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(1922-1994)

BELLA AND FLORA

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Bella & Flora circa 1897

Bella Strauß was born on 14 May 1884 in the spa town of Bad Homburg, two years after her older sister Flora. They were “inseparable from childhood”. They grew up together, married into the same family and they died together.

Their parents, Jakob and Bertha Strauß, ran a successful shoe and haberdashery shop first at Louisenstraße 16 and later—after 1912—at No. 35; above the showroom lay the spacious family flat where Bella and Flora were .

Curious and sociable, Bella attended a liberal day-boarding school where French and English were taught to the daughters of visiting spa guests. Teachers quickly noted her gift for languages and literature; a prized reward from Rabbi Dr Kottek—a beautifully bound Book of Legends and Tales from Jewish Pre-history—still bears her name and the date April 1898. She dreamed of becoming a teacher but the unwritten rules of the “respectable Jewish middle class” kept her behind the shop counter. Even so, Bella smuggled Goethe read Shakespeare under the till,

Richard lived for a while with his elder brother Julius in Wiesbaden with his elder brother Julius till the two families connected. Eventually both Rothschild brothers married both Strauß sisters. Richard, the handsome travelling salesman from Alsfeld in Bad Homburg – and Flora and Julius in Wiesbaden – they visited each other frequently. Richard and Bella married on 24 May 1912. Julius and a Jewish neighbor, Rudolf Weiden, were witnesses

Jakob continued to run Schuhhaus Strauß. He expected his new son-in-law to modernise the business under his watchful eye. Ellen later remembered feeling deeply sorry for both her parents, all living in the space and her grandfather – and her father having to ‘take orders’ from old Jakob Strauß. After Bertha’s death in 1923 and Jakob’s own passing in 1928, ownership and day-to-day authority, finally passed to Richard and Bella.

Three children followed: artistically gifted Edith (1913), book-devouring Fritz (1918) and shy, observant Ellen (1922). The shop and the flat were threaded together by Eugenie the live-in housekeeper who became the children’s second mother, and Bella’s steadfast ally for two decades and Ellen and Fritz’s connection their roots in the post war period.

Bella’s strengths were easy to admire—intelligence, linguistic flair, a strong sense of fairness. But she carried vulnerabilities too: lifelong headaches, bouts of insomnia, and a temperament that could swing from bright talk to brooding silence. Ellen later wrote that when her parents quarreled Bella would light the Sabbath candles, lay her hands on the children’s heads and sing a lullaby in a voice “not very steady,” yet the trembling seemed to give the blessing extra weight..

The Nazi victory of January 1933 reached Bad Homburg. SA lorries roared down Louisenstraße, their inmates yelling slogans. Kauft nicht bei Juden! (don’t buy from Jews) was a prime one, while and brown-shirts planted themselves outside the Rothschild window-display where customers once queued for summer sandals. Bella watched friends cross the street rather than greet her. Sales collapsed; gossip whispered that the Mercedes-Affe—the grinning monkey logo for the premiere handled brand of shoes and the shop’s trademark—should be “Aryanized.”

In April 1935 the town cinema opposite the Ackermann leather shop hosted Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. A neighbor’s son, now in Hitler Youth uniform, taunted Ellen with “Jew—shit in your hat!”; The reflex reply, “Christian—shit in your chest,” was brave but ultimately was in vain. The constant stress brought Bella nights of shaking nerves. When the boycott spread she broke down. In early 1936 Richard found her rocking in bed, trapped in cycles of nightmares. Doctors certified a nervous collapse and admitted her briefly to a clinic; sedatives dulled the terror but not the cause.

In a tough but in a pragmatic move, Richard sold the shop at far below value, to an ‘Aryan’ competitor – Emil Humpert and moved the family to anonymous Frankfurt-am-Main. The iconic monkey logo stayed on the façade—“grinning in mockery,” Ellen wrote. but the name Rothschild was removed from the frontage. Bella, still shaky, reinvented herself as a private English tutor. Richard was back to being a travelling sales man.

