Born on February 10, 1873 in Stuttgart
Murdered on September 4, 1942 in the Ghetto Theresienstadt concentration camp
Interned in Weißenstein in November 1941
Anna Einstein was the youngest of five children of the married couple Jeanette, née Arnold and Hermann Stern. Her father ran a wholesale cloth business in Stuttgart’s Seestraße. Anna grew up with her older brothers Ludwig, Max and Julius in a middle-class household; her only sister had died at the age of three before Anna was born. It is not known whether Anna received any vocational training.
At the age of 24, she married the merchant Sigmund Einstein, two years her senior. The couple remained childless; her spouse died when she was only 41. Anna lived in the apartment they shared until 1928, when she moved in with her siblings Ludwig, Max and Julius, who lived together in the family home in Stuttgart’s Seestraße.
During the Nazi era, the family had to sell their house and Anna Einstein was housed in a ‘Jews’ house’ at Wielandstraße 17. Apart from her brother Julius Stern, Emilie Gidion, Frime Frida Rosenrauch and Hermann Wolf also lived there. Together with Anna, they had to move to the forced residence in Weißenstein Castle on November 1, 1941.
Together with her brother Julius and long-time acquaintances Emilie Gidion and Hermann Wolf, Anna Einstein was deported from Stuttgart to the Theresienstadt concentration camp on August 22, 1942. The 69-year-old died there three days after her brother Julius, in the early morning of September 4, 1942, in the attic of the Dresden barracks, where she probably did not even find a bed.
On the ‘death notice’ that the Jewish doctors there had to issue, ‘weakness of old age’ is noted as the cause of death. The noted illness ‘intestinal catarrh’ indicates the misery in which the prisoners in Theresienstadt had to live, a misery desired by the Nazis, to which Anna Einstein also fell victim. Anna Einstein had to sign a ‘home purchase contract’ for ‘living’ in the Theresienstadt concentration camp and pay the Nazi state 19,800 Reichsmarks
(09.06.2023 kmr/ww)
