Objekt des Monats
Jedes Objekt in der Sammlung des Deutschen Auswandererhauses erzählt eine ganz persönliche Auswanderungs- oder Einwanderungsgeschichte. In dieser Rubrik stellen wir Ihnen jeden Monat ein anderes Objekt vor – eine Fotografie, ein Dokument oder ein persönliches Erinnerungsstück.
February 2021
Children’s dress, 1952
on the occasion of the enactment of the regulation for the admission of Jewish contingent refugees in February 1991
© Collection Deutsches Auswandererhaus
Historical Context
In 1952, 62-year-old Tatjana Putowa (Putova) sewed a children’s dress for her five-year-old granddaughter Elena Fridrih from old fabrics and embroidered it. Born in 1946 in the Ukrainian city of Schitomyr, Elena grows up under difficult conditions in the post-war years. In addition to limited supplies, there is a complicated family history. Her maternal grandfather, Andrei (Andrej) Putow (Putov), a physicist, worked under German occupation and was arrested after the arrival of the Red Army. According to family lore, he was forced to work in a ‘Scharaschka’, a secret research facility in Leningrad, while in custody. Elena’s father Solomon Fridrih participated in the war as a military doctor for the Red Army from 1942 onwards. The dress has been kept as a family memento and was taken along during immigration to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1992.
Brief biography of Elena Fridrih
Elena (Olena) Fridrih (Friedrich) was born on June 3, 1946, in Schitomyr, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, as the daughter of Solomon Fridrih and Natalja Putowa. She studies in Kiev and subsequently works as a physics engineer. In 1992, she emigrates with her whole family from the now independent Ukraine to the Federal Republic of Germany. She cites fear of the consequences of the Chernobyl reactor disaster in April 1986 as the reason.
As the daughter of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother, Elena is eligible to enter Germany as a ‘Jewish contingent refugee’, but she is not considered a Jew according to Jewish religious law (Halacha). Because interfaith marriages were very common in the atheistic Soviet Union, many people who immigrated from post-Soviet countries as ‘contingent refugees’ find themselves in this situation.
In the Federal Republic, the Fridrihs initially live in Gelsenkirchen. Elena works as a caregiver for the elderly, and her husband, a doctor of physics, works as a taxi driver. Meanwhile, she has become a grandmother herself.
Significance of the object
The dress, which is now over half a century old, not only recalls the difficult post-war years. It has been preserved by the great-grandchildren of Tatjana Putowa as a generational family relic and was handed over to the German Emigration Center in 2016.
Do you also …
… have a story of emigration or immigration in your family to tell and would like to submit it along with the associated objects and documents to the German Emigration Center for its collection? Then please contact Dr. Tanja Fittkau at the phone number 0471 / 90 22 0 – 0 or by email at: t.fittkau@dah-bremerhaven.de
Archive: Previous objects of the month
Show all objectsDo You Also Have …
… a story of emigration or immigration in your family that you would like to share with the German Emigration Center together with the related objects and documents for its collection? Then please contact Dr. Tanja Fittkau by phone at +49 471 / 90 22 0 – 0
or by e-mail at: t.fittkau@dah-bremerhaven.de