Felka Platek (German of Polish-Jewish descent, 1899 - Auschwitz 1944) was born on this day.
"Still life with a fried egg and cheese", 1935, oil on canvas.
Felix Nussbaum House in the Osnabrück Museum Quarters.
Felka Platek was born in Warsaw and moved to Berlin in 1920s to study. She attended the Lewin-Funcke School in Charlottenburg. In the class of Ludwig Meidner, she met her future husband Felix Nussbaum. When Nussbaum won a scholarship to stay in the Villa Massimo in Rome, Platek moved there with him. The painter Hanns Hubertus Graf von Merveldt also stayed in the Villa. In May of 1933 an argument between him and Nussbaum ended in fisticuffs. Merveldt, Platek and Nussbaum were thereupon all expelled from the Villa Massimo.
Platek and Nussbaum spent one and a half years on the Italian Riviera. The ominous political developments prompted them to emigrate to the Belgium. They married in Brussels in 1937. Living conditions became more difficult for Platek and Nussbaum once the Nazis forced them to wear the Star of David on their clothes, and they were compelled to abandon their apartment in 1942. In late May 1943, Felka Platek and Nussbaum managed to find a basement apartment in which to hide, but they were discovered on 20 June 1944 and sent to the Mechelen transit camp. They were both murdered in Auschwitz.
Never Forget.
Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors
