Charlotte Wendriner lived in Berlin and worked as a secretary for the Osram company before marrying the writer Erich Hopp in 1921. Their son Wolfgang was born in 1928.
The Hopps received notification of their deportation on June 1, 1942. They went into hiding separately. From an initial stay with a cousin, Charlotte Hopp moved to many other places, including with a furniture buyer, a junk dealer, and in the garden house of an elderly owner of show stages. One of the people who offered her accommodation raped her.
From early January 1943, Charlotte and Wolfgang Hopp were able to hide for several months in the small apartment of a family of five, the Schwersenskys. From September 1943 to the end of the war, Charlotte Hopp found shelter in the engineer Karl Marguerre’s house in Eichwalde near Berlin. Marguerre told the neighbors Hopp was a domestic help by the name of “Horn,” since she had forged papers in that name. From September 1944, Erich and Wolfgang Hopp also stayed there.
After 35 months in various hiding places, the family were liberated in Eichwalde. Following her husband’s death in 1949, Charlotte Hopp and her son emigrated to the United States.
The Hopp family, around 1938. Source: Privatbesitz/Private
