The “Genealogy” of Mom’s Porcelain Doll

My mother’s older, 6-year-old sister Lenchen received a porcelain doll during the first Christmas of German occupation of Ukraine (note 1). Though there were no gifts to be bought in 1941, their older cousin Marga Bräul who was studying in Odessa was able to get this doll.

Apparently the Nazis made some "plundered" gifts available to the ethnic Germans in Ukraine (note 2).

The horrible reality is that only two months earlier, Germany's Romanian allies slaughtered about 20,000 Jews in Odessa over three days.

Did this porcelain doll come from a Jewish home? That's my current theory.

On the grueling trek out of Ukraine in Fall 1943, sister Lenchen was ill and died at age 8. The doll then became my mother's.

When they reached the refugee camps in German-annexed Poland (Warthegau) in March 1944, the children dealt with their grief through play. My mother remembers how she and her girl-friends buried (temporarily) their dolls in the dirt together to reenact a funeral, with much pretend-crying—just as they had witnessed earlier that month on the box-car train trip from the Ukrainian border (an infant died and was buried at a stop).

A year later as the war was ending, many of the "Gnadenfeld Trek" families had fled again and reached the west German District of Celle in Lower Saxony. My grandmother and children were billeted for a year in Bonstorf. The doll was left in that house when the group of families "secretly" heard of the possibility of crossing the border into Holland (February 1946).

Bonstorf is only twenty kilometres from the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen where a very well-known Jewish girl died: Anne Frank.

All these complicated thoughts come to mind when I think of that doll’s “genealogy” and the girls that had once hugged it and called it their own.

---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: See previous post (forthcoming).

Note 2: Wendy Lower, “Hitler’s ‘Garden of Eden’ in Ukraine: Nazi Colonialism, Volksdeutsche, and the Holocaust, 1941–1944,” in Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and its Aftermath, edited by Jonathan Petropoulos and John Roth, 185–203 (New York: Berghahn, 2006), 197.

To cite this page: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, “The 'Genealogy' of Mom's Porcelain Doll,” History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), May 10, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-genealogy-of-moms-porcelain-doll.html.

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History of the Russian Mennonites

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