My dear friend Jürgen Flügge continues to tell the story of our mothers’ deep friendship. His mother, Mina, lived with my mother’s family, the Westerfelds, for several years during the 1930s. During the Great Depression, Mina’s family in Stockstadt am Rhein couldn’t afford to feed all of their children, so her parents asked my grandparents if their 15-year-old could do chores in exchange for room and board.
Mina became much more than a housekeeper to the Westerfelds. When my mother (Edith) and I arrived for our first visit to Germany in 1991, she told me that we couldn’t leave the country without seeing Mina. When I asked her who was Mina, she said, “She is a ‘sister’ to me.”
After my mother fled the country as a 12-year-old unaccompanied minor, Mina, then a 25-year-old Christian girl, became a voice of resistance. She recorded Nazi crimes on scraps of paper and placed her notes in a suitcase that Jürgen found after her death in 1992. Mina had kept the notes as evidence in the Nazi trials.
Mina is the subject of my next book, “I Will Not Howl with Those Wolves.”
Jürgen continues to perform his play, “Edith Und Mina” throughout Germany today. My friend, Fritz Wolf, attended this performance, organized by The Round Table of Jewish Life in Groß-Umstadt, and shared these photos with me.