Irma Natalie Loewy née Mokrauer

Irma Natalie Loewy was born on March 17, 1887 in Kattowitz (now Poland). Her maiden name was Mokrauer. She was one of nine children. Her father Julius owned a soda factory in Kattowitz and later moved to Berlin with his wife Agnes.

Irma left her hometown to find work in Berlin. She followed her siblings living there.

Leo met Irma Mokrauer through one of his sisters, who worked with her in the Rosenhain department store. They married on September 11, 1919.

On March 6, 1925, Leo and Irma had a daughter who they named Gerda Rose Agnes.

Although she was an only child, Gerda grew up in a large family where her parents' siblings would regularly visit for Shabbat dinners and weekend trips to the lakes around Berlin. Every Friday evening, Gerda would walk with her father to the synagogue on Lützowstrasse. Her mother was not as religious and came from a secular family.

The Loewy family lived in a five-room apartment at Lützowstraße 56 from 1931 to 1939. One room of the apartment was used for running their business.

Leo worked in leather goods retailing for most of his life - first in his own shop, in which Irma played a prominent role as his business partner, and then at a company called Offermann and Sons, where he was employed from April 1927 to December 1937. He traveled a lot through Poland and Germany and was very successful.

When Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, Leo's work and family life changed significantly.

On November 10, 1938, after the November 9 pogrom, Leo hid in the house of his two sisters, who lived alone on Motzstrasse in Schöneberg. Since it was a male-less household, it was fairly safe. When the Gestapo threatened to take away the wives and children of the husbands who did not show up, Leo returned home and was taken to the Sachsenhausen camp.

After her husband was taken away, Irma called all the other family members because their household was "safe" as there was no longer a man officially living there. Soon a dozen family members were sleeping in the apartment at Lützowstrasse 56, all men, cousins and uncles. They stayed in the apartment during the raids after the pogrom.

Leo was interned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp from November 11, 1938 to December 6, 1938. Although their extended family was safe in Leo and Irma's apartment on Lutzowstrasse during this time, they were all later deported to various concentration camps - Theresienstadt, Travniki, Riga, Minsk - where they perished. A total of 33 of her family members were murdered under the Nazi regime.

Leo could only be released from Sachsenhausen on condition that he proved that he and his family would leave Germany.

Since no entry visa was required there, Shanghai was one of the few places of refuge for European Jews. 18,000 refugees from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia streamed into the city of Shanghai after the pogrom night.

Leo, Irma and their daughter Gerda left Berlin on May 31, 1939 by train for Naples and then continued on to Shanghai on a Japanese ship called the Hakone Maru, arriving in June 1939. There they first lived in the French concession area in a one-room apartment with an outbuilding, where Gerda slept.

In Shanghai, Gerda had to support her parents, so she completed an 18-month course as a stenographer at Shanghai Business College and ended up working for a dentist for a few months with long hours and low wages, with just enough money to cover the trip and some grocery expenses pay.

On December 8, 1942, the day after the Pearl Harbor bombings, the Japanese occupied the city of Shanghai. Nazi officials pressured the Japanese to exterminate their entire Jewish population. The Japanese resisted, but in 1943 they forced all "stateless refugees" (all Jewish people who had arrived in Shanghai after 1936 - practically all Jews from central Europe) to move to the already overcrowded Hongkew district within three weeks. Barbed wire fences were erected around the area, which was then proclaimed a "designated settlement area" - another name for ghetto. The living conditions there were extremely harsh.

In the Hongkew ghetto, Gerda and her parents had very little money to survive.

The Japanese imposed strict curfews, rationed food to the point where many were starving, and imposed rules that made it difficult for ghetto residents to find work.

Gerda's small income supplemented the one meager meal a day and bread provided to Leo, Irma, and Gerda by the Joint Committee, an American Jewish Welfare Agency. They were almost always hungry and eating was a top priority. Leo had typhus and Irma had constant dysentery.

They learned to be very economical with their bread, slicing it very thin and chewing it gently and slowly with a cup of black tea. Everyone traded their possessions bought in Europe and everything was for sale on the sidewalks. The Loewy family sold their suits, cutlery sets, vases, damask sheets and Gerda's doll set, which helped them buy groceries for a while

Gerda and her parents lived with six families in a small terraced house in a narrow Chinese lane. There were six rooms but no kitchen; What used to be a kitchen served as a room for one of the six families. There was a bathroom but no hot water. If you wanted to bathe, you had to buy hot water on the street from the waterman, who would carry two buckets on a bamboo stick over his shoulder and pour the hot water into the tub. However, the hot water was very expensive and since nobody had a job or income, you could only afford the luxury of such a bath if you were ill.

Irma Natalie Loewy died in Shanghai in 1943. The cause of death was "dysentery" and was attributed to the terrible living conditions and also to being unable to afford the medicines needed for her illness.