Abraham Edelstein

Location 
Oranienstr. 198
District
Kreuzberg
Born
14 May 1894 in Warszawa (Russisches Reich) / dt. Warschau
Deportation
on 03 March 1943 to Auschwitz
Murdered
in Auschwitz
Abraham Edelstein was born on 14 May 1894 in Warsaw (then part of the Russian empire, now Poland). He was a shoemaker by profession. It is not known when he first met his wife Bertha, née Gutwachs. Both were devout Jews.

Their first daughter, Rosa, was born in 1919 in Warsaw. Their second child, Benno Edelstein, was born in 1921 in Osterode in the Harz region of Germany. Some time afterwards, the family moved to Berlin, where their two youngest children were born, Günther (on 3 June 1926) and Erna (on 7 March 1935). The two eldest siblings Rosa and Benno managed to emigrate and so survived the Nazi regime.

From 1938 the family lived at Oranien Strasse 198 in Kreuzberg, on the 3rd floor of the courtyard building. The four of them shared a 1½ room apartment. At that time, the building still had a Jewish owner, but in 1939 it was “Aryanised” and taken over by a non-Jewish barkeeper-landlord.

Abraham Edelstein was arrested during the Nazis’ “factory campaign” and deported to Auschwitz on the 33rd “transport to the East” on 3 March 1943, together with his wife Bertha and seven year-old daughter Erna. He probably performed forced labour to the last; it is not known where. Abraham Edelstein’s son Günther, who was a forced labourer for the Reich German association for the blind, was sent to Auschwitz a day before his parents and little sister, on the 32nd “transport to the East”. None of the deported members of the Edelstein family survived the extermination camp. Abraham Edelstein’s exact date of death is not known.