Felice Schragenheim

Felice Rahel Schragenheim (March 9, 1922, Berlin - December 31, 1944, Bergen, Germany) was a Jewish resistance fighter during World War II. She is known for her tragic love story with Lilly Wust and death during a march from Gross-Rosen concentration camp (today Poland) to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany or, not later than, March 1945 in Bergen-Belsen. The story of the relationship between Schragenheim and Wust is portrayed in the 1999 film Aimée & Jaguar, and in a book of the same name by Erica Fischer. It is also the subject of the 1997 documentary Love Story: Berlin 1942.

Because she was Jewish (and not because of her homosexual relationship with Lilly Wust), Schragenheim was deported from Berlin to KZ Theresienstadt (now Czech Republic) on September 8, 1944 by national-socialist Gestapo (transport nr. I/116). On October 9, 1944, she was deported from Theresienstadt to the extermination facility KZ Auschwitz Birkenau to be put to death (transport nr. Ep). As the gas chambers and crematoria were dismantled and blown up between November 1944 and January 1945, the mass extermination in Auschwitz came to an end, gradually. The inmates, also Felice Schragenheim, were taken to a death march to KZ Groß-Rosen, maybe later to a death march to KZ Bergen-Belsen. Date and place of her death are unknown. Officially, the date of her death was defined as December 31, 1944 by a Berlin court in 1948. Relatives set a memorial stone in Bergen-Belsen, naming “March 1945” as her death date.