Eva Fleischmann lived with her parents in Berlin. She graduated from the Jewish kindergarten teachers’ college in 1941, then performed forced labor in a laundry. The Fleischmann family was put into an assembly camp in Berlin at the beginning of March 1943. Eva escaped through a window at the last moment. Her parents were deported to Theresienstadt.
The Quaker Elisabeth Abegg found Eva Fleischmann a hiding place in the home of the patent lawyer Richard Linde in Hohen Neuendorf near Berlin. Fleischmann joined the secret Zionist youth group Chug Chaluzi, where her cousin Jizchak Schwersenz was also a member.
At the end of 1943 she came into contact with members of the Confessional Church in East Prussia. In Königsberg, she met Isolde Symanowski, who arranged for her to stay in a pastor’s house in Zinten (now Kornevo). For more than a year, she hid in numerous other pastors’ houses and with Confessional Church members in East Prussia.
In the second half of 1944, she got hold of papers identifying her as an “Aryan” victim of bomb damage, and used them to travel to Göttingen. She was liberated there, while staying in a Protestant pastor’s house.
Emblem of the secret pioneer circle Chug Chaluzi: “Despite it all. Be strong,” Berlin, 1943. Source: Privatbesitz/Private
