Herbert Haas/Haasz

Herbert ancestry extends to the large Sinasohn family of Schönlanke, Posen. Born 9 March 1916 in Berlin, youngest son of Samuel and Selma Haasz, née Sinasohn, brother of Regina Schallamach, née Haasz, Ivan Johan (Hans), and Hilde (Muschi) Friedländer, née Haasz. As young teacher in a Jewish orphanage in Frankfurt am Main, in 1939 he began to secretly evacuate the orphanage’s girls and boys to Hachschara camps in the Netherlands with the aim to smuggle them into Palestine; (in 1933 a Dutch Hachschara organization had been set up by the Orthodox ‘Agedat Jisra’el’ movement near Enschede in Overijssel province, in the village of Twekkelo, at Strootsweg 460.
In July 1942 Herbert, and Eva Zimmer, whom he met at the Hachshara camp, were taken to Westerbork where the couple decided to get married and face death together; it is known that the wedding ceremony was performed by Rabbi Gerhard Frank. Eva voluntarily joined her husband on the transport to Auschwitz where she was murdered on arrival; Herbert Haas, kept alive as slave labourer for four months, perished on 31 January 1943. His parents and three siblings survived the Shoah in Shanghai.