This exhibit relates to Hedwig Burgheim, an educationalist who, in the 1930s, founded a Jewish school in Leipzig focusing on home economics and training kindergarten teachers. Her work was likely as an act of hope and purpose in a time when the future for Germany’s Jewish population was rapidly being stripped away by the Nazis. There’s a lot more information about her on the German Wikipedia page, but one tragedy is that her attempts to move to the United States were thwarted.
By 1943, Hedwig was forced to move into one of Leipzig’s so-called “Judenhäuser”, the designated houses where Jewish families were crowded together before deportation. Aware of the horrors that were coming, she entrusted a suitcase which was filled with her personal belongings to a family she had befriended, a small act of faith that some part of her life might survive this horrendous war.
She was deported to Auschwitz and murdered on 27 February 1943. Her nephew Ralf Kralowitz returned to Leipzig from Buchenwald concentration camp, but it was returned to him empty. The contents had vanished, the museum doesn’t note whether they were likely stolen, lost or simply scattered.
The Nazis took away everything that Hedwig had built, whether that be her school, the Jewish community she was a part of, her possessions and ultimately her life. It’s a powerful exhibit sitting here in the museum and at least this exists to tell her story. Her memory certainly hasn’t been forgotten, there are numerous memorials to her and there’s also the Hedwig-Burgheim-Straße road in the city which has been named after her.