochmal) Krochmal

Henriette (Henryka) Zuckerberg-Krochmal was born in Munich on May 27, 1907, the daughter of Aron Leib Zuckerberg-Krochmal and his wife Rosa Saly. She grew up with her sisters Eugenie and Erna at Rumfordstrasse 40. Her parents ran a hat shop with a repair workshop at Rumfordstrasse 18. The family were Polish citizens. Henriette Krochmal attended the Luisengymnasium high school from 1920 to 1923. She was very musical, playing accordion and piano. From 1925 she studied Music at the music school Akademie für Tonkunst in Munich. She lived in Berlin for a short time in the early 1930s. Henriette Krochmal had engagements as a pianist in such places as Amsterdam and Milan, while also teaching accordion and piano as well as modern ballroom dancing.

Because she was Jewish, the Nazis refused Henriette Krochmal membership of the Reich Music Association (Reichsmusikkammer), which was created in September 1933 when the Reich Cultural Associations Law (Reichskulturkammergesetz) came into force. Henriette Krochmal was now no longer permitted to perform in public. The sources do not show what she did for a living after 1933. Unlike her sisters, who emigrated to Palestine, Henriette Krochmal stayed in Germany. Because she was ill, she avoided the “Pole operation” on October 28 and 29, 1938 and, unlike thousands of other Polish Jews living in Germany, she was not deported to Poland. A year later, she was arrested in Leipzig on “suspicion of racial defilement” and jailed in Dresden. She was released on December 19, 1939.

Henriette Krochmal had returned to Munich by 1941 and lived with her widowed mother at Blumenstrasse 48. In September 1941 the two women were forced to move to the “Heimanlage für Juden” (“home facility for Jews”) in Berg am Laim, and in early December 1941 to the “Judensiedlung” (“Jewish Quarter”) Milbertshofen, a primitive barrack camp at Knorrstrasse 148. From there, the Gestapo (secret state police) deported Henriette Krochmal and her mother Rosa along with around 770 other Jews to the Piaski ghetto in occupied Poland. There is no further trace of her after this. It is unknown to this day when and where Henriette Krochmal was murdered, whether she was a victim of an SS murder operation, starved to death, died in one of the work camps in the area or was killed in the Belzec or Sobibor extermination camps.(Text: Barbara Hutzelmann; editor: C. Fritsche; translation: C. Hales)