The Loewenstein Family: A Story of Survival

Loewnstein family portrait, 1940. A year after this photograph was taken, Alice (second left) and Georg (far right) were arrested and transported to the Łodź Ghetto where Georg died. Alice was later transported to Auschwitz where she was murdered.

Between 1933 and the end of World War II in 1945, the Nazis systematically murdered six million Jews – approximately 2/3 of the 1933 Jewish population of Europe. Nearly all Polish, German, and Austrian Jews who remained in their countries perished.  In other occupied countries, about a quarter of the Jewish population survived.  Nazis also targeted the mentally and physically disabled, gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals, Polish and Soviet citizens, political opponents, religious dissidents, and those whose behavior did not match prescribed Nazi social norms.

Frequent air raids were systematically destroying Berlin. Surviving among the ruins, the Loewensteins did as much as they could to help their friends. Maria welcomed displaced individuals like Monica, the daughter of a deceased Jewish mother and a fanatic Nazi father, into their home. Maria also sent food and packages of necessities to family and friends who had been sent to ghettoes (Max’s brother Georg and sister-in law Alice) and concentration camps (family friends the Eylenburgs).