Mural for the women from Dessauer Ufer
Between 6 July and mid-September 1944, a satellite camp of the Neuengamme concentration camp was located in Speicher G, a warehouse on Dessauer Ufer in the free port of Hamburg. The first 1,000 prisoners, most of them Jewish women from Czechoslovakia, had been selected at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in early July 1944 to work in Hamburg. Another 500 women arrived at Dessauer Ufer two months later. They were mostly Jewish women from Poland who had been imprisoned in the Lodz ghetto and were also sent to Hamburg via Auschwitz-Birkenau. Some of the women had previously been deported from Hamburg and other German cities to Ghetto Lodz in 1941/42. The 1,500 women were housed in a former grain warehouse and had to carry out clearance work for oil refineries and other companies at the port.
Mural
A mural painted by Cecilia Herrero and Hildegund Schuster in 1995 commemorates the women who were exploited and forced to live and work in inhumane conditions. In the centre of the mural is a portrait of Lucille Eichengreen (née Cecilie Landau), who was born in Hamburg in 1925. In October 1941, at the age of 16, she was deported to the Lodz ghetto with her mother Sala Landau and younger sister Karin because they were Jews. She was later sent to Auschwitz and then returned to her home city of Hamburg as a concentration camp prisoner in the summer of 1944 to perform forced labour. Together with 500 other prisoners, mostly Jewish women from Poland, she was taken from Dessauer Ufer to the Sasel satellite camp of Neuengamme concentration camp and from there to Bergen-Belsen towards the end of the war. Cecilie Landau was the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust. After the war, she emigrated to the USA. She published some books about the Holocaust, was honored, amongst others with honorary doctor of University Gießen. She died 2020 in Oakland.
FrauenFreiluftGalerie
The mural is part of Hamburg’s FrauenFreiluftGalerie (Women’s Open-air Gallery), a programme established in 1994 for female artists from Hamburg and worldwide to portray women’s lives and work through art.