Alfred Lessing was born in Germany in 1921. His autobiography, Mein Leben im Versteck: Wie ein deutscher Sinto den Holocaust überlebte, published in 1993, tells of his life spent navigating his identity as a German Sinto in a homeland where he was a target of persecution. He remembers how, when he was four years old, his father was beaten to death in a racially motivated attack. After that, he lived with an uncle in northern Germany.
Lessing played jazz guitar and became a professional musician. From 1936 to 1939 he travelled with an American band before voluntarily joining the German army in an effort to hide his Sinti background at a time of escalating danger. After his identity had been revealed, he spent the Second World War imprisoned first in Lviv, Ukraine and later in Germany. Between periods of detention in Germany he played music with a KdF (‘Kraft durch Freude’/Strength through Joy) group and once went to Buchenwald to perform in a concert for the guards, but thanks to his strategic hiding of his true identity, he was spar
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Description
The collection consists of biographical material, correspondence, writings and publications, family albums, and photographs documenting the history of the Lessing family, originally from the Netherlands, including Engeline Lessing’s deportation to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, her experiences at the Jeanne d’Arc refugee camp in Philippeville, Algeria (Skikda), her sons Ed, Fred, and Arthur Lessing’s experiences as hidden children, Ed’s time with the Dutch Resistance and hiding in the woods, and pre and post-war family history.
Biographical material includes material related Ed, his wife Carla Heymans, Nardus, Engeline, Nardus’s father Isaac and his second wife Agatha Trijntje Cornelia Jautze, and several other early family members. Material consists of report cards, identification cards, marriage documents, and a family book. Other material includes documents related to the Bergen-Belsen prisoner exchange and false identity cards for Ed, Nardus, and Carla’s mother Herta Heymans.
Correspondence primarily c •
Fred Lessing
On October 23, 1942, when our names came up for deportation, my family, instead of boarding the German trains to “resettlement in the east,” we went into hiding. I was 6 years old. My parents felt that hiding together, like Anne Frank’s family, was too dangerous and so, under mostly my mother’s direction and organization (my father looked too Jewish to operate out in the open), we split up and so there are really five stories that together tell the story of my family’s miraculous survival in hiding.
I was hidden out in the open, masquerading with dyed hair, changed name and forged identity papers as a Christian child, displaced from Zeeland, where the dikes had been bombed and the land flooded, and whose parents were looking for a new home and needed someone to look after little Freddie for a short time while they searched.
In order to find people to tell this totally fabricated story to who might be willing, for some money, to look after – though in reality to hide - me, my mother pretty much rang random doorbells, though sometimes she followed up leads p