Esther Lea Sondhelm, geb. Wainstein (Weinstein, Wajnstein)

Ester Lea (also called Lisa) Sondhelm, née Wainstein, was born on May 20, 1899, in Vilnius, located at the time in the Russian Empire. She was the daughter of the merchant Judel Samuel Wainstein and his wife Chejne, née Gelfar. After her father’s death, her mother married the typography illustrator and art painter Chaim Eingelster. The family moved to Munich in 1906 and from 1912 lived on the first floor of the forester’s lodge in Fasangartenstraße 124.
Ester Wainstein ran a cigar shop in St.-Anna-Straße. From 1933 the Jewish entrepreneur was hard hit by losses in sales and forced to rely on the support of her parents. On September 12, 1938, she deregistered her business. Aged 40, Ester Wainstein married Jakob Paul Sondhelm, six years her elder, on November 18, 1939. He was born on June 20, 1893, in Mainbernheim, the son of the livestock trader Hermann Sondhelm and his wife Rosalie, née Rosenfeld. Jakob Sondhelm attended secondary school and from 1916 to 1918 fought in the First World War. He was registered as living in Munich in 1920. At a premises in Augsburger Straße 2-4 he ran a business dealing in base metals and a metal smelter workshop. With a few rare exceptions, Jews were forbidden from running businesses in 1939, and he was forced to deregister his firm on January 6, 1939. After marrying Ester, he lived with his in-laws in Fasangartenstraße 124.
At the beginning of the 1940s Ester and Jakob Sondhelm tried to flee to the United States – their efforts were unsuccessful. On July 1, 1942, they were forced to move into the “Heimanlage für Juden” (“home facility for Jews”) in Clemens-August-Straße 9. Twelve days later they were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. After the end of the war, the date of the deaths of Ester and Jakob Sondhelm was set as December 31, 1943.(TExt Europäische schule 2022, editor C. Fritsche, translation P. Bowman)