Interviews with Jewish East Germans and eyewitnesses from the Soviet Union
The lives of Jewish men and women in the GDR were, until recently, a little-explored aspect of East German history. As part of the ‘Jüdischer Kulturklub Ostberlin’ project run by the Institut für Neue Soziale Plastik, since 2023 eyewitnesses with Jewish family histories have been interviewed about their experiences and socialisation, about the politics of memory and anti-Semitism in the GDR, about the possibilities of everyday Jewish life, and about the tension between socialism and Judaism.
By the summer of 2025, a total of 12 interviews had been conducted; so far, just under half are available in half-hour edited versions.
In 2026, five interviews with eyewitnesses from the (post-)Soviet space were added as part of ‘Jüdische Ossis IV’. Taking the image of the ‘Moscow kitchen’ as a place of freedom within a repressive system as their starting point, they speak of spaces of freedom and repression, networks of solidarity and immigration. And of ‘Mischka’, a Jewish communist who had survived 20 years in the Gulag and in exile and turned her kitchen in Moscow into a meeting place for critical intellectuals. She is a unifying figure in most of the conversations.
INTERVIEWER (FILM INTERVIEWS): DR BETTINA LEDER CAMERA, EDITING: TOBIAS JALL
INTERVIEWER (AUDIO INTERVIEWS): CHRISTINA KETTERING
Overview of interview films
Ellen Händler
In the interview, she talks about her parents’ difficult survival in Great Britain, the close relationships within her family, and the contradictions of life in the GDR. Like many other Jewish citizens of the GDR, she understands her Judaism as a cultural affiliation and as a mission to engage in remembrance and anti-fascism.
Further Infos about Ellen Händler
Ellen Händler was born in East Berlin in 1948. Her mother, Hella, fled to Great Britain with her sister on a Kindertransport after Kristallnacht, where she met her future husband, Werner. The couple returned to Berlin, out of conviction that “the Nazis must not have succeeded in making Germany ‘free of Jews.’”
The past was always discussed openly in the family: Ellen Händler knew from a young age that almost all of her relatives had been murdered because they were Jews. Her parents were not religious, but they talked to their two daughters about Jewish traditions. At the age of 14, Ellen Händler visited Auschwitz with her father, searching for documents about his parents. In the late 1980s, she frequently accompanied her parents to events organized by the Jewish Cultural Association. The family members have always maintained very close relationships. Ellen Händler is the mother of two children and has four grandchildren.
After finishing school, she studied sociology and earned a doctorate. She then worked in the Office for Youth Affairs and was a specialist advisor for education in the Secretariat of the Council of Ministers of the GDR. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, she was one of the few employees who did not become unemployed. She was the first freely elected staff representative at the branch office of the Federal Chancellery and later a press spokesperson for a federal agency. Although her qualifications were recognized and she was eligible to work as a senior civil servant, she was only classified as a case worker.
Together with Uta Mitsching-Viertel, she wrote the books »Unerhörte Ostfrauen« (Unheard (of) women from the East) 2019, »Problem Zone Ostmann?« (Men from the East, a problem zone?) 2021, »Die DDR ist nachhal(l)tig» (Sustaining echoes of the GDR) 2024.
Since 1998, she has been the chairwoman of the Federation of Antifascists in Berlin-Treptow.
Eva Nickel
Today, she lives in Prenzlauer Berg, in the house where she grew up. Among other things, Eva Nickel offers guided tours of Jewish Berlin and visits schools to talk to children about the Nazi era.
Further Infos about Eva Nickel
Eva Nickel was born in 1948 in the Jewish Hospital in Wedding, in the French sector of Berlin, and grew up in the eastern part of the city.
Eva’s mother was the only member of her family to survive the Nazi era; her young daughters, Ruth and Gitti, were murdered in Auschwitz. Eva herself had been hidden by acquaintances and thus survived. A few years after the war, she married the son of one of her rescuers – Eva Nickel’s father.
Eva was raised by her (non-Jewish) father as a conscious Jew. He understood her birth, four years after the murder of her half-sisters and the Shoah, as a political calling. From the very beginning, she was immersed in Jewish life and grew up as part of the Jewish community.
