Irma Irene Appel, born 1919 in Naumburg near Kassel, was trained and apprenticed from May 3, 1937 till April 4, 1938 in the Heim Isenburg of the Jewish Women’s Association. She was an orphan, when her father, the butcher Siegfried Appel, had died in 1924, her mother, Johanna, in 1932. Irma Irene had seven older siblings. Since Irma Irene was yet not of age, when her mother died, an official guardian was appointed for her. He wrote on November 28, 1939 to the Foreign Exchange Office in Kassel, that all the siblings of Irma “apparently were living abroad”.

A change of address for Irma Appel was registered from Neu-Isenburg to Kassel. Her last residence in Germany was in 1939 Bad Dürrheim in the Black Forest. Maybe she lived and worked there in the Friedrich-Luisen-Hospiz, a rest home for Jewish children and destitute adults. On August 20, 1939 Irma Irene fled to the Netherlands. What happened to her, when the German Wehrmacht invaded the Netherlands in the spring of 1940 and the Jewish population was prosecuted and deported, is unknown.

Sources: Stadtarchiv Neu-Isenburg; Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Wiesbaden