Ursula Finke weighed less than 5st (31kg) and by her own description was only a “skeleton”, when Lola Alexander tracked her down in bombed-out Berlin in the last days of April 1945. Both had repeatedly, narrowly escaped deportation to Auschwitz, unlike many of their closest Jewish relatives.
Lola and Ursula had become “friends”, as their survivors’ testimony from the 1950s put it, while in hiding from the Gestapo at the home of a resistance member. After Lola rescued Ursula, badly injured and chained to a bed in the dank cellar of a Jewish hospital, they would remain together for the rest of Lola’s life.
This week, as Europe marks the 79th anniversary of the end of the second world war, descendants of the two women gathered in Berlin from Australia, the UK and the US to lay Stolpersteine memorial stones for Alexander and four other relatives who were persecuted by the Nazis.
The vast grassroots project has already placed more than 100,000 of the brass plaques across Europe at the former homes of Holocaust victims and survivors. Lola’s ceremony resulted from a gradual peeling back of layers of silence around her life with Ursula, spearheaded by two queer women living on opposite sides of the world.
Berlin-based writer Hilda Hoy and her Australian friend Jane Becker belong to a new generation of Holocaust memory culture, seeking to shed light on lives activists say have long been marginalised in more traditional forms of remembrance.
“When Jane and I met we were not planning on this happening – I was just going to help her get to the bottom of these family mysteries that had been hanging over her,” Hoy said.
Hoy, who is Taiwanese Canadian, and her partner, Carla, a longtime friend of Jane’s, visited her in Sydney in 2016 and got to talking about the Beckers’ roots in Berlin. Fluent in German, Hoy offered to lend a hand with some genealogical research when she got back home.
She started digging in the German archives for information about Becker’s Jewish family and it “just kind of snowballed”, Hoy said. Becker’s father was a cousin of Lola’s. “We found this queer love story that had been completely buried for decades,” she said.
Lola and her twin sister, Hansi, were born to a middle class Jewish family on 20 June 1907 in Berlin. Aged just 21, Lola opened a shop for boys’ clothing, where her mother, Martha, was also employed. A decade later, during the “Kristallnacht” pogrom, Nazi thugs would destroy the business and in 1941 Lola was forced to start work building plane engines.
Her supervisor, Wilhelm Daene, belonged to a resistance group and warned her of the 1943 “Fabrikaktion” roundup of Jews. While Hansi was captured and deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered, Lola sought refuge in the home owned by Daene’s in-laws in a leafy suburb. Martha had killed herself the previous year to evade the camps.
Ursula, who was 16 years younger than Lola, went into hiding just two days before the Fabrikaktion, which would claim the lives of both her parents at Auschwitz. In August 1943, the Daenes took her in, giving both her and Lola false papers and employing them at two lending libraries they operated in the city.
At the end of each work day, Lola and Ursula would meet at Gesundbrunnen station and return home together. For a year, Ursula described in her postwar testimony found at London’s Wiener Holocaust Library, that she had found “happiness” among the books while facing the wrenching fear of being unmasked as a “U-Boot” or submarine, as the about 7,000 Jews in hiding in Berlin were known.
One day her luck ran out. A Jewish informer spotted her on the platform at Gesundbrunnen, gripped her arm and led her off before Lola’s eyes. “I swore to myself I wouldn’t let myself be killed by these dogs,” Ursula later said. She threw herself in front of an incoming commuter train.
Ursula survived badly hurt and once again evaded deportation to Auschwitz, this time with the help of a sympathetic doctor who gradually treated her crushed foot rather than amputating it. Lola had to find another place to hide as Ursula’s capture had exposed the Daenes’ refuge.
It was only in the final days of the war that Lola reunited with the emaciated, traumatised “Ursel”, as she called her, at Jewish hospital in the Wedding district. “I don’t need to tell you what joy both of us felt,” Lola would later recount.
She continued to bring food rations to Ursula until she was well enough to leave the clinic, then under Soviet administrators, and found a flat for the two of them in the eastern sector. They eventually opened a dressmaking shop together, adopted a small dog and remained inseparable until Lola’s death in 1965. Ursula would live until 2003 and, according to those who knew her in her later years, never had another partner. Family members who visited Lola and Ursula after the war noted that they shared a bed, a home, a business and a life but still called each other “friends”.
Debbie Fink’s father, Hans Finke, was Ursula’s brother. He changed his name to John Fink after he survived Auschwitz and emigrated to the US. Debbie had a close relationship with her Aunt Ursula growing up but the older woman refused to discuss her intimate life, even when Debbie shared the fact that she was a lesbian.
Hoy has initiated a Stolperstein for Ursula as well, which she hopes to see laid later this year after a large backlog is cleared.
Fink, who is deaf, flew from Chicago to Berlin to join the Beckers for the memorial ceremony on Tuesday, after visits at the weekend to the two women’s graves and their last shared home. Speaking through a sign-language interpreter, she said she had hoped her family could openly embrace their love for the extraordinary story it was.
“I wish I could have met Lola to thank her for saving Ursula’s life,” said Fink, who remembers seeing both women’s names on their doorbell when she went to visit Ursula in East Berlin with her mother.
“I feel so much better than before because everything was always secret. For my peace of mind it is just really good to have things spoken about and everything be out in the open and not just be this private thing that was bottled up.” Fink said Ursula and Lola’s love was an unspoken but open secret in the family, with several relatives noting that their shared flat had only one double bed.
Becker thanked the about 50 people who joined the hour-long Stolpersteine ceremony, including her extended family, neighbours and volunteers.
Hoy and Becker are now working on a graphic novel about Ursula and Lola. Their aim is to both honour the couple, who were targeted by the Nazis solely for being Jewish, while pushing past some of the limits of Germany’s famed culture of historical remembrance.
“LGBT stories from that era have been swept under the rug for too long, but we, as queer women ourselves, are keen to shine a light on this love story,” Hoy said.
Mirjam Zadoff, director of the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, said it was crucial for victims and survivors to be appreciated in all their humanity, not just the categories imposed on them under the Nazis.
“People need to understand why the history of violence is relevant for them and that’s why they need to see their stories represented, and their histories,” she told the Guardian.
The Nazis sent an estimated 10,000 men to concentration camps for homosexuality while lesbian women were often charged with crimes like public lewdness or “asocial” behaviour.
After a two-decade-long campaign by activists, the German parliament last year focused its annual Holocaust memorial commemorations on people persecuted and killed for their sexual or gender identity. There were no known LGBT survivors left to participate.
