Nazi resistance – memory of Mirjam Ohringer: Always with ears and eyes outside

Marx and Moses, the commitment against social injustice and for one’s own Jewish tradition, were the central values ​​for Mirjam Ohringer that accompanied her throughout her life. The Shoah survivor and resistance fighter, who was politically active and a contemporary witness until shortly before her death in 2016, would have turned 100 this year. We from the Wuppertal history initiative “1933 Never Forget!” visited Ohringer in Amsterdam several times starting in 2010 and had her tell us her life story.

Ohringer was born on October 26, 1924 in Amsterdam. Her parents came from Galicia. They had spent their childhood and youth in poverty and sometimes even had to go hungry. When the draft order came from the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War, Herman Ohringer decided that this was not the war of the simple, poor people and therefore not his war. To escape military service, he moved to the German Reich. In January 1917 he migrated to Amsterdam. In Amsterdam he met Tauba Bleiberg again, whom he already knew from Galicia. They married in 1923.

The Ohringers were convinced of socialism and later communism. In Amsterdam they organized themselves into the Yiddish-language workers’ cultural association Anski, which was affiliated with the socialist General Jewish Workers’ Union, or Bund for short. In this environment, a Yiddish-speaking Red Aid group was founded in 1931 to support political prisoners. The group met at the Ohringers’ apartment.

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In January 1933, Ohringer’s parents separated. Mirjam Ohringer and her mother only saw each other once again at the end of August 1933, and then again after the liberation in 1945.

Ohringer’s father helped German anti-fascists, some of them Jews, who had illegally fled to the Netherlands with shelter and food. Mirjam Ohringer described the situation at the time: »Many German anti-fascists had to flee back then. The slogan was: Stay as close to Germany as possible if you have to flee. That’s how many of them came to Holland, they were illegal. (…) Back then the most important thing was to raise money to keep people alive and give them food.«

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Mirjam Ohringer collected money for the German refugees from reliable like-minded people. Within her youth group, which also belonged to Anski, sponsorships were taken over for the illegal refugees from Germany. This included raising one guilder per week for each refugee. At the same time, the German anti-fascists, who had already experienced repression, gave them tips on how to later survive in illegality.

After the Wehrmacht invaded in May 1940, the situation changed. Mirjam Ohringer, still a student at the time, began producing and distributing the illegal communist newspaper “De Waarheid” in the fall of 1940. The four of them met in the Ohringers’ apartment, wrote articles for “De Waarheid” on given topics and distributed them to trustworthy people after they were printed. For a while in 1941, a honing machine stood in Herman and Mirjam Ohringer’s apartment.

»When the newspaper was finished, I got a copy and that’s what I used to do. I somehow hid it under my clothes and went by someone I knew and who I knew also knew people who were interested. You had to be completely sure about the person, you had to know exactly who you could go to. So I said to him, ‘You can read this now, and when I get back from school I’ll come pick it up again. But you have to give me something in return so we can buy paper again.’ And I did that to several people, always with the same copy.”

Ohringer was also active as a courier because young girls were considered unsuspicious. The February strike in 1941 was a central experience of solidarity for them. As a result of the crackdown, around 400 Jewish men were arrested and deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp. On June 11, 1941, a second major raid was carried out. Once again there were arrests and deportations of young Jews to Mauthausen, including Mirjam Ohringer’s friend and love, Ernst Josef Prager. None of them survived their imprisonment in Mauthausen.

When the deportations began on July 15, 1942, Mirjam Ohringer’s father wanted to have her smuggled to Switzerland, but she didn’t want to leave Amsterdam, not even to the Dutch provinces: “I knew that in the village everyone knows everyone, I can’t do that out of the house and I can no longer do anything in the resistance.” The father was able to go into hiding with an older couple in Amsterdam. Mirjam Ohringer was now left alone in their shared apartment, much to her father’s dismay. Since the raids always took place during curfew, when all Jews had to be at home, she always slept somewhere else.

At the beginning of November 1942, Herman Ohringer finally found a safe hiding place for his daughter, albeit in the countryside in a small village in the province of North Holland with a communist couple who ran a bakery. A hiding place was built for Miriam Ohringer under the floorboards in front of the attic. The entrance to the hideout was always kept open so that they would be able to reach it quickly in the event of a raid. She couldn’t leave the house during the day. The fear of discovery accompanied her constantly. She said: »You live outside with your ears and eyes. Always. Day and night.”

Meanwhile, the situation for the Jewish people in hiding in Amsterdam continued to deteriorate. In June 1943, Herman Ohringer, along with four other people in hiding, were arrested by two members of the National-Socialist Movement on a “Jew hunt” and taken to the Hollandsche Schouwburg assembly camp in Amsterdam, a stopover before being transported on to the Westerbork assembly camp. The deportation trains traveled from Westerbork to Auschwitz and Sobibór.

Fortunately, Herman Ohringer met an old comrade in the Hollandsche Schouwburg, apparently one of the Jewish stewards deployed there, with a connection to the resistance, who organized his escape. Mirjam Ohringer tells of his escape helper who said: “Leave everything and come up a flight of stairs with me.” He fled across the roofs to the street corner, down the stairwell into a courtyard where there were car dealers and workshops. There was an ambulance there in which he was taken away. Herman Ohringer managed to go into hiding until he was liberated.

Mirjam Ohringer hid with the communist baker couple for 19 months until June 12, 1944. Then her father had her brought to Amsterdam because he feared that it could be dangerous for her near the coast because of the Allied advance on the Atlantic coast. In Amsterdam, father and daughter experienced liberation.

Mirjam Ohringer was involved in the political left throughout her life. She campaigned against the Dutch colonial war in Indonesia and against the threat of nuclear weapons systems. She remained connected to the peace movement throughout her life. At the end of the 1970s she became active as a contemporary witness, as well as in organizations of former resistance fighters and in anti-fascist and anti-racist organizations. In particular, she served on the Dutch Mauthausen Committee and organized a delegation trip to the liberation celebration in Mauthausen every year. She died on May 29, 2016 in Amsterdam at the age of 91.