Pankok Otto & Hulda

Pankok, Otto Pankok, Hulda Emonds, Joseph Hilde Stein was the daughter of a Jewish horse dealer. She attended drama school, where she met the non-Jewish painter Mathias Barz. The two fell in love and were wed in 1929, despite the strong opposition of both families to the mixed marriage. Barz’s art was soon declared by the Nazis as degenerate, and he was discriminated against because of his refusal to divorce his Jewish wife. Nevertheless, having a non-Jewish husband protected Hilde from deportation to the east until 1944. Throughout the years, the couple was helped by their friend, Otto Pankok, another painter, whose art had also been defined as degenerate and 56 of his pictures seized from museums, some of which were included in the infamous "Degenerate Art" exhibition in Munich in 1937. Following the attempted assassination of Hitler in July 1944, terror intensified and Jews in mixed marriages as well as their children were now in danger of being deported. Hilde and Mathias Barz left their home and went into hiding with Otto and Hulda Pankok. "We had been living for two years in Pesch at the home of a farmer, when the Barz couple surprised us," Hulda later recalled. "The house was on a hill, and no one ever came close except foxes and rabbits. One morning, as we were still in bed, we heard someone calling our names. When we looked out of the window we saw the Barz couple. They told us that they had been wandering from place to place until they finally said to each other: 'The Pankoks will not throw us out.'" The Barzes stayed at the Pankoks’ home for two months, hiding in the attic, until the house was billeted by German soldiers. One of the officers saw the window under the roof and wanted to check out the room. "It was clear that our protégés were in danger," said Hulda."That night we moved them to the home of Father Joseph Emonds in Kirchheim." Father Joseph Emonds was a renowned anti-Nazi. Although he was constantly under surveillance, he helped people who were persecuted by the regime. He immediately agreed to hide the Barzes, and even told his friends that he fed the hiding Jews from the leftovers of Waffen-SS officers who had set up their headquarters in the same house. Shortly before the arrival of the Allied forces, the Barzes moved to Düsseldorf, where they hid in the city's art museum. On April 30, 2013, Yad Vashem recognized Otto and Hulda Pankok and Father Joseph Emonds as Righteous Among the Nations.