“The woman with the big heart” is how Hava Warburg was known to many people in her hometown of Hamburg. Born in 1912, she was the second of three daughters in an affluent family. Although her parents were non-practicing Jews and well-integrated in German society, they were connected to tradition and were meticulous contributors to the community. The family lived in a spacious house and also owned a vacation home outside the city.
Hava’s father, Fritz, was a banker; her mother Anna was a kindergarten teacher – a career Hava also chose to follow. Hava stayed in close contact with her extended family: her father’s parents, who also lived in Hamburg; and her mother’s parents, who lived in Sweden and would come to visit every summer.
The Nazi Party’s rise to power did not initially affect the Warburgs. Fritz believed that the troubles would pass, and dismissed his non-Jewish friends’ recommendations to leave Germany. Yet later, during the process of Aryanization, the bank that the Warburgs owned was transferred to the sole hands of their German partner.
From 1933-1938, Hava established a daycare center in Hamburg for Jewish children whose families had fallen on hard times. A total of some 250 children passed through the center, whose expenses were covered by Hava’s parents. Arriving after school, the children would eat lunch, do homework and then play. To help enhance their knowledge, Hava studied more about Jewish history and culture with a religious instructor, and after meeting with emissaries from Eretz Israel, she began to be influenced by Zionism. One of the emissaries was Naphtali Unger, who eventually became Hava’s husband.
Because of the anti-Jewish laws that prevailed in Germany at the time, the daycare staff could not take the children on field trips in the city. In order to let the children enjoy some outdoor recreation, Hava and her family organized summer camps outside Germany. The camps were funded by Hava’s family and other donations, and they met three times in Denmark and once in the Netherlands. Hava later recounted:
“For the children, this was a very big deal. We were free there.”
In September 1938, Hava moved from Germany to Stockholm, Sweden. Her parents followed in May 1939, later joined by her younger sister, Charlotte. Ingrid, her older sister, had moved earlier to the United States. Hava herself had intended to spend a short while in Sweden, a waystation before immigrating to Eretz Israel, but after the Kristallnacht pogrom, she made a brave decision. In a letter that former daycare children sent to Hava for her 90th birthday, they wrote:
“As the situation of the Jews in Germany grew more and more perilous, Eva (Hava) Warburg courageously intervened. After tough negotiations, she managed to get 500 Jewish children permission to leave Germany and placed them with Swedish families. Many of these children never saw their parents again. For many years, Eva Warburg remained a substitute mother in a foreign country.”
Hava herself recalled how, together with the Jewish community in Sweden, she brought children from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, and divided them up among Jewish families whenever possible, although some went to live in Christian homes. “Two groups of Youth Aliya came too… We set up facilities for these children. We rented a house, and the children worked for farmers who lived in the area. It was real Hachshara [agricultural training]… I was very involved. We had a smaller place for the religious children. We had a total of five homes for children who didn’t have families who could take them in.”
Although Hava participated in rescuing and raising the children, most of her work was in the organizational sphere, and by June 1941 she had managed to secure immigration visas for many young boys and girls to Eretz Israel. Hava was also involved in the rescue of more than 200 Jews from Denmark. She raised money in Sweden and helped buy a small fishing boat that sailed back and forth, transferring Jews fleeing Nazi-occupied Denmark to Sweden.
Throughout the war years, Hava maintained correspondence with her future husband, who had been serving in the Jewish Brigade since 1944. They were finally reunited in Israel a decade after having parted, and they married three months later. As a young mother, Hava continued her work in education and childcare in Israel. For years she stayed in contact with the children of the daycare center in Hamburg as well as with those she managed to bring to Sweden, some of them until the day she died.
When representatives of Yad Vashem's "Gathering the Fragments" campaign visited her at her home in Rehovot, Hava gave them photographs, documents and letters for posterity. The items she gave included a list of names of the children who were transferred to Sweden that also documented the fate of their parents; letters and drawings prepared by the children; photographs taken at the centers in Hamburg and in Sweden; and her own family photographs. Hava passed away in November 2016 at the age of 104.
"Thank you for the excellent documentation you prepared about our mother," wrote her children Gabi Unger and Dvora Pur in a recent email to Yad Vashem.
"We have no doubt that she would have been so happy to see her story publicized, but sadly she passed away just a few days before this occurred. Your project will, on top of everything, become part of our family lore about our mother, her unique personality and her unusual life path."
As of January 2019, 12,600 people have donated some 284,400 items, including 166,800 documents108,000 photographs, 5,000 artifacts, 753 works of art and 191 original films to the “Gathering the Fragments” campaign. Representatives of Yad Vashem visit Holocaust survivors or their family members in their homes, in addition to holding collection days in centers closest to their place of residence, in order to gather Holocaust-era personal items. To schedule a meeting in Israel: +972-2-644-3888 or collect@yadvashem.org.il
Yad Vashem runs the “Gathering the Fragments” campaign with the support of Israel’s Ministry of Jerusalem and Heritage.
Representatives of Yad Vashem visit Holocaust survivors or their family members in their homes, in addition to holding collection days in centers closest to their place of residence in order to gather Holocaust-era personal items. To schedule a meeting in Israel: +972-2-644-3888 or collect@yadvashem.org.il.
This article originally appeared in the "Yad Vashem Jerusalem Magazine," volume 84.
