Hanni Jaffé

Johanna ("Hanni") Jaffé was born in Posen (now Poznań, Poland). She grew up in a well-to-do jewish family. Her father (Georg Jaffé) ran the family lumber wholesale business. Georg married Alice Portner, who was the daughter of one of his older sisters, Regina Portner (née Jaffé). Alice's father, Heinrich Portner, was a banker from Warsaw. A few years after Hanni was born, Georg relocated the headquarters of his firm to Berlin. Hanni's younger sister, Hilde, with whom she was very close, was born shortly after the family moved to Berlin.

In 1919, Hanni completed her schooling at Berlin's Auguste Victoria Schule, continuing on to study medicine at the universities of Berlin and Freiburg before she had to break off her education due to illness. Rather than continue to pursue medicine, she worked in an administrative capacity for her father's firm, while pursuing various other fields of study. In 1924, Hanni went to the suburb of Dachau near Munich to attend a home economics course given at "Die große Moosschwaige," the home of the Swedish artist Carl Olaf Petersen and his wife Elly and a meeting place of many authors and artists. Elly Petersen taught the course, and the Petersens became close friends of Johanna's. Around this time, Hanni began doing volunteer social work for a children's shelter run by the Israelitische Jugendhilfe in Munich. She would eventually become the principal of the "Kinderheim." Between 1928 and 1930, she studied modern languages at universities in Munich, Geneva, and London. During semester breaks she would return to Dachau to assist the Petersens with their literary output, including the writing of Elly Petersen's "yellow books" on topics such as gardening and homemaking. After finishing her studies in 1930, Hanni moved to Dachau. Because of her family's wealth, she was then in a position to live comfortably without needing to work to support herself. Nevertheless, she chose to continue working for the Petersens on a full-time basis, often working late into the night for very low wages.

After the traumatic events of Kristallnacht in November 1938, Hanni turned her attention to the "fiendishly complicated" and very costly process of emigrating from Germany. In April 1939 after many months, she finally managed to emigrate to England, initially working as a domestic servant. Ultimately, she settled near Cheltenham in the Cotswolds, where she opened a teashop.

During the Holocaust, Hanni lost almost her entire family. Her mother Alice Jaffé was deported to Theresienstadt in July 1942 before being killed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau in July 1944. After facing deportation, Hanni’s sister Hilde Tittel, committed suicide in October 1941, only 5 months after the loss of her youngest son, Rolf, who died of an ear infection shortly after the tragic death of her non-Jewish husband, Heinrich, who died in an avalanche in Austria. Hanni was able to bring her sister's orphaned son, Klaus, to live with her in England in 1948. With Hanni's help, Klaus was able to secure a scholarship to attend Oxford University where he eventually earned a PhD in Physics before moving to the U.S. in 1960.

Although Elly Petersen asked her to return to Dachau to work for her after the war, Hanni chose to remain in England. In her later years, she spent much of her time in genealogical research, documenting the descent of various branches of the Jaffé/ Jaffe family from Mordecai Jaffe of Posen as well as tracing the spread of the family, with family members in Germany, England, the United States and Israel.

The Jaffe (sometimes spelled Jaffé) family derived from the Posen (now Poznań) and Miloslaw regions of present-day Poland. Included among its members was Rabbi Mordecai Jaffe, known for his works Levush Malkhut or the Levushim, which interpreted the Jewish laws. Another noteworthy member of the family was the historian Philipp Jaffé.

Much of the information in this biographical note derived from material in the book Before Sunrise by Hans Holzhaider, which was translated into English by Johanna Jaffé in 1984.

Hanni spent a lot of time in the 1970s and the 1980s until her death to build up this huge family tree of the Jaffé family and all their descendants, now stocked in the Leo Baeck- Institute in New York.

See the document (Before Sunrise) posted in the media section of this profile regarding the story of Hanni's life and persecution by the Nazis. Her story is in Chapter 2.