He did not survive his imprisonment. Walter remained in Auschwitz until his transport with the other 19 children to Neuengamme.
Grete and her mother were liberated in early April 1945, and Walter remained unknown to his family in the Neuengamme concentration camp. When the family’s search for Walter in the immediate aftermath of the war yielded no results, they assumed he had died in the death marches from Auschwitz in fall 1945. All information that Hamburg residents had as to one Bullenhuser Damm victim was that he was a twelve-year-old boy by the possible name of “W. Junglieb”.
In 2015, the wife of Yitzhak Reichenbaum, whose brother Eduard was also murdered on Bullenhuser Damm, was reviewing papers received from the Auschwitz Memorial on the Reichenbaum family. Among these notes was a transport list for the prisoner train from Auschwitz to Lippstadt. On this list, she not only discovered the name of her husband´s mother but also two women named Jungleib: Grete and her mother. Reichenbaum managed to contact the Jungleib family through the Yad Vashem website, and it soon became clear that Walter Jungleib was in fact “W. Junglieb”, whose full identity had been unclear for all those years. Grete visited Germany and the Bullenhuser Damm Memorial for the first time in 2015 and later brought with her a gift: her brother’s stamp album. The only remaining keepsake of her brother. She powerfully remarked while presenting the donation to the memorial, “it now belongs here”.
The Memorial Today
The Bullenhuser Damm exhibition tells a number of stories, including biographies of the murdered children and adults, information on their persecution and deportation, background on the medical experiments at the Neuengamme concentration camp, and the history of the building itself as a satellite camp of Neuengamme. The exhibition also details what occurred 20 April 1945, when the children, their four nurses, and up to 30 Soviet concentration camp prisoners were murdered en masse in the basement.
There is also documentation on the prosecution of the perpetrators, the commemoration of the victims after 1945 and the development of the memorial itself. The basement rooms in which the murders were committed have been left empty. Quotes taken from statements made by the perpetrators during their trials in 1946 are written on the walls, illustrating where the murders took place.
With its wealth of information in panels, documents, photographs and interviews, the exhibition is designed to encourage exploratory learning. Materials for further reading as well as audio and video interviews allow visitors to explore the history of the site in great depth. Visitors are also invited to participate, with the ability to plant roses in memory of the victims in the memorial's rose garden. Students can exhibit their own art projects on remembrance which they produce through project seminars at the memorial.
Currently a work by Daria Filippova is on display. She wants to express that a commemoration act should show that the tragedy of Bullenhuser Damm didn´t happen in vain but had an impact on the present: “Wandering among the images of the past, one is immersed in reflections on these events and then finds himself being an active participant of the "exhibition" (small mirrors), which means that he himself plays a significant role in the history as a whole and in commemoration of this particular tragedy. If noone remembers - the story is senseless. This art-object is to ask a person who he is and what his own history is, what he has done to prevent the cases of violence and to improve today´s world.”