Felice Schragenheim

Rachel Felice Schragenheim ( Berlin , 9 of March of 1922 - possibly in early 1945 in transport to Bergen-Belsen ) was one journalist German , who died in the genocide against the Jews organized by the Nazis . Posthumously he achieved fame as protagonist of the book Aimée and Jaguar of Erica Fischer and of the film of the same name, Aimée and Jaguar .

Life

Felice Schragenheim was Jewish and worked, in addition to his profession as a journalist, in the resistance , after failing in several attempts to leave Germany. Under the false name of “Felice Schrader”, it worked in a Nazi publication, whose information passed then to the Jewish resistance. ¹

It is known that she was a poet of a certain talent, poems “in the style of Mascha Kaléko “, as Helga Brinitzer recalls. In the summer of 1942 he met and fell in love with Lilly Wust , a convinced Nazi, wife of a war hero, mother of four, decorated for his services to the state. ¹ Felice called Lilly Aimée and Lilly called Felice Jaguar . After four months of meeting Felice moved to live with Lilly. Wust was slow to discover that Schragenheim was Jewish and worked in the resistance, which made him rethink his ideas. Both maintained their relationship despite this, a relationship that was for all purposes equivalent to a marriage. ^{1 2}

On August 21, 1944, back from an excursion to Lake Havel , Felice Schragenheim was arrested by the Gestapo and taken to a concentration camp for being Jewish. ¹ According to the Yad Vashem museum database , she was deported on 8 September 1944 on the “Transport I / 116” train from Berlin to Theresienstadt . There Wust tried to use his influence to visit her, but was rejected by the commanding officer. ¹ On 9 October 1944 she was transferred to the Theresienstadt Transport Ep train to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp .

The day and place of his death are unknown; Probably died in a death march that left the Gross-Rosen concentration camp , but it may have been after the arrival at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp . On February 14, 1948, Felice Schragenheim was pronounced dead by the Berlin-Charlottenburg court, which pro-forma the date of her death on December 31, 1944. ³

Book and film «Aimée and Jaguar»

The life of both women is novelized in the book Aimée & Jaguar of Erica Fischer , published in 1994, that served as the foundation for the film Aimée and Jaguar . ^{4 5}The book is based on the memoirs and extracts from Lilly Wust’s diary, as well as eyewitness accounts of the time, and contains letters and poems from both. Unlike in the film, no dramatic or partially fictional plotting is created.

Some eyewitnesses criticized the book and the film. According to them, the alleged love story between Felice Schragenheim and Lilly Wust would actually be characterized by Schragenheim’s dependence. Elenai Predski-Kramer, a friend of Felice Schragenheim, expressed the suspicion that Lilly Wust herself could have betrayed Felice Schragenheim to the Gestapo, for which however there is no evidence. ⁴

Other tributes

Maria Schrader , who took the role of Felice Schragenheim in Aimée and Jaguar , in 2007 dedicated her first work in the direction of a film, Liebesleben : «For Felice».

Oskar Ansull created Felices Bücher - Die Bücher der Felice Schragenheim, 1922-1945 (“The books of Felice - The books of Felice Schragenheim, 1922-194”), a representation and reading of the books that Felice Schragenheim thought to take for a trip. The work tries to show the mentality and the cultural background of the young women of Berlin in the decades of 1930 and 40. The production was represented more than 100 times in all Germany. ⁶

References