A number of photos were scattered throughout the box of “unidentified photographs” that, once I began to take them out, were clearly part of a set. They show a woman from girlhood through to late adulthood. Several of them are photos of her as a child either alone or with her parents. Her father is wearing an army uniform in several of the photos, and in one she has a younger brother. Some are marked on the back with European, specifically German-style handwritten cursive giving the same name again and again – “Hanna Apfel”. Disappearing down the rabbit hole of Ancestry, Holocaust records, and page after page of examples of German cursive script from the early 20th century, I eventually discovered who Hanna was and her link to Calderdale.
At first glance the girl appears to have been born in either 1919 or 1920. Some photos seem to give her age and the date they were taken. One appears to be her first day at school, wearing a straw hat and a little backpack, aged 6 – labelled “mein ersten Schulgang”, “my first schoolwalk” (presumably a different way of describing a first day at school). Another shows her stood next to a table with a toy cat on it, with the date “31 Juli 1924, 4 Jahre” – 31st July 1924, 4 years old. Many of the photos are labelled Bonn or are from a photographic studio located in Bonn.
Her father, as mentioned, wears an army uniform in the photos he appears in. One is a postcard of the family together and its postmark is 8.9.15 – 1915, as WW1 neared the end of its first year. One of him on horseback, unusually, has a simple caption in English on its back: “Father 1916”. But wait – if Hanna was born in 1920, how does that work? The answer is, she wasn’t. The later dates written in aren’t dates showing the year the photos were taken, but some other notation whose purpose is now lost.
Johanna Apfel – as she was registered at birth – was born on 2nd October 1911 in Mamburg, near Bonn. We know this because by 1939 she was in the UK, safe from what was ahead. She was living in Finchley and working as a domestic maid for Fritz (later styled as Frederick) and Else Dannenbaum, later Dannen. You can probably make an educated guess now as to why they had come to England from Germany…
That’s right – the Dannenbaums, and Johanna, were Jewish.
Johanna’s parents were Adolf Apfel and Gertrud Seligmann, both born in Bonn, and Johanna was their only child who we’ve been able to find a record for. In the family’s surviving vital records, their religion is given as “Israelitischer” – Israelite or Jew, in other words.
As mentioned before, one photo shows an older girl with a young boy but due to records being destroyed over time and during the war we cannot find information about him. At first I thought he might not have been Johanna’s brother, because one of the postcards is addressed to an Eva Seiburg with an address on the same street as Johanna’s. Eva was born the same year as Johanna and they must have been friends. But on closer inspection, the girl has a small mole on her cheek, and this matches the later photographs which are labelled with “Hanna” on the back.
How Johanna ended up working for the Dannenbaums is a mystery, but it was likely the key to her survival. Adolf died in September 1919 aged 39 while still serving in the German army. Gertrud disappears from the record entirely afterwards. Adolf had two sisters named Johanna and Jeanette who worked in Bonn as jam makers and confectioners, and Jeanette is listed amongst those who were killed at the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1944. Eva Seiburg’s mother Elly is also listed amongst the dead there.
Johanna and the Dannenbaums had to register as enemy aliens at the beginning of WW2 but were all granted an exemption from internment. Johanna’s future husband was not so lucky. Robert Grotte is hard to track down before 1939 when he appears in the 1939 Register living in Chingford and working as a shopkeeper. Robert was born in September 1904. His profession pre-escape from Germany was “analytical chemist” and he is noted down on the Register as an “anti-Hitler refugee”. His enemy alien records are missing and his later naturalisation record, as well as Johanna’s, is sealed until 2060. Robert is marked down in the 1939 Register as married but without his wife present with him – once more, we cannot work out who she was or what happened to her.
How either of them came to Calderdale after the war is a mystery, but Robert found work at a factory in Elland, and a Peter Grotte (possibly his brother?) joined him at this point. They began to rent part of Elland New Hall Farm, and by the time he and Johanna got married, they were both financially secure enough to purchase New Hall itself and live there. In the meantime Johanna and the Dannenbaums had done what many German immigrants and refugees did post-war and anglicised their names – Johanna, nicknamed Hanna, became Hannah, and Fritz and Else Dannenbaum became Frederick Ben and Else Dannen.
The most recent photo in this set shows two older people sat on a low wall, laughing. The back is simply marked “Frankfurt 1962”. I assumed at first glance that this was Johanna and Robert, and perhaps it is. Or is it Johanna and her brother, reunited? Sadly we will probably never know.
Robert passed away in 1965. Johanna stayed on in the Hall for a little while, but eventually sold it, as it had for the entirety of their marriage been a fascinating but expensive and time consuming restoration project. She herself died in 1975 in Leeds.
All this begs the enormous question of where these photographs came from. They were clearly precious to Johanna – perhaps some of the only photographs that she had of her family that she was able to bring to England with her when her employers took the decision to escape what they could see was coming. She and Robert had no children of their own and so these photos likely passed to the executors of her estate (such as with Sarah Hannah Wright’s from our last photograph blog post), or maybe even were found secreted somewhere at the Hall by later owners and given to the library. As it stands they’re all that is left of Johanna and her family, and maybe even of her friend Eva’s family. Some families who were killed in the Holocaust don’t even have this much left. If you know anything about these people please share it with us so we can update this post at a later date.
If you think you can solve a mystery from our Unidentified Photos box, please come in and have a look through it, and use our online resources to see what you can find. And of course let us know so we can properly catalogue them and maybe even bring the subjects back to life a little!
Calderdale Local Studies Library 