Rolf Joseph

Rolf Joseph (December 11, 1920 – November 28, 2012) was a witness and person persecuted by the Nazi regime. He grew up with his brother in Berlin, having a typical childhood of school and soccer-playing until the persecution of the Jews began in the 1930s. His first initiation was when a schoolteacher began wearing a Sturmabteilung (SA) uniform and began beating Jewish schoolchildren. Rolf left school at the age of 14 and began to work as a carpenter's apprentice. When forced labor was inflicted on Jewish men, he worked at IG Farben. He was also forced to make equipment and uniforms for the Wehrmacht (Nazi armed forces). On November 10, 1938, he saw and was afraid by the devastation of Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) to Jewish businesses and synagogues.

After his parents were taken from their home to concentration camps, Rolf and his brother Alfred went into hiding, only possessing what they could carry. After some months, they were taken in by Marie Burde, who fed them and sheltered them in her apartment. She had few possessions, but she fed them and a friend Arthur Fordanski from her rationed food and what discarded vegetables that she picked up from the weekly markets. They kept warm from the many newspapers that were stacked up in her apartment.

Rolf was subject to severe beatings from the Gestapo that left him with lifelong epileptic seizures. He escaped during a train ride to Auschwitz concentration camp and later by jumping out of a hospital building. After Berlin was bombed in 1943, Burde and the three young men went to live on a plot of land that she owned outside of Berlin. They build a crude shelter and then lived there until Burde was assigned a room. Rolf stayed hidden until the Red Army entered the city in 1945. His brother Alfred had been captured and was held in a concentration camp until the end of the war. Burde and Fordanski survived the war. His large family did not, except for the wife of one of Rolf's cousins.

After the war, Rolf met with schoolchildren to tell them his war-time story. He received the Federal Cross of Merit (Bundesverdienstkreuz) in 2002 for his commitment.

Early life Joseph came from a religious Jewish family, the son of the textile salesman Hermann Joseph and his wife Recha, in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin.

His brother Alfred, one year younger than Rolf, was nicknamed "kleene keule" (small club). Rolf grew up with him in the Moritzplatz and Wedding districts of Berlin.

World War II

Jews were persecuted by Hitler before the war. Rolf, who had worked in a factory making military uniforms, thought that war might make things easier for him. He said of that time, "When war was declared we were happy. We felt that it was our only possibility of regaining our freedom, because it was unbearable how Hitler was treating us during this time." Joseph had witnessed his parents being deported in June 1942 and subsequently went into hiding, as did his brother Alfred (1921–2014). Their only possessions were what they could carry and they did not have ration cards or money.

Rolf and Alfred

The brothers hid in train station bathrooms and the forest, evading Nazi soldiers, for about four months. an area that was inhabited by working-class people.

Rolf, who was said to have been tortured several times by authorities, was arrested at a Wehrmacht checkpoint one day, having waited some time before venturing out of the apartment. He was questioned by the Gestapo about his brother in the spring of 1944. Burde was allotted a room in Berlin, they moved back.

The brothers remained close, feeling each other's pain after the war and worried about each other. After decades of freedom, Rolf continued to have an automatic fight-or-flight reflex, fearing that he was being followed. where he died on November 28, 2012. He prayed regularly at the Pestalozzistrasse Synagogue. He died on November 29, 2012, and Alfred died less than two years later on April 11, 2014.