Max Lauenger
Max Lauenger was born on June 30, 1918 in Wilhelmshaven, a German coastal town on the North Sea. He was the seventh of eight children of Adolf (Alter) and Sara Friedman Lauenger: Eva, Alfred, Toni, Isidor, Moritz, Jenni, Max, and Mary.
The family owned a fabric store in Wilhelmshaven and another in nearby Bremerhaven. After Adolf died in 1926, at age 48, Sara and the children took a greater role in running the shops. The rise of the Nazis, and the enactment of the Nuremberg laws in September 1935 put further pressure on the family and their business. By the late 1930s, Max and his siblings were eager to obtain visas to emigrate to any place that would take them. Max enrolled in an agricultural school in Leipzig, in the hope that this would help secure a visa to Palestine. The family started to disperse: Eva to Palestine, Alfred and Jenni to Uruguay, Toni to the United States.
In November 1938, Kristallnacht was the final blow to any thought of remaining in Germany. Max hid in the back of the family’s Bremerhaven shop, but was found during the plundering of the store, arrested and sent with thousands of other German Jews to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. While there, a Nazi soldier kicked him in the torso with a metal-tipped boot, leaving an untreated injury that caused Max pain for the rest of his life. He was released from Sachsenhausen after 30 days, after promising to leave Germany at the earliest opportunity. He managed to put his name on a waiting list at the U.S. consulate in Hamburg for a future visa but, given strict quotas at the time, that would likely take years.
By July 1939, desperate to get out of Germany as war became increasingly imminent, Max and his brother Isidor had a stroke of luck: they was among the 4,000 German and Austrian Jewish men who were given refuge at the Kitchener Camp, near the town of Sandwich, Kent, as a result of advocacy by the British government and U.K. Jewish community.
Upon the outbreak of war in September 1939, however, the British sent male German citizens to internment camps as enemy aliens – even if they were Jewish, and clearly not supportive of Hitler. While the conditions were significantly better than at Sachsenhausen, the 12 months that the brothers spent on the Isle of Man were grueling.
After his release, Max found refuge in the Jewish community of Manchester. He was employed by a kosher wine factory, settled in a room at a boarding house, and started to rebuild his life. At the boarding house, he met Rosa (Rose) Kirsch, whom he married in October 1942. (Max knew Rose’s brother Aron from the agricultural school in Leipzig.) The couple had a daughter, Ruth, in December 1943. After the war, Max’s quota number for an American visa finally came up – after an additional delay when he added Rose and Ruth to his visa application – and the family of three sailed for New York in August 1947. Max and Rose lived in Washington Heights until 1967, then in Queens, and then Long Beach, Long Island. Rose passed away in 1994 and Max in 1995.
Five of Max’s siblings also survived the war but Moritz died on a passenger ship that was torpedoed on its way from Yugoslavia to Palestine, and it is believed that Mary was murdered at Auschwitz. Records that recently became available indicate that their mother, Sara, was deported to Riga, Latvia, in 1943, but it is unknown whether she reached that destination and was killed there or her train was diverted to Auschwitz or another death camp.
Max and Rose had two grandchildren, including Heschel Holocaust Commemoration Committee member Barry Langman, the parent of Heschel student Elliott Langman.
