Strindberg Friedrich & Utje

Strindberg-Wedekind, Friedrich Strindberg, Utje Pauselius, Felicia Dombrowski, Wanda Herbert Strauss, who was born in Würzburg in 1918, moved to Berlin in 1936 in order to study at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Higher Institute for the Scientific Study of Judaism). In Berlin, Strauss met his future wife, Lotte Schloss. In the ’30s, the Schloss family had moved to the city of Berlin from Wolfenbüttel, a small North German town which was almost completely Nazified. In keeping with the increasing persecution of the Jews, Strauss was put to work as a forced laborer in early 1942. On October 24, 1942 Strauss and his fiancée went underground after the Gestapo had tried to arrest Lotte at her apartment. The first help they received came from August Sapandowski*‚ who put the couple up for several weeks in his cellar. After that, Herbert and Lotte split up, each looking for a separate hiding place. Friedrich Strindberg and his wife Utje, Herbert’s next hosts, were already known to Strauss as neighbors of the Schloss family in Berlin’s Kladow neighborhood. Friedrich Strindberg-Wedekind, born in 1897, was the son of the German playwright and poet Frank Wedekind, worked as a correspondent for Swedish newspapers. As such he had good sources of information, and heard early on about the systematic extermination of the Jews. Strindberg and his wife provided Strauss with a small room in their house. He remained there from around December 1942 to the end of February 1943. For the next four weeks, Herbert hid with Felicia Pauselius, a woman aged 50 or so, to whom he was referred by Lotte’s friend Christel Simons*. Pauselius lived in a spacious apartment near the Tempelhof airport. Pauselius had let the neighbors assume that he was Felicia’s illegitimate son whom she had given away many years before. In May and June 1943, Herbert Strauss stayed with Wanda Dombrowski, whose Jewish husband had immigrated to Brazil as early as 1937. He and Lotte’s uncle wereold friends. Wanda had helped prepare forged ID papers for Herbert. He survived and in the 1980’s became director of the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin. On July 16, 2001, Yad Vashem recognized Friedrich and Utje Strindberg, Felicia Pauselius and Wanda Dombrowski as Righteous Among the Nations.