Wanda Impact

Wanda Einschlag was born in Leipzig on April 3, 1883, the child of Dorothea Armhaus and Josef Einschlag. Because of her profession, Ms. Einschlag was known to music-historians. Her life story could be traced using material from various online archives.

She was a music teacher as well as a singer and lived at 33 Promenadenstraße (now Käthe-Kollwitz-Straße) in early 1933. This address can be found in the membership records of the Israelite Religious Community of Leipzig. It also says there that she worked as a “sound artist”.

Wanda Einschlag also held Polish citizenship through her parents and was therefore forcibly deported to Poland on October 28, 1938. At the time, the so-called “Polenaktion” (“Polish Action”) – the first violent deportations of Polish Jews – was conducted in the German Reich. Particularly in Leipzig, there were many people from the Jewish community who had roots in Eastern Europe.

Later on, Wanda Einschlag had to live in the Warsaw ghetto under catastrophic living conditions. It was the biggest Nazi ghetto for Jews. Starting in mid-1942, deportations began from there to the Treblinka extermination camp, where approximately 800,000 people were gassed in 1942/43 alone. These mass killings were part of the so-called “Aktion Reinhardt” (“Operation Reinhardt”) – the systematic murder of 1.8 million primarily Polish Jews.