Johanna Maaß (Maass)

Location 
Franziusweg 63
District
Lichtenrade
Stone was laid
21 March 2007
Born
07 June 1884 in Märkisch-Friedland (Westpreußen) / Mirosławiec
Occupation
Handelslehrerin
Deportation
on 28 March 1942 to Piaski-Trawniki
Murdered
in Piaski
Johanna Maaß was born on 7 June 1884 in Märkisch Friedland, a small town in West Prussia (now Mirosławiec, Poland). She trained as a teacher of commercial subjects and graduated with a diploma, indicating that she completed a university course in economic science. She obviously enjoyed professional success as she was able to buy a house in the early 1920s at Waldweg 19 (now Franziusweg 63) in the Lichtenrade district of Berlin-Tempelhof.
In 1940, aged 56 and unmarried, she was forced to sublet two furnished attic rooms to the Hirschfeld family (see Hirschfeld) for 60.00 Reich marks.
On 28 March 1942 she was deported on the 11th transport to the Piaski ghetto, which served as a transit camp for deportees on the way to the extermination sites of the Lublin area in German-occupied Poland. It is not known when or how she died.
The only indication of her “migration”, as deportation was euphemistically called, was found in the so-called declaration of assets signed by Anna Maaß, née Beer, Johanna’s mother. A widow born on 21 May 1859 in Stolp (now Słupsk, Poland), Anna Maaß had lived in the Jewish old people’s home at Graben Straße 12, in the Berlin district of Lichterfelde-Ost, since April 1942.
According to this declaration, Anna Maaß still had some belongings (including a piano and a music stand) in her daughter’s apartment at Waldweg 19. Anna Maaß was deported on 21 July 1942, aged 83, to Theresienstadt and, two months later, to Treblinka extermination camp. She did not survive.