Brigitte Jacobsberg. Collection

Hanna Brigitta alias Brigitte Jacobsberg was born in Aachen, Germany, on 26 April 1925 as the daughter of cloth manufacturer Ernst Jacobsberg (born on 26 January 1879 in Aachen, Germany) and his wife Margarete Dannenbaum (born on 27 November 1889 in Krefeld, Germany). Brigitte had an older sister named Dorothée, born in 1913, and an older brother named Franz, born in 1923. Franz was sent off to boarding school in England in 1936 and survived the war there. Brigitte spent her childhood years in Haus Birke in the Raerener Strasse 105 in Aachen. After finishing Montessori school in 1936, she became a student at the catholic St. Ursula Gymnasium. However, the anti-Jewish laws in Nazi-Germany forced the Jacobsberg family more and more into social isolation until after Kristallnacht Brigitte could no longer attend her catholic school. Her parents then decided to flee Germany. Ernst Jacobsberg was smuggled across the German-Belgian border to Vaals by a business acquaintance in November 1938 and travelled from there to Brussels. On 10 December 1938, Brigitte arrived in Belgium via a Kindertransport. Her mother Margarete followed in January 1939. The Jacobsberg family tried to build a normal life in Belgium. When Nazi-Germany invaded Belgium on 10 May 1940, they had made home at Rue Souveraine 12 in Ixelles, Brussels. However, Ernst was arrested – as were thousands of recently arrived Germans and Austrians – by the Belgian authorities and deported to southern France as a ‘suspect’. Ernst would be able to escape and survived the war in Switzerland. Margarete and Brigitte who were left behind in Brussels obeyed the anti-Jewish decrees. Both women registered in the municipal Jewish Register, had their ID stamped with the mark “Jood-Juif” and became members of the Association of Jews in Belgium. When Brigitte was expelled from her non-Jewish school in Brussels, she enrolled in the Jewish Athenaeum. In August 1942, Brigitte applied for a job at the Jewish children’s home in Wezembeek-Oppem, led by Marie Albert-Blum under the supervision of the Association of Jews in Belgium. She was hired and moved from Ixelles to Wezembeek on 29 August 1942, where she started working as one of the caretakers. Brigitte got lucky: when the orphanage was raided by the Nazis on 30 October 1942, she was not there. After the children and some of the caretakers were released from the Dossin barracks and were allowed to return to Wezembeek-Oppem, Brigitte re-joined them. For safety, however, she obtained false papers on the name of Brigitte Leclerq which she could use in case of emergency. Brigitte thus survived the war, and was reunited with her mother Margarete Dannenbaum who had moved around Brussels to avoid arrest. After the war, Brigitte studied chemistry at the Université libre de Bruxelles. She became a doctor and a succesful laboratory technicien, specialising in palm tree oil. In 2018 she relocated to Germany, where she passed away on 16 September 2019.

Brigitte Jacobsberg donated the original items in this collection to Kazerne Dossin in 2019, with the help of her friend Annie Sliwka.

Brigitte Jacobsberg, 2019