After graduating from school, she initially trained as a costume designer in the costume workshops of East German television and later studied economics education. For over 20 years, she worked in vocational training for commercial and clerical apprentices.
Alongside her professional work, she volunteered to establish and lead a children’s group within the East Berlin Jewish community in the 1970s and 80s.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the loss of her job, she began working as a social worker with the Jewish Community of Berlin. She qualified as a social worker and supported many victims of Nazi persecution, many of whom she had known since childhood.
Even in retirement, she continues to support some of her former clients and remains a source of strength for them. Since 2023, she has volunteered with the Central Welfare Board of Jews in Germany (ZWST) on antisemitism prevention, conducting seminars and training sessions. She also advises theater groups preparing performances on this topic for schools and youth groups.
Leah Carola Czollek
Leah Carola Czollek talks about her relationship with her father and how she was raised to be a fighter. She speaks of the feeling of having grown up in a cemetery. She talks about antisemitism in the GDR and privileges, about the development of Jewish life in the 1980s and the possibility of experiencing Jewishness as something vibrant. She discusses how her experiences in the GDR and her Jewish background influence her political work, about institutionalized and instrumentalized remembrance in East and West, and her loneliness after October 7, 2023.
Further Infos about Leah Carola Czollek
Leah Carola Czollek was born in 1954 in East Berlin. She studied law at Humboldt University in Berlin. In 1989, after a five-year attempt, she managed to emigrate to West Germany, but because her degree was not recognized, she could not practice law. She completed a second degree in social pedagogy at the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences in 1994. She has since been active in adult education and also works as an author. In 2005, she co-founded the Institute for Social Justice and Radical Diversity with Gudrun Perko which they continue to direct together.
Her father, Walter Czollek – a Jewish communist – survived several concentration camps before being expelled from Germany. In Shanghai, he became the leader of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in China. He returned to Berlin in 1947. Later, he became the head of the publishing house Volk und Welt. There he met Leah Carola Czollek’s mother, Dr. Roswitha Czollek (née Kaminski), who at that time worked as an editor at a publishing house and later as a researcher at the Academy of Sciences of the GDR.
André Herzberg
André Herzberg recounts this inner conflict, family traumas, and unspoken issues. He speaks of missing kippot and improvised Jewish life, of the moving voice of Estrongo Nachama, and his own search for happiness. He explores rock music as a counter-model both to rigid socialism and to the sorrow of Jewish memory. And he tells of the search for, and eventual arrival at, his own Jewish identity.
Further Infos about André Herzberg
André Herzberg was born in East Berlin in 1955. His mother, Ursula Herzberg, was a public prosecutor in the GDR, and his father, Hans, was a journalist. They met while in exile in Britain, where they had fled to from the Nazis. In 1947, they returned to Berlin, first to West Berlin, then to the Soviet zone of occupation.
André Herzberg studied at School of Music Hanns Eisler; in 1981 he became the frontman of the band »Pankow«, one of the most successful rock bands in the GDR. His lyrics and stage performances repeatedly brought him into conflict with the authorities, resulting in broadcasts being canceled and album releases being delayed. In 1988, he played a concert with the band to raise funds for the reconstruction of the Neue Synagoge (New Synagogue) on Oranienburger Straße.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, André Herzberg continued to enjoy success as a solo musician and began writing.
Herzberg grew up primarily with his mother, as his parents divorced when he was young. Both parents were staunch communists, yet André Herzberg’s mother Ursula regularly took her son to the Rykestraße synagogue and tried to instill in him an awareness of his Jewish heritage. Her communist worldview and her experiences as a Jew repeatedly clashed.
Sandra Anusiewicz-Baer
In the interview, she talks about the only Jewish holiday camp in the GDR, her exploration of Judaism and the period of upheaval in Dresden following the collapse of the GDR.
Further Infos about Sandra Anusiewicz-Baer
Dr. Sandra Anusiewicz-Baer is an educational scientist specializing in Jewish education. Her research focuses on questions of Jewish identity, the content and aims of formal and informal Jewish education, and processes of socialization within and through Jewish educational institutions.
