Hans Pese

Ella Pese was born on 9 December 1896, the second child of Louis Wittenberg and his wife Rosa, née Kessel, at Kottbusser Damm 7 in Berlin. Her father had moved to Berlin from Tilsit, East Prussia, in 1888. He took an apartment at Grenadierstraße 20 in the Scheunenviertel quarter, and married Rosa Kessel, a native of Berlin. In the same year he set up a business at Kottbusser Damm 7 in Kreuzberg, manufacturing and selling linens, which was to thrive there for 50 years. In 1919, after her father’s death, Ella’s sister Gertrud (born in 1891) took over the business with her husband Hans Liepmann.
Meanwhile, Ella married Hans Pese (born on 9 February 1893 in Berlin), co-owner with his brother Leo Pese of a sausage-skin business at Kottbusser Ufer 39-40 (now Paul-Lincke-Ufer). On 22 April 1924, their daughter Marianne Rose Pese was born. They lived at Bürknerstraße 16 in Neukölln, diagonally opposite Ella’s sister’s home at Kottbusser Damm 7. The business prospered and in the 1930s the Pese family was able to move to the more affluent west of the city; first to Charlottenburg, then to a 4-room apartment at Sächsische Straße 20 in Wilmersdorf.
In view of the increasingly threatening situation and intensifying persecution, Ella and Hans Pese made every effort to get their daughter Marianne to safety abroad. They sent her to the Dr. Leonore Goldschmidt private school for Jewish children on Hohenzollerndamm in Schmargendorf. Pupils here received English instruction from a native speaker to prepare them for emigration. The school had 520 pupils in 1937 but was closed by the Nazis in 1939. The headmistress Dr. Goldschmidt managed to emigrate to England shortly afterwards, never to return to Germany.
Ella and Hans Pese managed to arrange for their 15-year-old daughter to leave for England with a kindertransport on 19 July 1939. In the same year, they were forced to give up their apartment in Wilmersdorf and move to one at Neanderstraße 38 (now Heinrich-Heine-Straße) in Mitte.
A year previously, in 1938, the Pese brothers’ business at Kottbusser Ufer had been forcibly liquidated and Hans Pese conscripted to forced labour in a battery factory, Akkumulator Fabrik Karl Pfalzgraf, at Chausseestraße 36. On 22 June 1941, Ella and Hans Pese were forced to move into a “Jew house”. They now lived in a partly furnished room in the home of a Dr. Jakobi at Wiener Straße 15 in Kreuzberg. On 15 March 1942, Hans and Ella Pese completed a compulsory declaration of assets. Their only remaining possessions were a few household items, even fewer items of clothing, and 215 Reichmarks in cash.
On 28 March 1942, Hans and Ella Pese were deported together with 973 other Berlin Jews to the Piaski ghetto in south-east Poland. It is not known what happened to them after their arrival.
Their daughter Marianne later emigrated from England to Canada and submitted several applications for compensation. Applicants were treated with disgraceful insensitivity and cynicism. It took 19 years for Marianne Pese’s application to be processed, during which time she was repeatedly required to submit written proof of her parents’ assets. The authorities insisted she produce her parents’ business documents even though she had left Germany for England when she was fifteen.
Many other members of her family also died in the Shoah. All Hans Pese’s siblings were deported and murdered: His brother and business partner Leo Pese, his brother Willi Pese and his family, and his younger sister Rosa Dobrin, née Pese. Stumbling stones were laid for Willi Pese and his family in Neukölln in 2016.
Ella Pese’s sister Gertrud Liepmann, née Wittenberg, was also deported with her husband Hans Liepmann, daughter Eva, and Eva’s husband Werner Rosenthal, to Auschwitz and murdered.