Margarete Bloch née Revy

Margarete Bloch was born on 10 June 1898 in Berlin, the daughter of Siegfried and Martha Revy. She married Ernst Bloch, a tradesman. In 1923 their daughter Margot was born. The Bloch family lived in the same house as Margarete’s parents, at Innsbrucker Straße 7 in the Berlin district of Schöneberg. In March 1941 they were forced to move out, and went to live as subtenants of Olga and Josef Weinreich, Margarete Bloch’s aunt and her husband, at Martin Luther Straße 95.
One evening in November 1942, Margot returned home from forced labour at Flohr engineering works in Tegel, and her father Ernst Bloch from the doctor’s, to find their apartment sealed off and Margarete Bloch gone.
Margot Bloch and her father turned to the works manager at Flohr, Herbert Patzsche, who had previously offered to help. Patzsche and his wife Erika, who lived in Tegel, let them stay in their home. A few days later, Ernst Bloch reported to the Gestapo in a desperate bid to get his wife released. Instead, he was arrested and sent to the assembly camp at Große Hamburger Straße 26, where his wife was also being held. They were both deported on 29 November 1942, along with Margarete’s aunt Olga Weinreich, on the 23rd transport to Auschwitz. They did not survive.
Margot Bloch stayed with the Patzschkes until 21 December 1942. Then she contacted a Jewish acquaintance, Lina Cremer, who was married to an “Aryan” and lived in Hanover, and who took Margot Bloch in, despite the risk to her own safety. After about five months, in spring 1943, Margot found a new place to hide in the home of Gertrud Kochanowski, a convinced Social Democrat whose husband had been conscripted to the army. A business woman with two small children, Gertrud Kochanowski not only harbored but also provided for Margot, who as an “illegal” person had no access to food ration cards.
In October 1943, Gertrud Kochanowski’s apartment in Hanover was destroyed by bombing during an air raid and she was allocated emergency housing in Osterode in the Harz region. She took Margot Bloch with her, claiming she was a “soldier’s wife” named Margot Fischer. But the jobless young woman was a conspicuous presence in the small provincial town. So, Gertrud Kochanowski asked a friend in Hanover, Albert Heuer, for help. In the last months of the war, he and his wife Dora, both Social Democrats, took 19-year old Margot in, although they had four children of their own and Albert Heuer had already been imprisoned as an opponent of the regime in Börgermoor concentration camp. The Heuers did not tell anyone about Margot apart from their eldest daughter, Gisela.
Margot Bloch survived to see Hanover’s liberation by the Allies on 10 April 1945. In 1946 she moved to England, where she married Max Arnsdorf. She and her husband then moved to Australia, where they took on the name Arnott. Margot Arnott died in Melbourne in September 2015.
On her initiative, in the 1970s, Gertrud Kochanowski, Albert and Dora Heuer, and Herbert and Erika Patzschke were recognized as “Righteous among the Nations” by the Yad Vashem memorial site in Israel. Dora Heuer and Gertrud Kochanowski were also awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for their humanitarian efforts.
On 5 November 2010, a street in Hemmingen near Hanover was renamed “Dorle-und-Albert-Heuer-Weg” in commemoration of Dora (known as Dorle) and Albert Heuer. At the same time, a memorial plaque in commemoration of the Heuers and Gertrud Kochanowski was unveiled outside the town hall.