Taube [Tauba Toni] Ibermann née Rösler

Location 
Fehrbelliner Straße 86
District
Prenzlauer Berg
Stone was laid
01 July 2010
Born
24 November 1891 in Dombrowa / Dąbrowa Górnicza
Occupation
Schneiderin
Deportation
on 29 October 1941 to Łódź / Litzmannstadt
Dead
Toni Taube Ibermann was born on 24 November 1891, the daughter of Kalmann Rösler and his wife Devora (née Korn) in Dąbrowa, Galicia (Poland). Her family perhaps came to Berlin as part of the wave of Jewish immigrants from the East around the turn of the century. Toni had a younger brother named Salomon and four sisters – Rosa, Selma, Charlotte and Minna. Minna later also lived in Berlin with her husband, Hermann Chomet, an ironer.
Around 1920 Toni married Leo Ibermann, a tradesman from Warsaw. The couple lived at Sebastian Strasse 17 in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Here their three daughters were born: Lotte on 9 February 1922 (or 1921?), Sonja on 20 June 1923 and Ursula on 16 May 1925. When Toni was pregnant with Ursula, her husband died of a heart attack. He was laid to rest in the Jewish cemetery in Weissensee, as was his father-in-law Kalmann Rösler some years later. Toni now had the difficult task of bringing up her children alone, without any state support. She combined single motherhood with full-time work. Despite her selfless love for her daughters, she was not able to spend much time with them. The day-to-day struggle to survive in 1920s Berlin was too demanding. Her children all went to kindergarten and later to local schools and after-school daycare. Toni even had to send her daughter Ursula to stay in the AHAWA children’s home at August Strasse 14-16 at a very young age.
It is not known whether Toni ever had any professional training, but one of her daughters later described her as a dressmaker. After her husband’s death, she initially stayed in the apartment at Sebastian Strasse 17 but re-entered herself in the Berlin directory as a “feme-sole trader” and applied for and obtained a telephone. In the evenings she sewed items of clothing which she sold at the market during the day. Her skill in and flair for dressmaking is apparent on photos kept by her daughters. On a very early photo from the 1920s, all three of them are wearing charming sailor suits, and on a later one (perhaps from May 1939) her eldest daughter’s outfit is elegant and distinctive, despite the material shortages at the time.
In 1934 Toni moved into a two-room apartment on the second floor at Belforter Strasse 30, on the corner of Weissenburger Strasse 15 (today Kollwitz Strasse 38) in Prenzlauer Berg. The apartment was in a pretty building constructed during the boom in the 1870s or ’80s that housed a typical Berlin bar and was surrounded by tall trees. It was not far from the synagogue and the Jewish school in Ryke Strasse. Toni’s daughters associate many happy memories with this home, e.g. of their friends in the house opposite in Belforter Strasse who had an unusual bird, time spent in after-school daycare by the park in Friedrichshain with its fairytale-themed fountain, and their rare visits to the Ufa Palast cinema in Schönhauser Allee.
While Toni had certainly not had an easy life so far, things became even harder when she realised that her family, too, was threatened by the Nazis’ persecution of Jews. From 15 November 1938, for example, her daughters were barred from attending the German school in Schönhauser Allee (following an order from the Reich ministry for science, education and national culture). Close relatives started leaving Germany to emigrate abroad. Toni was evidently forced to give up her apartment at Belforter Strasse 30 and moved with her daughters to a one-room apartment with an outside toilet and no washing facilities at Metzer Strasse 28.
Nothing certain is known about the circumstances of this move. But Toni once again fought desperately for her family – with some success. She managed to get Ursula a place on a kindertransport to Britain in May 1939 and Sonja was also evacuated on 9 or 10 August that year. The girls were only able to pack very few items to take but these included recent photos of the family together, taken in front of the grand Zeughaus building in Lustgarten park, probably shortly before Ursula’s departure in May 1939. On one of these photos, Toni’s eldest daughter has her arm laid protectively around her mother’s shoulders.
Toni and her remaining daughter moved into another apartment at Fehrbelliner Strasse 86 in Prenzlauer Berg some time between August 1939 and 1941. There is still a single one-room apartment on the second floor of the courtyard building at this address, but it is not known if it was where Toni lived. This latest change of location had the advantage that it was close to Linien Strasse 215, where Toni’s sister Minna Chomet still lived with her husband Hermann and children Cilli and Siggi in 1939. And their widowed mother, Devora Rösler, had also moved there in 1933.
How did Toni survive in this period? Was she still able to work as a “feme-sole trader”? How long could she maintain contact with her two daughters in Britain after the outbreak of World War II? In 1941 she and her daughter Lotte were forced to move again – this time to a so-called Jews’ house in what was then Lothringer Strasse 34-35 (today it is Tor Strasse and has different numbering). From this address the two were deported on 27 October 1941 to a concentration camp in Łódź, Poland.
Toni Taube Ibermann and Lotte Ibermann never returned.