Historian Atina Grossmann speaks about her grandmother Gertrud Grossmann and the long-incomplete history of her persecution and murder. Gertrud Grossmann, born in Berlin in 1873, lived at Fasanenstraße 2 until 1938, before being forced by the Nazis to sell her house. Together with her widowed sister Erna, she went into hiding to evade deportation. In 1943, they were discovered and deported to Auschwitz, where they were murdered.
Only decades later, Atina Grossmann was able to reconstruct her grandmother’s story on the basis of newly discovered sources. In the process, she also came across the stories of the people who helped Gertrud and Erna while they were in hiding—another example of “everyday life” during the war. And she encountered the many gaps and the silence that accompanied this story for decades.
Gertrud Grossmann is one of the people presented in the exhibition “From Here” at the Exilmuseum. Atina Grossmann’s lecture complements and expands upon the narrative. In her lecture, she connects her grandmother’s story with her own historical investigation and asks what can be reconstructed from the surviving documents—and what remains in the dark.
