Armin (Josef/Jozef) Gerechter

Before 1933

Armin was born in the year his father went bankrupt. The family recovered, and Wilhelm built up the Kaufhaus Wilhelm Gerechter in Groß Räschen. On 1 July 1930 Armin and Herbert Bernhard, who was about to marry his sister Edith, took over the store together. It kept his father's name: Textilhaus Wilhelm Gerechter.

1933 – 1938

In February 1937 the local police counted the Jews of the district. There were five, and Armin was first on the list: "merchant in the textile trade".

1938 – 1945

On 10 November 1938 the police arrested Armin, with Herbert and the stocking merchant Kurt Mannheim. The shop was wrecked and Armin was beaten. He was taken to Sachsenhausen, where he was prisoner 13128. While he was held there, officials decided that the store would pass to a local merchant. He was released in December. In the spring of 1939 the family firm was struck from the register.

By May 1939 he was living in Berlin, at Choriner Straße 53, with Edith, Herbert, their daughter Ilse and Max Bernhard. In September he left for England, for Kitchener Camp in Kent, a camp for Jewish men let out of the concentration camps. That October a tribunal found him a refugee, not to be interned.

In 1940, with Britain at war, he was interned after all, as a German, and sent by ship to Canada. In March 1941, from Canada, he placed a notice in the refugees' paper in New York, searching for his cousin Vally Phillipp, née Krakauer, of Berlin. By late 1943 he was in Toronto, a roomer on Markham Street and a tailor at Tip Top Tailors.

After

He was naturalized in Canada on 21 December 1946. In Toronto he married Jean Sandberg. His nephew Kurt, his brother Erich's son, came to see the family in Toronto every so often. A photograph shows the two of them arm in arm in the snow, both smiling.

By 1954 he had a shop of his own again: Armin's Bargain House, textiles and dry goods, on Eglinton Avenue West. His daughter Valerie was born on 20 December 1954. Armin died of a heart attack on 28 August 1955 and is buried at Dawes Road Cemetery. His Hebrew name on the stone is Avraham Yosef ben R. Zev Wolf.

In 2011 a Stolperstein was laid for him in Großräschen, opposite the old store. It ends: "survived in Canada".