ran it privately for almost 20 years before merging with the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial. Today, the memorial is one of Hamburg's most important commemorative sites.
In 2011, a new permanent exhibition opened in the Bullenhuser Damm Memorial. This bilingual exhibition is aimed particularly at young people, with a mission of ensuring that stories of the children are not forgotten. The exhibition therefore incorporates biographies within a central design element of a curved platform with 20 suitcases containing information on the lives of the children and their families. Photos solely displaying them during their period of experimentation represent the viewpoint of the perpetrators, who saw the children as objects. Instead, here we present the children in family photos not as victims, but as what they were: children.
The Story of Walter
Next to one symbolic suitcase in the exhibition, visitors can discover a stamp album which belonged to Walter Jungleib, one of the children murdered at Bullenhuser Damm. The story of this child, however, only emerged in 2015, when the memorial was finally able to locate Walter´s older sister, Grete Hamburg, née Jungleib. It was only then that Grete learned of her brother’s fate. In memoriam, she donated Walter’s stamp album to the site.
Walter was born on 12 August 1932 to a Jewish family in Hlohovec, Slovakia.
The family owned a jewellery business. Walter and Grete, only two years his senior, attended the local Jewish school. Walter was an avid stamp collector. With the onset of the war in Slovakia in 1942, life changed overnight for the Jungleib family. Forced to relocate several times, Grete, Walter and their family were finally arrested and deported to the Sered transit camp in 1944. Between 1941 and March 1945, 13,500 Jews were sent on deportation transports from Sered to Auschwitz.
The members of the Jungleib family were deported there in late October 1944. After a week in Auschwitz, the SS separated the women from the men and children. Along with 300 other women, Grete and her mother were taken to a Buchenwald satellite camp for women in Lippstadt, Westphalia. The father was transferred to the Mauthausen concentration camp and then to the Gusen satellite camp.