Fromms: How Julis Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis (5 page)

By the 1880s, the Jews constituted over half of Konin’s population. They had great difficulty finding work to keep them afloat, so an increasing number of them moved westward. For many of the Jewish emigrants, the desire for a better and more prosperous life meant relocating to Germany. Baruch and Sara Fromm and their children joined the ranks of Jews heading to Berlin. A later family story had the parents fleeing pogroms in Konin, but this appears unlikely in light of the information contained in Theo Richmond’s thorough and affectionate chronicle of this community,
Konin: A Quest
. Richmond’s meticulous research reveals that while many of the Christians in Konin—both Catholic Poles and Protestant Germans—were united in their anti-Semitism and ranted about “the dirty Jews,” there was no systematic violence here in the late nineteenth century. Notwithstanding their religious and linguistic differences, the people of Konin lived in reasonably peaceful coexistence.

In 1893, the Fromms left their homeland. Baruch looked forward to the prospect of a decent life and better opportunities for his children. The economic vitality of the rapidly expanding city of Berlin became their beacon of hope. A community of Eastern European Jewish immigrants was already well established there, thus paving the way for the fresh start they were seeking. Germany offered the Jewish immigrants a measure of legal security, freedom of movement, and liberty to choose their own profession, all of which seemed idyllic in comparison with tsarist Russia.

Mulackstrasse 9, ground floor, was the first German address recorded for Baruch Fromm. It is listed in the 1894 edition of the
Address Book for Berlin and Its Suburbs
. The family of seven appears to have shared a single room in this area of Berlin, which was notorious for its criminality. Mulackstrasse runs through the Scheunenviertel area, situated northwest of Alexanderplatz. This quarter, with its dilapidated houses and narrow streets, was the first destination for most Jews who had immigrated from the east. Rents were low. Old buildings just two or three stories high stood adjacent to stables and ramshackle sheds. In many ways, this neighborhood resembled the homelands these newcomers had just left. In the late nineteenth century, investors avoided the area. Elsewhere, they were constructing the five-story tenements that would come to typify Berlin. These buildings were shooting up throughout the city—everywhere, that is, but here.

“Stores with Hebrew signs and the oddest names instantly reveal the foreign nature of the area. In the summer there is a lively bustle of the sort you would find at an open market in Galicia or Poland,” wrote the novelist Adolf Sommerfeld in describing the Scheunenviertel. Immigrants like the Fromms were not responsible for giving this neighborhood its bad reputation. The crowd that dragged the area down consisted of “felons and prostitutes and their work-averse hangers-on living here, as parasites of the nonviolent Eastern European Jews.” The Mulackritze Pub became a favorite haunt for the Berlin underworld. It attracted criminals, whores, hustlers, alcoholics, and stool pigeons. Two gangs of ex-convicts, Immertreu (ever-devoted) and Felsenfest (solid as a rock), were among the regulars. A small brothel in the attic, furnished with several cots, turned a brisk business.
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After a year, the Fromms found a new place to live, just a few hundred yards down the street, at Kleine Rosenthaler Strasse 12. Soon thereafter they moved about a hundred yards south, to Steinstrasse 24, and then to Gormannstrasse 21. Most likely they did not have much in the way of personal belongings to move.
The buildings on Kleine Rosenthaler Strasse and Steinstrasse are long since gone, as is the house at Mulackstrasse 9, which is now the site of a pristine playground. However, Gormannstrasse 21 still conveys a sense of how people lived in the Scheunenviertel at that time. This three-story house with a converted attic has a steep staircase leading upstairs from the courtyard entrance. The staircase is too narrow to accommodate two people at a time. On each floor a dark hallway leads to four small apartments and a shared toilet. When the Fromms moved onto Gormannstrasse, there were twenty-three tenants listed in the address book for this building. The men worked as masons, carriage drivers, sign painters, tailors, glove makers, and waiters.

At some point Baruch Fromm changed his Hebrew first name to Bernhard. His wife, Sara Rifka, became Regina; Szlama, the eldest son, went by Salomon. The second-eldest, Israel, opted for Julius; his sister Esther was now called Else; and Mosziek (Moses) became Max.

