Eva Dodeles and many of her family members were murdered, and their names are recorded in Ellen Bertram’s Memorial Book of Leipzig Victims of the Shoah. Documents detailing her life can be found in the archives of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. Descendants wrote to the Museum of City History Leipzig from Israel.
Eva Dodeles
Eva Dodeles
Photo Mittelmann Photo Archive
Seq. No.: AM00001313
The photograph shows Eva Dodeles on her first day at school, probably in 1933 when she was six years old. That year, the Nazis came to power and anti-Jewish laws, discrimination and persecution intensified.
Her Jewish parents were Naftule Dodeles (born in 1890 in Leipzig) and Dora Deborah Dodeles (née Aschkenasy). Her mother owned a tobacco shop and was born in Brody, Poland. The family also included the children Hirsch Abraham (born 1922), Ruth (born 1924), Bella (born 1929), and Moses Raphael (born 1933). They lived at Funkenburgstraße 16 in Leipzig’s Waldstraßenviertel neighborhood.
Nothing more specific is known about the family’s subsequent fate. However, it is documented that Eva Dodeles, along with her siblings Bella and Moses Raphael and her mother, was listed on the deportation list dated May 10, 1942, for the Bełźyce ghetto (near Lublin). At that time, Eva Dodeles was only 15 years old. It is highly likely that they were sent to the ghetto in occupied Poland along with approximately 1,000 other Jews from Saxony and Thuringia (including 287 from Leipzig and the surrounding area).
They were either murdered there or deported on to extermination or labor camps.