3 A shared friendship, and a shared fate (Willy Bodlaender and Lucie Lasker) This story begins with a postcard (reproduced in the overview), shared by Willy Bodlaender and Lucie Lasker to Georg Cassirer.  Lucie Lasker, the mother of Lisbet, Martin Cassirer’s wife, at 72 years of age was too old to leave Germany in 1938 and stayed. Her great grandson, Ben Bano has a postcard from Lucie (to Georg Cassirer) which was kept by his mother. Lucie had probably arranged for the card to be posted when she was held in an interim holding camp at Riebnig (now Rybna, Poland) in March 1942. (This “group housing” [Wohngemeinschaft] had been established by the Nazis, operating over October 1941 to March 1943, to temporarily hold Jews who had been transported from Breslau, before sending them on East to the concentration camps.) On 31 August 1942 Lucie was sent on Transport IX/2 to Theresienstadt concentration camp where she is recorded as having died. (Although Theresienstadt was not equipped with a gas chamber most prisoners there were doomed to die from the starvation diet and other appalling conditions or else were transported on to Auschwitz or other death camps.  Of the arrivals at Theresienstadt only one in eight ultimately survived.) There are two messages on the postcard, each probably shaped to evade censorship. The first, from a friend, Willy, seems framed to convey the news that his sister Grete has died, five weeks earlier. (Willy was clearly a good friend of Georg’s wife Vera, and, although the signature is hard to read, appeared to be Willy Bodlaender.) Lucie’s message on the postcard concludes, with probably studied ambiguity: ‘Now it’s all at an end. Heartfelt greetings, and you think of me.’ It was possible to identify the signature on the postcard tentatively as ‘Willy Bodlaender’.  A search of the Yad Vashem database of victims of the Shoah indeed identified a Willy Bodlaender. The Yad Vashem database showed only one plausible victim of the Shoah who could have been the friend of Lucie with a similar name originating in Breslau, since that was the point of origin of the prisoners at Riebnig.  The person, Willi Bodlaender, was described as: “Willi Bodlaender was born in Neustadt, Germany in 1901 to Max and Dora. He was a banker and married to Ruth. Prior to WWII he lived in Breslau, Germany. During the war was in Breslau, Germany. Willi was born on 16 June 1901 and died in the Shoah at the age of 41. This information is based on a Page of Testimony submitted to Yad Vashem on 01/01/1990 by his sister Marianne Goldmann from Denmark.”   Fuller details of the Yad Vashem record of Willi Bodlaender showed that Willi Bodlaender was probably transported from Breslau and died between 16 June 1942 and 15 June 1943.  This fits with his having been transported from Breslau in 1942 and having been housed at Riebnig at the same time as Lucie Lasker. He addressed Vera Cassirer using the ‘du’ form and was therefore close to the family. A further web record of Silesian family trees was found which showed a family tree for a Louis Bodlaender who had children one of whom was Max Bodlaender (1863-1932) who had four children.  If Max was the father of Willi then Willi was born when Max was 38 (which was feasible).  Two of the other children of Max would thus be Marianne (who married Mr. Goldmann) and Grete (the sister who in the postcard is reported to have died). More than a year later an email arrived from Annette Atsmon, daughter of Marianne Goldmann ne Bodlaender.  This confirmed the above chain of reasoning.  This album contains material provided by the Bodlaender Family.   They have also established a Bodlaender genealogical website. To see it click here. Some elements of the Bodlaender immediate family are also shown here in the family tree section (even though there is not family relationship) for easy reference.  Max Bodlaender and his wife Dora in fact had four children: Willy, Marianne, Charlotte and Grete.  Photos of them and their partners are provided in this album. At first it seemed reasonable to assumed that Willy perished with Lucie Lasker in Theresienstadt. However, excerpts of letters shown here indicate that he died  of typhoid fever in the work camp Ossowa, district of Lublin.  Ossowa was a labor camp, near the Sobibor death camp in Lublin.  Often, as with Theresienstadt, however, the difference was primarily semantic, but meant that the Ossowa camp did not actually use gas chambers.   (See http://www.deathcamps.org/sobibor/sobibor.html)  It is possible that Willy was sent there and perhaps occupied a leadership position in the Jewish community in the camp for some time prior to dying of typhoid.