Bernhard Fromm found work selling cigarettes. In the address book entry for 1894, he listed himself as a “cigarette dealer,” and a year later as a “cigarette manufacturer.” This new branch of industry—the cigarette as a cigar for the masses—had been initiated by Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Klara Eschelbacher described the circumstances that resulted in their interest in the cigarette business in her 1920 dissertation “The Eastern European Jewish Immigrant Population of the City of Berlin”: “At that time Russian-Polish Jews, who had brought little more than their manual dexterity, tried to earn a living by rolling cigarettes during the day and selling them one by one in cafés at night.” The author of this dissertation was seeking to establish the extent to which Eastern European Jews aimed to integrate into mainstream society and advance their position in Berlin, or, in her words, “whether and how Eastern European Jews were able to settle in and adapt here under normal circumstances.”

In 1894 the Tobacco Professional Association in Berlin comprised twenty-one cigarette factories with 111 workers, plus approximately seven hundred family businesses making cigarettes for the local market. The Fromms had one of the latter businesses. The tobacco products were made by hand; blending the tobacco and rolling it into the cigarette papers required skill. This line of work lent itself to impoverished immigrants, because it required virtually no start-up capital. Paper that cost twenty pfennigs and tobacco ninety-five pfennigs would yield about a thousand cigarettes.

This cottage industry enabled Jews to observe the Sabbath. But “the greatest benefit,” according to Eschelbacher, “was the prospect of autonomy it offered.” “With a wife and children pitching in, cigarettes were often rolled until two in the morning. A deft worker with several older children sometimes reached an output of as many as 3,000 cigarettes.”
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Bernhard Fromm began by selling cigarettes for other companies, then manufactured and sold the product himself. Naturally the whole family had to help out.

Bernhard Fromm died on June 18, 1898, at the age of only forty-two, quite possibly as a direct result of working under poor conditions, inhaling tobacco particles, and living in wretched housing.

At the time of Bernhard’s death, the Fromms had been living in Berlin for five years, and the widow and her children found themselves in desperate straits. The family lacked a breadwinner, but fortunately Gormannstrasse had a cooking school belonging to the Jewish community that supplied inexpensive food to the needy. Moreover, Regina Fromm was in the third trimester of her latest pregnancy. At the end of her rope, she felt she had no choice but to place her youngest sons, Siegmund and Alexander, in the Baruch-Auerbach Orphans Educational Institute at Schönhauser Allee 162. In July 1898, just one month after the death of her husband, she
gave birth to her sixth son, and named him Bernhard in memory of her deceased husband.

Fromm family, ca. 1904; standing from left: Max, Else, Siegmund, Helene
,
Julius; seated from left: Alexander, Regina (mother), Bernhard

Since his older brother, Salomon, had emigrated to London, and remained there for several years, fifteen-year-old Julius had to take care of his mother and siblings. The family continued making cigarettes at home—for the years 1899 to 1907, “R[egina] Fromm, W[i]d[ow]” was listed in the address book as
Cigarettenmanu
. Later on, Julius became an employee of Josetti Cigarettes, where he quickly worked his way up in the business. A photograph taken circa 1904 shows Regina Fromm with seven of her children in festive outfits and earnest expressions.

When Julius started his own family in 1907, at the age of twenty-four, he and his wife and their newborn son (whom they had named Max, like many assimilationist Jews of the time) moved to the nearby Bötzow area in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin, which had fairly decent Wilhelmine-style tenements.
His mother and younger siblings soon moved into a neighboring apartment. They were now living at Allensteiner Strasse 40. The street has since been renamed Liselotte Hermann Strasse in honor of a communist student executed in 1938. Their neighbors included a postal worker, a jeweler, and a furrier. The Fromms were coming up in the world.

On left: Salomon Fromm, Julius’s older brother, ca. 1907
On right: Helene Fromm, Julius’s younger sister, ca. 1910

Julius’s father had lived to the age of forty-two. His mother passed away when she was fifty-two, on July 13, 1911. Their unadorned double tombstone, at the Jewish cemetery in Berlin-Weissensee, carries this inscription: “Here lie our dearly beloved parents. In their unselfish love for their children, they passed away far too soon.” Klara Eschelbacher observed that “Eastern European Jews who were willing and able to work, even when they had virtually nothing upon entering the country, were able to save up money relatively quickly by living incredibly frugally.” Scrimping and
saving opened up new opportunities for “Eastern European Jews … to carve out better futures for themselves and especially for their children. In pursuit of this goal, they are willing to go hungry and live a miserable life.”