Rosenstraße: The Women Who Stood in the Street
Why is it significant?
Find the small park on Rosenstraße and the reddish stone figures standing in it: women huddled together, heads bowed, a man bent double, hands reaching out.
Key Facts
| Place | Rosenstraße: The Women Who Stood in the Street |
|---|---|
| Address | Rosenstraße, 10178 Berlin, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.52110, 13.40510 |
| Part of Walk | Golden Dome, Missing House: Jewish Berlin & the Scheunenviertel |
| Generated | Generated |
Find the small park on Rosenstraße and the reddish stone figures standing in it: women huddled together, heads bowed, a man bent double, hands reaching out. The sculptor Ingeborg Hunzinger called the work Block der Frauen, the block of women, and it was unveiled in 1995 to remember one of the most astonishing scenes of the Nazi years.
On the twenty-seventh of February 1943 the Gestapo began rounding up the last Jews still working in Berlin's factories. Most were sent straight to Auschwitz. But around two thousand people, most of them men married to non-Jewish women, were brought here, to a building of the Jewish community that stood on this street. Their families had no idea whether they would ever see them again.
And then the wives came. First a few, then hundreds, standing in the street in the late winter cold, day after day, calling for their husbands. Armed guards appeared; the women scattered when threatened, and came back. In the middle of the Reich capital, in 1943, unarmed German women protested openly against the regime, and they did not go home.
In early March most of the men were released, and some who had already been sent to Auschwitz were even brought back. Historians still argue about why. Some believe the regime had not yet planned to deport these men at all; others think Goebbels flinched at the sight of unrest in his own city. What nobody disputes is the courage it took to stand on these cobbles.
Just behind this park stood Berlin's first great synagogue, the Old Synagogue in Heidereutergasse, consecrated in 1714, wrecked in the war and never rebuilt. Read the information columns beside the park; they tell the protest's story in the words of those who were there. Then walk north across Hackescher Markt to Rosenthaler Straße, and slip into a narrow, scruffy courtyard right beside the polished Hackesche Höfe.