A MOTHER and her son had their home taken away from them after it was discovered to have been stolen by the Nazis.
Gabriele Lieske grew up in the Wandlitz house in Brandenberg, there she cared for her parents and raised her son Thomas.
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But now, at the age of 85, she has been told that the house no longer belongs to her or any member of her family, leaving her distraught, saying she would “rather die than move.”
The property has been ruled to belong to the Jewish Claims Convention, an organization formed in 1951 to help compensate victims of the Holocaust and the Nazis.
It was discovered that Lieske’s grandfather had purchased the house from a real estate agent in 1939.
But it had belonged to two Jewish women, Helene Lindenbaum and Alice Donat, who were forced to sell their property by the Nazis.
They planned to run a holiday home for Jewish children until they were deported by Adolf Hitler’s regime between 1943 and 1944, when they were brutally murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
There are no known descendants of either woman and the JCC filed a claim on the property in 2015 instead.
The group of 23 Jewish organizations is now the legal successor to Donat and Lindenbaum, leaving Gabriele and her 61-year-old son dismayed.
Gabriele told a local media outlet. image: “I have lived here for 82 years, I have taken care of my father and my sick mother. The house is my life.
“It’s like a nightmare. “I would rather die than move out of here.”
“We have nowhere to go, we have lost everything,” added his son.
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Before 2015, the JCC had filed other claims for the property to be returned, one in 1992 and another in 1998.
Thomas Lieske believes that if they had been aware of these attempts, he and his mother would not be trapped in the situation they are in now.
“We didn’t know anything about it. “Barnim’s office should have informed us that there were claims on the house,” he said.
“Then we could have at least bought it back for the then market value. That would have been around 400,000 Deutschmarks (£166,000).
“Now it is €1.5m (£1.2m). “We can’t do that.”
The family also noted that in 1994, the property was transferred from Luise Moegeling to her daughter Gabriele, two years after the first complaint was filed with the JCC.
“The office should have also informed us of the possible claims there. They didn’t,” Thomas said.
The Barnim district had the transfer deed notarized and nothing was said about other rights to the house.
But they will not be forced to abandon the property even though they no longer have the right to it.
A JCC spokesperson told the outlet that Gabriele has a “lifetime right of residence in the single-family home” offered by the organization during the conflict.
This “will continue to exist even after the property has been returned,” the spokesperson explained.
“The Claims Convention has committed to selling the returned assets to use the proceeds to support impoverished and sick survivors of the Shoah around the world.”
Despite this, Gabriele’s lawyer threatens to take the case to the Federal Constitutional Court, according to Bild.
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