Leopold Frankfurter

On 7 December 1938, shortly after Kristallnacht, the Belgian government gave permission for 250 Jewish children to be brought from Germany to Belgium. Sixteen-year-old Leopold Frankfurter was among them. In Brussels he was reunited with his mother, who had emigrated earlier. The Belgian authorities arrested him on 10 May 1940 as a ‘suspect’ and handed him over to the French administration, which interned him at Saint-Cyprien and later at Gurs. Leopold was placed in a Foreign Labour Group, which was used for forced labour in places like Le Barcarès and Montpellier. 

On 26 August 1942, Leopold Frankfurter (19) was deported from the Drancy assembly camp via Transport 24 to Auschwitz-Birkenau. He was ordered off the train at Cosel and once again put to work as a slave labourer. He survived several labour camps and also experienced the death march in early 1945 from Gleiwitz – an Auschwitz sub-camp – to Theresienstadt, where he died in cell 51 of the Gestapo prison known as the ‘Small Fortress’.