Zander family
"Dr. Kurt Zander". Kurt Zander Collection, AR 4371, Box 1, folder 4. Photo Courtesy of Leo Baeck Institute New York.
"Kurt Zander with employees of the Berlin-Baghdad Railway". Kurt Zander Collection, AR 4371, Box 1, folder 4. Photo Courtesy of Leo Baeck Institute New York.
In 2021, a book from the Zander family's library could be returned.
The path of acquisition of the book (Adelheid Wette: Hänsel und Gretel : Märchenspiel in drei Bildern, ca. 1900) into the holdings of the Berlin City Library ("Berliner Stadtbibliothek", BStB) is unknown and could not be traced. It was identified in unprocessed stock of the BStB and contains no marks indicating intermediate owners.
The handwritten entry "Anatolische Bahn Geheimrath Zander Constantinopel" clearly identifies Johannes Kurt Zander as the previous owner. He was born in Stettin on 24 September 1860 as the son of Abraham Zander (1822-1892) and Clara Zander, née Prager (1836-1893). He studied law, moved to Berlin and started a family there with Gertrud Simon, who had been born there on August 9, 1871. In the course of his career, Kurt Zander was appointed Privy Councillor of Justice and was General Director of the Anatolian Railway Company from 1897 to 1905 and subsequently Director of Deutsche Bank. He died in Berlin on 22 March 1922. It can be assumed that the book was then owned by his wife or children.
Gertrud Zander was the daughter of Hedwig Louise Liebermann and the Berlin merchant Theodor Veit-Simon. She had five children with Kurt Zander: Clara, Käthe, Karl, Theodora and Ernst. They were all persecuted as Jewish in Nazi Germany. Part of the family escaped to the Netherlands, where Karl Zander had already been living for some time.
Gertrud Zander was interned in the Westerbork concentration camp in 1943 and later deported to the Sobibor extermination camp, where she was murdered. Her daughter Clara (1895-1943), her son Karl (1900-1943), his wife Anette, née Monasch (1908-1943), and their three children Hedwig (1931-1943), Robertine (1934-1943) and Frans Koert (1938-1943) were also murdered in Sobibor.
Born in Berlin on 31 May 1896, Käthe Zander was able to flee to Great Britain in 1939 and survived the Shoah. She later emigrated to the United States, where she lived until her death in 1984.
Theodora "Dodi" Zander was born in Berlin in 1904. She also escaped from Germany via Belgium to the United States. Dodi Zander died in New York on 22 April 1989.
The youngest child of the family was Ernst Konrad Heinrich Zander, born on 2 December 1908 in Berlin. Ernst Zander was already politically active in Berlin before 1933 and was deputy leader of the Charlottenburg resistance group of the Socialist Workers' Party ("Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei", SAP). His apartment at Reichsstr. 8 served as a meeting place, also for a group of the Socialist Youth Association ("Sozialistischer Jugendverband", SJV). Ernst Zander was arrested as early as 1933 and held for several days in the SA's Maikowski House. In one of the first mass trials against a party of the workers' movement, he was sentenced to two years in prison. After his imprisonment, he went into exile in Uruguay and survived the Shoah. He got married to Maria de las Nieves, together with whom he had two sons.