Leo Loewy

Leo Loewy was born on November 8, 1884 in Freystadt, West Prussia (now Poland). He was the second youngest of 15 children. His father was Aaron Loewy, who used to own a general store in Freystadt. In addition to German, Leo learned Polish fluently, because Freystadt was close to the Polish border at the time.

Leo left Freystadt to find work in Berlin.

He did military service for Germany during the First World War, including in Reims and Verdun. He received the Iron Cross for his military service in Reims (July 23, 1917), during which he lost sight in one eye.

Through one of his sisters, who worked with her in the Rosenhain department store, he met Irma Mockrauer and 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, she grew up in a large family where her parents' siblings regularly came to 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 wasn't that religious, she 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 working life changed significantly. The Nuremberg Laws were promulgated in 1935. One of these laws prohibited Jews from traveling freely and staying in hotels. After all, no hotel would dare accept a Jew, and Leo could only keep his customers by letter and phone. This made things very difficult because although he still had some loyal customers, there were few hotels to stay in and hence sales soon dropped.

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. He pinned his Iron Cross and Frontkampfer's medal to his lapel to show that he had fought for Germany in World War I 1914-1918. As he walked out the front door, he said, "There must be a mistake, I'll probably be back tomorrow."

Leo could only be released from Sachsenhausen on condition that he proved that he and his family would leave Germany. In 1938, the UK, US and Australia had immigration quotas or required money to be deposited into a bank account before an immigrant visa could be granted – for example, Australia required £200, which was about a full year's salary. And Leo was no longer able to earn an income at that point due to legal restrictions. Between 1933 and 1937 it was still possible to transfer money from Germany, but from 1938 it was no longer possible to transfer money abroad. The government only allowed 10 marks per person to be taken along. Eventually, Irma and Gerda secured tickets to Shanghai after losing money on tickets to Uruguay, which also closed its doors.

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.

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.

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.

After the Americans liberated Shanghai from the Japanese in August 1945, Gerda worked as a secretary for the American occupying forces.

In May 1946, seven years after arriving in Shanghai, Gerda was helped to immigrate by a family in Melbourne, Australia. She arrived in the middle of winter and started making a new life for herself in Australia. She was 21 years old.

Leo had to wait three years before Gerda could support him. He emigrated to Melbourne in 1948 and lived in Brighton, Melbourne after finding work in a leather goods factory. He remarried in 1949 and became an Australian citizen in 1954. He died of liver cancer in 1955.