She grew up in Dresden with her paternal grandparents. They shared a large house with a garden. Her grandparents had survived National Socialism in exile in France and South America.
Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she went to the United States for a year of high school, where she met relatives from the Jewish side of her family. She remembers the period of political change above all as a time of new beginnings that, despite the growing threat posed by neo-Nazis, seemed full of promise to her.
From 1983 onwards, she spent almost every year as a child at the Jewish summer camp in Glowe, the only one of its kind in the GDR. Due to a lack of educational materials, literature, knowledge, and trained staff familiar with Jewish practice, it was more a space for children with similar family backgrounds than a distinctly Jewish environment. Nevertheless, alongside her experiences at home, those three weeks at summer camp shaped her lifelong engagement with Judaism.
Together with Lara Dämmig, she edited the book Jung und jüdisch in der DDR (Young and Jewish in the GDR) about the Jewish summer camp. In the book, second- and third-generation Jews recount their experiences of growing up in the GDR.
Coming from a mixed family, she had already wanted to formally convert to Judaism while still living in the GDR. The fall of the Berlin Wall meant that this did not happen at the time. After spending a year studying in Israel, she completed her conversion. In the film, she says that Judaism is something she had to work hard to make her own.
Overview of Audio Interviews
Alla Blatow
In the interview, Alla Blatow talks about secret late-night reading marathons and the circulation of samizdat literature in the Soviet Union, her emigration to Germany, and networks of solidarity in exile.
The interview is in German. At Alla Blatow’s request, her voice was re-recorded by Nina Heithausen.
Further Infos about Alla Blatow
Alla Blatow was born in 1953 in St. Petersburg, Russia (then Leningrad). In 1969, she began studying piano at the Mussorgsky Music Academy in St. Petersburg and later continued her studies at the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory. In 1977, she graduated as a concert pianist, chamber musician, accompanist, and piano teacher.
In 1980, Alla Blatow left the Soviet Union with her family and travelled via Vienna to West Germany, where she lived for many years in the Rhineland and the Ruhr region. From 1985 to 2000, she taught piano at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen-Duisburg. She subsequently headed the master class of the Lew Kopelew Forum in Cologne. Since 2003, she has been a lecturer and artistic director at the International Anton Rubinstein Academy for Piano and Chamber Music in Düsseldorf. She has given numerous master classes and workshops for young musicians, including outside Europe, served as a jury member for the Jugend musiziert competition, and initiated her own music projects.
She was also a prizewinner at the International Chamber Music Competition in Paris.
Alla Blatow now lives in Berlin. In the interview, she talks about growing up in a Jewish family of doctors in Leningrad, about antisemitism, and about the music academy as a place of greater freedom. She describes life in a kommunalka, a Soviet communal apartment, and later in the family’s own apartment. She also recounts secret late-night reading marathons and the circulation of samizdat literature, before reflecting on her emigration to Germany and the networks of solidarity she encountered in exile.
Maria Klassen
In the interview, Maria Klassen describes her work with Lew Kopelew in Cologne and the circle of exiles that included Alla Blatow, the Birger family, and Mischka Slavutzkaja. She talks about growing up in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, where her parents had been deported under Stalin as so-called “Russian Germans.”
The interview is in German.
Further Infos about Maria Klassen
Maria Klassen was born in 1958 in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, then part of the Soviet Union. In 1976, following the Ostverträge (Eastern Treaties) under Willy Brandt, she moved to West Germany as a person of German descent. She holds a degree in film and photographic engineering and worked as a freelance contributor for the German public broadcaster WDR. From 1989 to 1997, she worked as Lew Kopelew’s assistant and archivist, and from 2012 to 2024 as an archivist at the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen. She is a member of the Executive Board and Advisory Board of the Lew Kopelew Forum in Cologne.
Her parents were deported to Kazakhstan under Stalin as so-called “Russian Germans.” In the interview, she talks about the difficult living conditions there and the family’s long-awaited departure. She describes her work with Lew Kopelew in Cologne and the circle of exiles that included Alla Blatow, the Birger family, and Mischka Slavutzkaja.