The family’s sense of fragile safety shattered on 9–10 November 1938. Kristallnacht meant burned or smashed synagogues and broken windows for Jewish businesses. In Frankfurt; all Jewish men between 16 and 60 were seized. Richard, Fritz and Uncle Julius were all arrested in different locations and vanished into Buchenwald. At home Bella confronted Gestapo clerks, filled endless forms, and—most daringly—appealed directly to a police official to bring her son home for Christmas: ‘I thought you were humane… But your task is to see that Jews are killed, not saved’. brought a last minute response – ‘your son might come home sooner than you think’. Evidently the officer petitioned for Fritz and Richard’s release. Richard who arrived first and then Fritz -emaciated, toes black with frostbite. Bella had chased visas for Northern Rhodesia, the only destination where Richard’s half-siblings could sponsor them. She prioritized the departure of the men, believing women were in slightly less danger. and at that very moment that was true. But it was a selfless calculation because it was only a question of time before the women were targeted too. Julius’ release was announced too by by that time he had died in the camp- in Fritz’s arms.

February 1939. Richard reached Southampton and headed to Africa while Fritz boarded the Ussukuma, threading down the African coast to Beira, Mozambique, then by rail to Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). On board, with Fritz – fourteen other Jewish refugees lacked permit to land because they lacked the train fare inland; one family, fearing return to Germany, took their own lives—an episode that haunted him.

Bella’s next task was Ellen. She cajoled the ever reluctant officials into stamping Kindertransport papers, itemized a humiliating luggage list (only fifty kilos, meticulously checked), and kissed her seventeen-year-old goodbye at Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof on 28 July 1939. Mother and daughter never saw one another again.

Flora, later widowed after Julius died in Buchenwald. She moved in with Bela bringing Persian carpets to cover over the rented parquet. By autumn Bella and Flora were still in the Westend flat, two middle-aged sisters trying to preserve civility: afternoon tea with rationed sugar, French conversations to keep their minds agile, communicating or meeting Frau Ackermann when possible. It was grief and pleasure when letters from England Africa and USA arrived.

Visas to Africa and monies were secured for Bella and Flora to leave for Africa but the war was now on and most exit countries occupied by the Nazis. A transit visa was sought through Portugal. but it failed. Details below.

Ansgar Schaefer’s article, “Facing an ‘Invasion of Undesirables’: The Worsening of the Restrictions on Entering Portugal” highlights the lost chance of refuge for Flora and Bela Rothschild as emblematic victims

On 19 October 1941 Transport DA 6 left Frankfurt’s Grossmarkthalle with 1,005 Jews crammed into third-class coaches. Radegast station outside Łódź greeted them with snow and shouted slurs. Within thirty-five minutes guards had driven the bewildered arrivals—Bella and Flora among them—through mud to the school on Franzstraße 13, now a “collection barrack.” Chronicler Oskar Rosenfeld, deported the same day, wrote of “carts pulled by starving men, barefoot children in the slush, and faces that whispered, We will outlive you yet”.

Inside the walled ghetto life shrank to hunger, lice and hope measured in Rumkies. The brittle scrip printed by the Judenrat. Payroll lists record Bella receiving tiny sums on 5 Feb, 10 Feb (with Flora beside her), sporadically in April, and once more on 1 May 1942; after 11 May her name disappears, the column marked “erled.” completed.

What happened next remains conjecture: They could have died from iIllness cold or starvation: they could have died in the ghetto’s typhus wards before the mass “resettlements.” Otherwise there were the Chelmno gas vans: Frankfurt collective VI supplied deportees to Chelmno on 12–13 May 1942; Flora is officially listed as murdered there, though no trace survives.

Either way, no postcard left Franzstraße; no postcard or note reached Rhodesia. In 1948 a Frankfurt court, at Fritz’s request, declared both women dead as of the deportation date, a bureaucratic full stop that disguise d the brutal ellipse of their final year.

Ellen, writing in distant Zimbabwe decades later, paints her mother not as a saint but a complex, modern woman.

Lookng back on their lives, Flora Bella shared more than blood. They spoke a rapid private patter of French idioms, laughed over childhood secrets, and in Frankfurt pooled ration coupons to stitch an extra quilt for Ellen’s trunk. In the Łódź ghetto, neighbors recalled “two German sisters who kept speaking English together, as if practicing for another life, somewhere else” (*testimony in post-war compensation files). Holding onto language was, perhaps, their last act of ownership.

When Fritz filed Red Cross inquiries in 1943 he addressed them to “Theresienstadt”—he could not imagine his scholarly, music-loving mother in the hellscape of Chelmno. The reply never came, but the query letters remain, signed simply “Richard, Fritz, Ellen—your loving family”.

MANDATE _ ACTUAL DOCUMENTS – THE FINAL TRANSPORT TO LODZ GHETTO