Recha Kniebel

Recha Blond was born on 5 November 1904 in Posen (now Poznań, Poland). After moving to Berlin, she lived from 1933 to 1937 in Lychener Straße, Prenzlauer Berg, and worked as a clerk. In 1937 she married Max Kniebel, a sales representative 18 years’ her senior, who also came from the Posen area. They lived together at Hochmeisterstraße 1 (now Husemannstraße 1) for about a year, before being forced to vacate their apartment. They then moved in with Max Kniebel’s older sister Rosalie Aronsohn at Tasdorfer Straße 71 in Lichtenberg. Later, when applying for compensation for assets stolen by the German Reich, Recha Kniebel stated that they had been forced to move in there.
On 28 October 1942, Recha Kniebel was deported with her husband to Theresienstadt. After almost two years in the ghetto, on 1 October 1944, the Kniebels were deported to Auschwitz, where Max Kniebel was murdered.
Recha Kniebel was taken from Auschwitz to Mauthausen, and witnessed the camp's liberation by the U.S. army on 5 May 1945. She was so weak that she had to be treated in a provisional hospital on the camp grounds for almost another three months. Thousands of others died of the after-effects of concentration camp imprisonment during this time. Recha Kniebel returned temporarily to Berlin, where she stayed in the Jewish Community hospital in Iranische Straße and with relatives for a time.
She moved to Belgium, where she married again. She assumed the name of her second husband, Levinthal, who had returned from exile in Shanghai. In the mid-1950s she moved with him to the United States. She lived in Massachusetts until her death in the late 1970s.