Hedwig Finder née Loewy

Hedwig Finder was born on August 2, 1876, in Posen as Hedwig Loewy. She was the widow of Felix Finder and last worked as a home health nurse for 70 reichspfennig an hour. Since 1934, she had sublet an apartment on the fifth floor of the front house of Friedbergstrasse 10 from Benno Loewy, who was also born in Posen (on February 14, 1879). Benno Loewy was first listed in the “Jewish Address Book” as a tradesman and later, after 1933, as a decorator. He survived the Third Reich, probably thanks to his non-Jewish wife Frieda, and remained in Charlottenburg after the war.

Hedwig Finder and Benno Loewy were brother and sister.

What is known is that Hedwig Finder was deported on September 26, 1942, from the Moabit freight station on Putlitzstrasse with 1,042 other victims, including many families with small children, on the 20th “Osttransport.” Three hundred Jews from Frankfurt/Main were added to this group. Hedwig Finder is listed on the train’s manifest as number 256 and classified as unable to work.

The train’s original destination was the Riga ghetto, but the ghetto was already overcrowded. Shortly after arriving at the train station in Raasiku, 29 kilometers east of Tallinn, women, children, and people who were either older or sick were put on busses and taken to the sand dunes along the Baltic Sea near Kalevi-Liiva, where they were shot by a German-Estonian commando. Hedwig Finder was 66 years old.

Six weeks after Hedwig Finder’s deportation, her apartment on Friedbergstrasse was cleared out and her personal effects, a sewing table, a sewing machine, and a suitcase containing her clothes, were confiscated and sold to the head of the Wehrmachtsfürsorge (armed forces welfare agency) for 60 reichsmarks.