Overview
What leaves the greatest impression on me about Heinrich Heinen is not his “daring,” although his courage and determination certainly deserve the highest respect. What moves me most is his love for Edith―a love so strong that it led him to defy racial laws and cross the barbed wire of the ghetto.
Heinrich Heinen and Edith Meyer, a “German” and a “Jewess,” were eighteen years old when they met and fell in love in Cologne in 1938. Their relationship was under constant threat of discovery and punishment because the racial laws then in effect in Germany prohibited romantic relationships between Germans and Jews.
Until December 1941, the two lovers were still able to meet secretly. However, disaster struck. Like thousands of other Jews from towns and villages across Germany, Edith was deported to the East. Heinrich succeeded in locating her among more than 25,000 Jews who had been deported to Riga and together they escaped from the barbed-wire-enclosed, heavily guarded ghetto. The couple covered more than 3,000 kilometers on their escape route, remaining undetected. From Riga they fled first to Königsberg, then to Berlin, continuing to Solingen, where Edith hid for several days at the home of her Jewish cousin Helene Krebs while Heinrich returned to his job in Berlin. Edith joined him there shortly afterward. Their flight then took them to Konstanz, where they made a first, unsuccessful attempt to cross the border into Switzerland. On the night between June 22 and 23, 1942, they again tried to cross the border, this time near Feldkirch. They were caught and taken to the court prison at the Feldkirch Regional Court. From that point on, their fate was in the hands of the Feldkirch judiciary and the Gestapo.
Alfons Dür first encountered their story in 1997 when historian Günter Schmitz contacted the Feldkirch Regional Court, of which Dür was then vice president, in search of records concerning the couple. After retiring, Dür set out to research the story in greater depth. This book, the product of that research, follows the traces left by Heinrich Heinen and Edith Meyer and attempts to reconstruct their story—and the stories of those whose lives became entangled with theirs—as fully and accurately as possible. It demonstrates the immense suffering inflicted by Nazi racial policy and how difficult it was to escape the machinery of National Socialist rule. Likewise, it sheds light on the Feldkirch justice system and the Gestapo’s response to attempts to cross the Swiss border. However, primarily, it tells the moving and heartbreaking story of Heinrich Heinen and Edith Meyer.
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