Ludwig Falkenstein

A biography of Falkenstein, a German Jew and former resident of Meudt (Westerwald). He was born in 1910, the eldest of nine children of a Jewish butcher, cattle dealer, and farmer. At the age of 14 he began to learn his father's profession and worked with him until 1937, when the increasing discrimination against Jews forced them to close their trade. On 9 November 1938, after witnessing the devastation committed by Nazis in a nearby village, Falkenstein managed to remove and hide four Torah scrolls from the synagogue of Meudt before it was burned down. On 11 November he was deported, together with all Jewish males aged 18-65, to Buchenwald; he was released on 22 December. In January 1939 he fled to Belgium. In 1944 he was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Auschwitz. In January 1945 he was taken on a death march to Mauthausen, and from there to Melk and Ebensee, where he was liberated. After the war he lived in Brussels, until his death in 1990. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)