Houses as Memory: How Germans Honor Jewish Neighbors Lost to the Holocaust

Marie Rolshoven stands in the kitchen of her fourth-floor apartment on Rosenheimer Straße in Berlin and feels the weight of a threshold. She has lived here since 2007, but she knows the apartment holds a history that predates her by more than eighty years. Jews once lived in this space. They sat at tables, looked out windows, crossed the same doorway she crosses now. None of them survived the Nazi era.

When the National Socialists took power in January 1933, Jewish citizens in Germany began losing the basic securities of life. Within five years, the right to a home was no longer guaranteed. The Nazi party newspaper declared in September 1938 that landlords could not be expected to house Jews, and by April 1939, the law formalized this expulsion. Jewish tenants and property owners were forced into buildings the authorities designated as "Judenhäuser"—Jewish houses. At Rosenheimer Straße 40, nine people were crowded into the Möller apartment. In the fall of 1941, systematic deportation began. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary that Berlin must be "cleansed of Jews," and the residents of this building were among those sent east to ghettos and camps.

Rolshoven decided to transform her apartment into something more than a residence. In 2016, inspired by a similar project in Amsterdam, she founded Denk Mal Am Ort—a phrase that means both "Think about it at the site" and "Memorial at the site." The initiative invites descendants and interested people to stand in the actual rooms where their ancestors lived, to feel the connection that a physical space can create in a way no museum can replicate. "You feel a strong connection to these individuals through the actual site," Rolshoven says. "It's different from visiting a memorial."

In 2018, a ninety-two-year-old man named Joel Ludwig Katzenellenbogen returned to the apartment two floors below Rolshoven's. He had lived there as a child before his family escaped in 1939. When he walked in, he pointed to a spot on the floor and said, "My brother's bed used to be right here. He was 10 when we had to leave the country." Katzenellenbogen has since died, as have many other eyewitnesses. This is why Rolshoven's work has become urgent. She has welcomed descendants who have no graves to visit, no physical place to mourn. One woman, Claudia Samter, came to the apartment because her aunt had been housed there before deportation. "After all, there's no grave in a cemetery for her to visit," Rolshoven says. "We sat at the kitchen table to talk about life today and tomorrow, and we laughed a lot and cried, too."

This year, Denk Mal Am Ort organized ninety commemorative events across eight German cities. Many young descendants attended, people who had grown up knowing fragments of family stories but never the full weight of them. For some, like nineteen-year-old Adam Ethan Klein from Switzerland, the research began with a suitcase in an attic. Klein had always known his great-grandparents left Germany in 1938, but the story felt distant, abstract. Then he opened the suitcase and found dozens of documents, including a letter dated June 12, 1933, from the Hanover District Court. It informed his great-grandfather, attorney Max Haas, that he had been removed from the list of licensed attorneys. "With this single sentence, it became unmistakably clear to the families that they were not quite what they had aspired to be for generations: an average German family," Klein later wrote. "From that moment on, they were above all one thing: Jews."

Klein's research deepened after an antisemitic stabbing near a synagogue in Zurich where he had celebrated a cousin's bar mitzvah. For the first time, he felt the unsettling sensation of not quite belonging in the city where he had lived his entire life. He decided to write his high school graduation thesis about his relatives and, in spring 2024, traveled with his extended family to visit the places where his ancestors had lived. In Stuttgart, standing in front of a building at Hölderlinstraße 55, a man on a bicycle emerged from the courtyard. Thomas Koch had spent years researching the former residents of his house. When Klein's family explained they were looking at where their ancestors lived, Koch asked, "Are you the Hirschheimer family?" They were. Adolf and Auguste Hirschheimer were Klein's great-great-grandparents. Their daughter Ilse had married Max Haas, the attorney who had been stripped of his license.

Koch showed Klein photographs of his grandmother in her wedding gown, standing in the living room in front of a door that still exists in the apartment. The Hirschheimers had emigrated to Switzerland in 1939; Ilse and Max found refuge in England. They eventually moved to Israel and later returned to Europe, settling in Switzerland just two hours from the homeland they had been forced to abandon. Ilse wrote to a friend from England: "There, we are the Jews; here, we are the Germans. Try figuring that out." Klein chose those words as the title for his thesis. His great-great-grandfather Adolf died in 1940, officially from a heart condition, but Klein believes he "certainly also died of a broken heart." The family never found peace after being stripped of their identity and their home.

As eyewitnesses disappear, the work of remembrance falls to younger generations. Klein believes that "every single person has a responsibility—and the power—to actively keep memories alive. And hopefully, that can happen even without eyewitnesses." In apartments across Germany, in the rooms where families once gathered, that work continues. A kitchen table becomes a place to sit with the past. A doorway becomes a threshold between forgetting and knowing. A suitcase in an attic becomes a bridge across time.