Marianne (Marie) Bloch née Scheuer

Location 
Vinetastraße 49
Historical name
Vinetastraße 49
District
Pankow
Stone was laid
14 June 2018
Born
19 August 1878 in Mannheim
Occupation
Hausfrau
Deportation
on 19 February 1943 to Auschwitz
Murdered
in Auschwitz
Marianne (Marie) Scheuer was born in Mannheim on 19th August 1878.
Her parents the banker Max and his wife Fanny Scheuer, nee Hellmann had got married there three years earlier and within eight years they had six children, three sons and three daughters.
The marriage was divorced in 1898. Long before the mother had left her family. The oldest son Joseph had already died at the age of three, Bernhard and Ludwig emigrated to South Africa and Canada. The three sisters Marianne, Martha and Emilie were sent to boarding schools arranged by their grandparents Hellmann and to be married as quickly as possible after graduation.
Marianne was married to the bank employee Richard Bloch in 1898 and together they moved to Berlin Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorfer Straße 70. A year later their daughter Johanna, called Hansi was born, followed by their daughter Ilse in 1902. The marriage was not a happy one. But unlike her two sisters who got divorced after a few years Marianne stayed with Richard until he died.
We could not find out when and where that happened. Until 1911 Richard Bloch was registered in Berlin`s address book but according to the local address book the widow Marianne Bloch was registered in the Kronprinzenstraße in Heidelberg since 1919. While the older daughter Johanna always stayed within reach, Ilse got married (Aronsohn). We only know that she died in Davos in 1937, possibly of tuberculosis. Johanna was into art very likely as a painter. In Heidelberg she had an apartment not far away from her mother`s. In Berlin Pankow she shared an apartment with her according to the census of May 1939.
She must have been very ill she died on 11th March 1941 at the Jewish Hospital.
Of her five brothers and sisters Marianne had a very close relationship to her sister Martha. According to documents we had access to she was first married to Moritz Kaufmann who owned a printing business and lived around the corner from the Bloch family in Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorfer Straße 118. There her son Robert Reiner was born in 1904 who eventually changed his name to Rene Polack in 1930. Already in 1909 his mother had married the merchant Richard Polack in Hamburg. And since 1914 at the latest she had lived together with him and their daughter Susanne, called Susi who was born in Heidelberg in 1912.
We can be sure that Marianne Bloch had moved to Heidelberg with her daughters after the death of her husband to be close to her favourite sister Martha. Some pictures from that time show a happy togetherness of the two families.
All that ended with the Nazis coming to power in 1933. Martha and her family emigrated, Susanne to Palestine. The rest of the family first went to France then to England and eventually to the USA.
They could not persuade Marianne Bloch to also depart most likely because she did not want to leave her daughter Johanna behind. Together with her she moved to Vinetastraße in Pankow in 1935 at the latest. A small passport photo taken on March 16th 1940 at a photographer`s in Breite Straße could be a hint that she wanted to escape the Nazi terror after all.
In the meantime her sister Martha in England kept trying with a lot of effort to make this escape possible. Her brother Bernhard who had become very wealthy in South Africa and England should also be part of it- but it was too late.
Marianne Bloch was forced to leave her apartment and was moved to a so-called Jews’ house in the Schöneberger Straße 25 in Berlin Kreuzberg. From there she was deported to Auschwitz on 19th February 1943 together with four fellow residents and 992 others.
Only almost three weeks earlier on 27th January she had written to her sister- and brother- in law:

“My dears, good ones,
I am happy having received your good news. My thoughts are with the dear ones ever so often. Maybe I will be seeing them all again and you too. My heart is almost breaking thinking of a reunion with you! There is some tiny hope left, otherwise I could not live on like this. Give my love to the dear ones. I am hoping so much for a reunion.
All the very very best to you. Thanks a million and all my love.
Always yours Auntie Marie.”