Maria Birger
Maria Birger talks about growing up in a circle of critical artists and intellectuals, the role of women in Soviet dissident movements, and the possibilities for art under authoritarian regimes.
The interview is in German.
Further Infos about Maria Birger
Maria Birger, born in Moscow in 1983, is the daughter of the artist and dissident Boris Birger, with whom she studied art and art history for ten years.
After completing secondary school, she studied history, Slavic studies, and education in Cologne and is currently pursuing a doctorate on German-Soviet relations during the Cold War, with a focus on dissidence in the Soviet Union and political culture in West Germany.
She works as a programme officer for “Heinrich Böll – Life and Work” at the Heinrich Böll Foundation (Berlin/Cologne). She also serves on the Advisory Board of the Lew Kopelew Forum in Cologne and the Board of the Marion Dönhoff Foundation in Hamburg.
In the interview, she talks about her father’s life and work and his studio in Moscow, which was a place for “free people in an unfree country.” In 1990, the family left the Soviet Union and moved to Germany with the support of Heinrich Böll. The Birger family initially stayed at the Böll family home. Maria Birger talks about growing up among artists and intellectuals, the role of women in Soviet dissident movements, and the possibilities for art under authoritarian regimes.
Irina Scherbakowa
In the interview, Irina Scherbakowa talks about being Jewish in the Soviet Union and the myth of the “Moscow kitchen.” She discusses the significance of Gulag experiences within Soviet families, the process of coming to terms with this history, and the instrumentalization of history in present-day Russia.
The interview is in German.
Further Infos about Irina Scherbakowa
In the late 1970s, she began collecting oral history interviews with victims of Stalinism and former Gulag prisoners. From 1999 to 2022, she headed the educational programmes of the human rights organization Memorial in Moscow. Following its forced dissolution, she emigrated to Germany in 2022. Today, she is Chair of the Board of Zukunft Memorial e. V. in Berlin.
Publications (in German): Zerrissene Erinnerung (2010), Vaters Hände (2017), Erinnern ist Widerstand (2025), Der Schlüssel würde noch passen. Moskauer Erinnerungen (2025)
Awards and honours: Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2005); Marion Dönhoff Prize (2022); honorary doctorate from the University of Bern (2024)
In the interview, she talks about being Jewish in the Soviet Union and the myth of the “Moscow kitchen.” She discusses the significance of Gulag experiences within Soviet families, the process of coming to terms with this history, and the instrumentalization of history in present-day Russia.
Rene Böll
René Böll talks about his experiences during the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 and the many guests from the Soviet Union who stayed at his parents’ home, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lew Kopelew, and Mischka Slavutzkaja.
The interview is in German.
Further Infos about Rene Böll
René Böll was born in Cologne in 1948. He studied painting and printmaking, with a particular focus on lithography, in Cologne and Vienna. Around 1970, he began working with Chinese and Japanese ink.
Since 1971, his work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions at museums, art galleries, Goethe-Instituts, and galleries in Chile, China, Germany, Ecuador, France, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, and the United States. His works are held in public and private collections in Germany and abroad, including the Beijing Art Museum and the Ludwig Museum in Koblenz.
Alongside his work as an independent artist, he founded and directed Lamuv Verlag and served as an editor of the six-volume edition The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh.
Since 1988, he has worked full-time as an independent artist and has led symposia, workshops, and lectures on subjects including Chinese ink, colour, and painting techniques from the Middle Ages to the present day.
In October 2002, he was appointed honorary professor at Beijing Nationality University in China. Since February 2019, he has been a member of the Academy for East-West Cultural Dialogue (Akademie für west-östlichen Dialog der Kulturen e. V.).
He regularly leads seminars and is the author of numerous publications, articles, and catalogues.
In 1968, he travelled to Prague with his parents and witnessed the suppression of the Prague Spring. He documented the events with his camera and recounts his experiences in the interview. He also talks about the many guests from the Soviet Union who stayed at his parents’ home, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lew Kopelew, and Mischka Slavutzkaja.