Munich man discovers grandmother’s fate in Holocaust exhibit
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Toni Heilmaier of Munich discovered a photograph of his grandmother, Anna Paroubek, in a city library exhibit about Jewish victims of National Socialism.
Heilmaier remembered Gestapo officers taking his grandmother from their home in 1942, but his mother told him she had gone to a nursing home. The exhibit, part of a school project researching forgotten Jewish residents of Munich, sparked Heilmaier’s search for the truth about her fate.
Ursula Saabel, a teacher who organized the school project, and Barbara von Broekhoven researched Anna Paroubek’s life after Saabel retired in 2010. They learned Paroubek was born in Čelechovice, in what is now the Czech Republic, in 1870 and moved to Munich before 1900. She married a Catholic tailor and though Jewish herself, she did not actively practice her religion. After her husband died in 1932, she faced increasing harassment and isolation under the Nazi regime.
Anna Paroubek was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto in September 1942 with 49 others and died there in 1943 due to malnutrition and isolation. After the school project uncovered her story in 2003, the Hadern Historical Association and Paroubek’s family raised funds for a memorial plaque, which was unveiled at Theresienstadt and, recently, at her former home in Munich. Munich now has around 350 such memorials to victims of National Socialism, creating a growing network of remembrance.
