Date end of the year 2021

Schillerstraße 7

When we laid the Stolpersteine for two-year-old Jutti Ziering and her mother Zilla, née Spatz, in 2014, we already noticed that there were other relatives of the family. But on the one hand at first our focus was on the children and on the other hand we still believed at that time that Stolpersteine are not laid for survivors.

Therefore, we did not deal with Jutti's father and the other family members any further. In the meantime we see things differently. So we have already laid quite a few stones for people who were able to survive the horror of the extermination camps or who were able to escape extermination by flight.

When surviving members of the Ziering family contacted us last year (2019) and wanted to know if we could also lay Stolpersteine for other family members, we also looked into their fate.

We now lay a Stolperstein for Leo Ziering, the father of little Jutti, right next to those of his wife and daughter.

For the other family members there are further Stolpersteine at other places (Graben 6A and Jägerstraße 1) (for Leo's siblings Isaak, Benjamin and Anna, his nephews Siegfried and Heinz Hermann as well as his sister-in-law Cilly and his brother-in-law Abraham).

Jutti Ziering was the youngest victim for whom we laid a Stolperstein here in Kassel.

We know almost nothing about her. She was born in Kassel on March 31, 1939. Her parents were Leo (Leib) Ziering and Zilla Ziering, née Spatz. Jutti was not even 2 years old when she was deported to Riga together with her mother on December 9, 1941.

Leo Leib Ziering was born on 30.12.1900 in Kalusz (Ukraine). His parents were Tzvi Khaim Ziering and Rivka Nussbaum. Leo had four siblings who, like him, were born and raised in Kalusz, Poland: Joseph (b. 1888), Isaac (b. 1895), Benjamin (b. 1903), and Anna (b. 1907).  All except Joseph came to Kassel at the end of the twenties, probably together with their parents.

The three Kassel brothers ran a linen business together at Pferdemarkt 28. It was partly registered to Isaak, whose occupation was given as a traveling trader, and partly to the two merchants Leo and Benno. Leo lived temporarily in Essen, where he had been running a business since 1922, which he continued from 1929 in Kassel at Schillerstraße 7, a store for men's lingerie (the value of which he gave in the compensation proceedings as 62,000 RM) with three shop windows and four employees.

In Kassel, he was initially registered at Werner-Hilpert-Strasse, then at Mittelgasse and Pferdemarkt. When he married Zilla Spatz, who was eleven years younger, on November 10, 1937, he lived at Jägerstrasse 7. The couple moved to Schillerstrasse 7 on february 19, 1938 , where their daughter Jutti was born a year later on February 26, 1939.  

On a Saturday in May 1939, the young family had been ordered tot the police headquarters. Because of the newborn child, Zilla was sent back to the apartment, while her husband was taken to the Polish border the next day due tot he  Aliens Police Regulation. But since he did not have a valid Polish passport, the Poles turned him back. He made his way to Berlin and turned to a Jewish emigration office. After three weeks he was given a passport for stateless people and he got a place on a transport to England,o the basis of his deportation notice,.

Meanwhile, his wife Zilla and their little daughter Jutti stayed behind at Schillerstraße. On December 9, 1941, together with 1,000 other Jews from northern Hesse, who were gathered in a gymnasium at Jägerstraße, they were escorted to Kassel's main train station, loaded into freight cars and transported to the Riga Ghetto

From a letter of Jutti's cousin Siggi Ziering, who was also in Riga and survived the time there, we know that the two were able to survive in Riga for at least two more years. He reported about a selection in November 1943 for the transport to Auschwitz, when Zilla and Jutti managed to hide. But he does not know what finally happened to the two of them.

Leo did not know anything about al that at first. After his arrival in England, he worked for the labor service of the British Army (Corps 165 Camp 3) from December 1939 to May 1941. When he learned about the deportation of his wife Zilla and his little daughter Jutti, he suffered a nervous breakdown and spent four years in various English hospitals (with suicide attempts and electric shock treatments). Even after that, he often was in medical treatment, was unable to work and struggling for years to prove the causal connection between his health problems and the persecution measures. The legal proceedings filled many files and also occupied several German state parliaments, the Bundestag and the Federal President. After the war, Leo was initially registered in Palestine and in Germany. On 26.6.1960 his birth name Leib was officially changed in Leo (file number 35/60 City of Kassel) and since 14.4.1970 he was called Arie (Hebrew Löwe) (Magistrate Sprendlingen). He lived in Kassel for a short time in each case, most recently at Hohenkirchener Straße 34, before moving to the Frankfurt area in 1963. On 15.11.1979 Arie Ziering died in a nursing home in Langen.

Sources:

HHStA Wiesbaden compensation file Leo Ziering 518 No. 72382

HSTAMarburg 270 Kassel 3880, 4972, 6017, 7025

City Archives Kassel - Address Books

B. Kleinert and W.Prinz: Names and Fates of the Jews of Kassel - 1933 to 1945, Kassel 1986

Helmut Thiele: The Jewish Inhabitants of Kassel, Kassel 2006

Memorial book Federal Archive https://www.bundesarchiv.de/gedenkbuch

www.yadvashem.org

 "Book of Remembrance.  The german, Austrian an Czechosovakian Jews oft he Baltic States", published by Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e.V. u.a.; K.G. Saur Verlag Munich 2003, Volume 2.

Photos:

Private collection Debby Ziering, New York.

Jürgen Strube 2015, November 2020