Julie Stark

Feb. 24, 2001

Dear Julie,

Now that you own the statue of the little dancer, I thought you would like to know more about its history.

I remember it from my grandmother’s Carolina Rosenfelder’s house.  I remember sitting on a little stool next to her when I was 7 years old in Munich, Germany [1930]. As she reviewed the correctness of my knitting, I saw the little statue out of the corner of my eyes.  My grandmother was a very rigid, proud and strict lady.  I usually felt uncomfortable in her presence.  Her house was dark with all the shades drawn, but elegant.

The only other memorable encounter with her was when my mother, Oma Klara, and I tried to convince her to go to America with us in 1939.  She absolutely refused.  She wanted to be buried next to her husband in Germany.  She never was.  She was deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp and perished there, along with her brother, Max.

[Carolina was deported sometime between 1939 and 1942.…There is some written correspondence between Klara…now in America and her mother, Carolina, in ‘39-‘40. Nothing after that.]

I did not realize how much she must have suffered, until Oma Klara told me the story of the little dancer through tears and sobs.

[After the war was over, Klara and her husband Herman went back to Germany regularly…at first, working to get restitution for lost monies and items from the German government].  Because of their affinity to their homeland, they continued going back to Munich every summer.  Here is what happened on one of those trips.]

A woman came to see Oma Klara in the Hotel Bayrischer Hof in Munich late at night in the late 1960’s. 

[This was the finest hotel in Munich, and people in the city watched carefully who came and went from there.  It’s possible the woman heard through word of mouth that the Starks were there.]

The woman had knocked on her door very gingerly.  She did not want to come into the room.  She wore an apron, wrapped around her waist, and plain clothing.

“Are you Mrs. Stark?” she asked.  “Daughter of Mrs. Rosenfelder?”

When Oma agreed, she unwrapped her apron, brought out the dancer statue, and said,

“This belongs to you.  Your mother gave it to me in exchange for a loaf of bread.  I really told her I did not want to take it.” With this she disappeared and left Oma Klara standing there holding the dancer.

I know you will take good care of it and hand it from generation to generation as part of the Stark Rosenfelder history.

Love,

Aunt Lilo