Mala Laaser

Mala, actually Amelie Eva Ruth, was born on 19 July 1911 to Isidor and Helene Laaser in Königsberg. Her older brother Walter was born on 26 February 1907. The family belonged to the Jewish religious community. On a date unknown to date, mother Helene, daughter Mala and son Walter moved to Berlin. Isidor Laaser died on 6 August 1929 in Königsberg.

In the Jewish address book from 1931, Dr Walter Laaser's address is listed as Steglitzer Straße 77. It must be assumed that his mother and sister were also registered at this address.In the 1939 census, only Mala and Helene Laaser are listed.The address at Sybelstraße 27 in Berlin-Charlottenburg was Mala's last residential address before her emigration. Helene Laaser was unable to emigrate, her application of 23 August 1939 was not approved. She remained alone in Berlin. Her son Walter had obviously already emigrated to Great Britain by this time, as he was no longer included in the 1939 census and so-called Residentenliste.

Like her two children, Mala's mother was persecuted by the National Socialists because of her Jewish religious confession. On 18 October 1941, the mass deportations of Jews from the ‘Altreich’ to the Litzmannstadt (Lódz) ghetto began.  Together with 1,089 Berlin Jews, Helene was deported on the first transport from Berlin.The deportation train reached the ghetto on 19.10.1941. A ‘report dated 13.11.1941 concerning the deportation of 20.000 Jews and 5.000 gypsies to the Litzmannstadt ghetto’ lists the following for the first transport on p. 5: ‘200 families / of which 229 men / 224 women / 547 children (2 dead children) / able to work: 400 men and women’. Helene Laaser was murdered in the Shoah on 9 January 1942.

Mala's brother Walter joined the British Army and fought as a soldier in the Allied forces against the National Socialists. Walter was involved in the battles at Monte Cassino (Italy) from 17 January to 18 May 1944 and must have been seriously wounded. This battle, which lasted four months, was one of the longest of the Second World War.  Walter Laaser succumbed to his wounds on 7 August 1944 and died at the age of 37. His final resting place is at the war cemetery in Rome.

Little is known about Mala Laaser's work before and during her emigration. Thanks to the archival documents in the Centrum Judaicum mentioned at the beginning, we know that she was active as a writer and journalist. Mala Laaser wrote reportages and later also published stories and poems, mainly in Jewish magazines. A brief search in the catalogue of the German National Library and the online portal Compact Memory of the University Library Frankfurt/M., which includes the most important Jewish newspapers and magazines in the German-speaking world up to 1938, shows that in the second half of the 1930s Laaser published her articles, mainly longer novellas, in the Central-Verein-Zeitung as well as in the Jüdisches Gemeindeblatt of the Jewish Community of Berlin, in the monthly newspapers of the Jewish Cultural Association in Berlin and in the Berliner Der Morgen / Monatsschrift der Juden in Deutschland.

In 1937, Mala Laaser met the writer and lawyer Jacob Picard (1883-1967). They became engaged. The couple broke off their engagement and relationship, presumably because of the attempts to emigrate. Unlike her mother, Mala's application to emigrate was granted. On 23 August 1939, Laaser left Nazi Germany and followed her brother to Great Britain. Very little is known about her time in Great Britain. Further information could only be researched for the year 1946. In October of the same year, she married the Briton Henry James Moyes (1996-1965) in Hampstead, Greater London. Their daughter Joy was born in the same month. There is no information about Mala Laaser's work until her death. She died in Glasgow, Scotland, at the age of 42.

Thanks to the support of Anne Webber, Vice-Chair of the Commission for Looted Art in Europe, we were able to trace Mala's heir in England and get in touch with her.

The book comes from the purchase of ∼40,000 books made by the Berlin City Library in 1943, which were proven to have come from the last residences of deported Berlin Jews. The copy was entered in the so-called accession book ‘J’ under the serial number ‘1203’ on 27 November 1944. The book was intended for use and was given the shelfmark ‘Cm 5557’ on 25 September 1946.