Erna Bleich lived together with 15 other children from Frankfurt where they spent three weeks in the summer holidays in “Heim Isenburg” in 1938.

Erna was born on February 10, 1925, in Frankfurt at Main. She lived with her parents and four younger siblings in Grünestraße 38. Erna's father was already deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg on May 3, 1940, where he died on May 19, 1942, at the age of 44 years.

Along with her mother and siblings, Erna Bleich was driven to ”Frankfurter Großmarkthalle” (Frankfurt’s large market hall) on June 10. In the morning of June 11, 1942, a train left with more than a thousand people from Frankfurt and the district counties of Wiesbaden/Frankfurt towards Lublin. Probably all able-bodied men were taken off the train and taken for forced and hard labor in the concentration camp at Majdanek. The children, women and elderly men (perhaps with a stop-over in Ghetto Izbica) were transported to the extermination camp of Sobibor. Survivors of deportation are/were not known. (Kingreen, Gewaltsam verschleppt, S. 373 f.). Among the victims were the 17-year-old Erna Bleich, her 45-year-old mother Ita and younger siblings, the 14-year-old Heinrich Selig, the 12-year-old Salomon, the eight-year-old Ruth and four-year-old Hirsch Bleich.

Sources: Stadtarchiv Neu-Isenburg; Hessian State Archives; Memorial Book - Victims of the Persecution of Jews under the National Socialist Tyranny in Germany 1933 – 1945 (Bundesarchiv - National Archive); https://www.platz-der-vergessenen-kinder.de. (opens in a new tab)