Alice Carlé (1902-1943)

(this text can also be heard in the audio clip)

Alice Carlé was born in Berlin on June 7, 1902 and lived at Weberstraße 19 (now Plansche Weydemeyerstraße) during her childhood. After leaving school, Alice trained as an office worker.

When the National Socialists came to power in 1933, life changed dramatically for Alice and her Jewish family. The regime’s anti-Semitic policies meant that the family came under increasing pressure. Around 1938, Alice, her parents and her older sister Charlotte were therefore forced to share a two-room apartment – a clear sign of the repression and disenfranchisement of Jewish citizens.

In the midst of these dark times, however, Alice also found love and hope. In 1938, she met Eva Siewert, a former chief announcer at Radio Luxembourg. Despite the threatening circumstances, the two women courageously pursued their relationship. They loved each other as women at a time when homosexuality was not only a social taboo, but also persecuted. Even though Paragraph 175 only applied to men, lesbian women had to suffer protective custody or other harassment by the criminal authorities.

From 1938, the two were a couple and Alice often spent the night in Eva’s apartment on Wittenbergplatz, where she felt safer than with her own family. Alice Carlé lived near Spittelmarkt around 1938, so they were able to visit each other by subway without having to change trains. Despite the dangers and social taboos, a deep relationship developed between the two women. Eva, who was considered “half-Jewish” according to Nazi categorization, offered Alice a place of refuge.

The two tried to obtain visas from all possible consulates, but just as an opportunity to leave for England presented itself, the Second World War began and their hopes were dashed. The two visit a fortune teller who predicts to Eva: “First you’ll get away.” Then she looked at Alice: “Then you’ll get away, very far away.” She paused […] “Then you’ll never see each other again.”

On August 12, 1942, Alice’s parents, Margarete and Nathan Moritz Carlé, were deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto and murdered shortly afterwards. Presumably, their daughters never found out. Barely three weeks after this deportation, Eva Siewert was sentenced. She was denounced and sentenced to nine months in prison for “subversion of military power”. This imprisonment had fatal consequences for Alice, who was now deprived of an important means of protection. Alice then tried to go into hiding with her sister Charlotte.

In prison, Alice had been able to communicate in code in the penultimate letter to Eva that they considered their home unsafe and had to leave. They now lived in hiding in the suburb of Kladow further away from Berlin as summer visitors

During this time, Alice and Charlotte were in contact with the resistance circle around the lawyer Franz Kaufmann. He helped persecuted Jews with false papers. Charlotte received a fake passport, and one was also being prepared for Alice.

Tragically, Alice and Charlotte were arrested by the Gestapo on August 27, 1943. Their address in Kladow had been found in Franz Kaufmann’s papers when his circle of helpers was uncovered.

Two weeks later, Alice and Charlotte Carlé were deported to Auschwitz on September 10, 1943, where the siblings were murdered.

Eva Siewert, who survived her prison sentence, created a literary memorial to her beloved Alice after the war. Her story “The Oracle” is a moving testimony to her love and loss. She recorded: “I often dreamt that Alice knocked on my door and asked me to hide her, as we had agreed. She was always on the run.” [….] “I wrote to Tel Aviv. The brother lived there, the only one of the family who had escaped abroad in 1934. We never received a reply. There was never a knock at my door. The oracle had been fulfilled.”

Today, four stumble stones in front of the house at Beuthstraße 10 in Berlin commemorates Alice Carlé and her family. The rediscovery of Eva and Alice’s story was carried out by historian Raimund Wolfert. In 2018, a digital memorial space was set up at eva-siewert.de, which pays tribute to their lives.