Abraham Holländer

Abraham Holländer was a son of Benjamin Holländer and Sara Bertha Menken. He married Rosalie Stern on 18 July 1893 in Bad Schwalbach. The marriage produced four children, Julius (1894), Walter (1897), Bettina (1898) and Edith (1900).

Abraham Holländer was co-owner of the company B. Holländer, a business that took its name from Abraham's father. Benjamin. An advertisement from 1914 mentions 1858 as the year of founding.^[1]

The B. Holländer company initially traded in waste paper, rags and scrap metal, but grew into a producer and fitter of technical and industrial machinery, and developed into a respectable wholesaler.^[2] Abraham's younger brother, Moses 'Max', started a branch in Oberhausen in 1898. Later, branches in Cologne and Hannover followed. Ernst Holländer, a son of Max, worked in Cologne as a branch manager for the firm B. Holländer. He emigrated to the United States in 1936, and would be instrumental in helping his cousins ​​Julius and Walter come to the US in 1939.

Abraham Holländer was the second eldest child in a family of nine children and had three brothers and five sisters, namely: Manuel, Johanna, Rosa, Henrietta, Caroline, Eva, Moses 'Max' and Karl.^[3]

Eldest brother Manuel (1859->1930) emigrated to New York, married an Irish woman and died childless in New York.

Johanna (1862-1894) married butcher and cattle dealer Albert Hartog and had four children with him. After Johanna's death in 1894 at the age of 31, her younger sister Eva (1871-1956) moved in with widower Albert to care for the four children. They married a year later and had seven more children. The eleven Hartog children were first cousins ​​of Edith Holländer. The life stories of a number of them can be called extraordinary: they were active in the communist resistance against the Nazis and sometimes paid a high price for this: two of them were murdered in the Nazi camps; others became victims of the terrorist regime of Stalin. Eva Hartog-Holländer emigrated to the United States in January 1939 with the help of three of her children who were already living there, and moved in with her daughter Metha, an opera singer with the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Her husband Albert had already died in January 1938. In 1949 Eva returned to Germany and lived in East Berlin (GDR) with her daughters Selma, Johanna and Ewalda.^[4]

Rosa (1864-1939) married butcher Salomon (Sally) Randerath; both died before the outbreak of the Second World War.

Sister Henriette (1865-1943) also married a butcher: Simon DeFries. That marriage remained childless. After the death of her husband in 1939, Henriette, possibly to escape persecution by the Nazis, left for Deventer, where she moved in with Aron Mozes Zendijk (1875-1943) and his wife Tina (1887-1943) and their son Max (1920-1943).^[5] This was a butcher's family, as was the related DeFries family. Simon DeFries, was a brother of Tina's mother, Sibilla DeFries, and Henriette therefor, was an aunt of Tina by marriage.^[6] Henriette, together with the Zendijk couple, was arrested in early January 1943 during the last roundup of Jews in Deventer, and arrived in Westerbork on 15 January 1943; from there they were deported to Auschwitz on 29 January and were gassed upon arrival.^[7]

Caroline (1896-1942) was married to her cousin Joseph (Josef) Holländer, a son of a half-brother of Abraham's father Benjamin. Joseph Holländer also traded in scrap metal and old iron, as did his father Moises and brother Benjamin. After Joseph's death in 1935, the firm company was owned by to son Erich, who would set up his own company, NV IJzerwerk, in Heerlen in 1937. Widow Caroline was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto in July 1942; from there she was sent to the Treblinka extermination camp two months later and was probably murdered immediately after arrival.^[8]

Abraham's brother Max died at the age of 38 in 1913; his widow and four children all managed to escape persecution by the Nazis by leaving Germany in time.

In 1914 Abraham Holländer founded the Waggonfabrik Heine & Holländer with Karl Heine in Elze near Hanover in 1914.^[9] Son Walter became manager there in May 1916. The years before and during the First World War were of great economic significance for the success of Abraham Holländer's businesses and the family was among the most prosperous and well-known citizens of Aachen, both in the city and within the Jewish community.^[2] On a personal level, the war years were less fortunate for the family: daughter Betti died in 1914 at the age of 16 from appendicitis; son Julius was wounded on the battlefield; and Abraham's youngest brother Karl died in 1915 in 'service to the fatherland' in a military hospital.

Abraham Holländer died after granddaughter Margot's birth, but before Anne's. He therefore only knew his eldest grandchild. After his death, his sons Julius and Walter took over the management of the B. Holländer family firm.

He is buries at the Jüdischer Friedhof Weisweiler in Aachen.^[10]

Source of personal data.^[11] Addresses: Eschweiler; Heinrichsallee 50, Aachen;^[12] Liebfrauenstrasse 5.^[13]