Therese (Resi*) Neuburger

Eintrag im »Gedenkbuch« des Bundesarchivs:

• Sternglanz, Therese Resi
• geboren am 29. März 1881 in Tarboro / North Carolina / USA
• wohnhaft in München
• Deportationsziel:
• 1942, unbekannter Deportationsort

cf. also: http://yvng.yadvashem.org/nameDetails.html?language=en&itemId=15333...

place of birth there: Nördlingen, Bayern, Germany

Yom Hashoa Story Below is Leonard Rogoff’s article which appeared in the (North Carolina) News and Observer on April 15, 2012.

Born in Tarboro, died in the Holocaust

Therese Sternglanz, born in Tarboro in 1881, “disappeared” in eastern Europe in 1942, a North Carolina victim of the Nazi Holocaust. We know little about her but enough to imagine her life. Her parents David and Sary Sternglanz were Jewish immigrants from Bavaria who settled in Tarboro after the Civil War. In 1878, the year Therese’s parents married, Tarboro was home to nearly 100 Jews, most, like the Sternglanzes, were recent immigrants. In Bavaria, Jews had endured restrictions about where they could live, trades they could practice, or even if they could marry. Most were poor. They emigrated after the European revolutions of 1848 failed, when hopes were crushed for Jewish emancipation in an enlightened Germany. From the ports of Baltimore, New York, and Philadelphia they followed sea lanes and rail lines to mill and market towns across North Carolina. As they had in their native Germany, they peddled and opened stores, bringing commerce to the countryside. In 1878, according to Atlanta’s Jewish South newspaper, Jews owned some dozen stores in Tarboro. David Sternglanz ran a grocery while Sary worked as a milliner.

The Sternglanzes joined “our crowd,” a German-Jewish social circle. They gathered for holidays, games of whist, and parlor singing. The community center was the clubroom of the B’nai B’rith Lodge, which David Sternglanz helped organize. In the year Therese was born, her father was elected president of Congregation B’nai Israel, Children of Israel. Therese would have been among several dozen children attending Sabbath School. These Jews clung to their German kultur, and very likely she was educated in German.

The post-war years were hard times. Merchants went bankrupt. Though Jews were the least likely of America’s immigrants to resettle in their countries of origin, the Sternglanzes returned to their native Nordlingen, Bavaria. After Germany unified, Jews were granted civil rights and religious freedom. Many abandoned the countryside for cities where they rose into the middle-class. The Sternglanzes, however, resumed their village ways.

Therese seems not to have had a happy life. In 1902 she married Leopold Neuburger, a horse dealer from nearby Ellwangen. Their first child, Hans Siegfried, died at four months. In 1904 their daughter Gertrud Bianca was born. After 22 years of marriage, Therese divorced Leopold and retook the Sternglanz name. With the death of her parents, Therese relocated to Munich, where her married daughter lived.

Munich was the cauldron of Nazism, the site in 1923 of Adolf Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch. The first concentration camp, Dachau, was on the city’s outskirts. Starting in 1933, the first of some 400 anti-Jewish decrees would have circumscribed her life. The Nazi noose tightened slowly, and Therese’s daughter and son in law left Munich. On the streets Therese would have seen Nazi thugs assault Jews and smash their store windows. Jewish businesses were closed and Jewish employees were fired. Synagogues were destroyed. On Kristallnacht, 1938, if Therese did not hide in terror, she would have encountered rampaging Nazi mobs A thousand Jewish men were sent to Dachau. Anti-Jewish curfews restricted Therese’s ability to walk the streets, and she was denied public transit. Rationing allowed her meager food. As a Jew, she was forbidden to own a radio, camera, or appliances. In 1941 she was required to wear a yellow star. By autumn, 1941, the government had confiscated some 1500 Jewish apartments, and we do not know if she was among the homeless Jews conscripted into forced labor to construct a camp that would become a deportation center to the death camps. In November 1941, nearly 1,000 Munich Jews were deported eastward.

German-Jewish families in North Carolina like the Weils of Goldsboro, Meyers of Enfield, Sterns of Greensboro, and Katzensteins of Warren Plains received desperate, heart-rending letters from German cousins pleading for sponsors to America. Therese’s American birth should have opened doors, but by 1942, she was 61, divorced, and alone. Did she have a birth certificate? Or the funds to immigrate? She would need to brave lines at an American consulate, a hateful Nazi bureaucracy, and an unwelcoming U. S. State Department. Records tell us that Therese was deported from Munich in 1942, and did not survive the war, but exactly when, where, and how did she die?

We know enough to imagine a death for Therese Sternglanz.

In April, 1942, 343 Jews were sent from Munich to a transit camp in Poland and from there to the death camps. Or, months later, she may have been among the some 300 Jews shipped to a ghetto and then to Auschwitz. Or, among the 1,300 Jews packed in 24 transports and sent to the Theresienstadt camp. She may have suffocated in a gas chamber, been shot by a mobile death squad, or died of hunger or disease. Or she may have been among the hundreds to commit suicide.

We do know this about Therese Sternglanz from a German Holocaust registry. Born: Tarboro. Resident: Munich. Deportation: Destination unknown.

We’ve received new information about Therese, the Holocaust victim born in Tarboro. Joan Pollak of Philadelphia has an autograph album from her great grandfather Alexander Heilbroner of Tarboro with the signature of ‘..little cousin Therese’. Joan informed us that Therese Sternglanz was deported to Theresienstadt on July 11, 1942.