39th Berlin Jewish Cultural Days
Late February 1943. In the heart of Nazi Berlin, hundreds of women gather in front of a building on Rosenstraße – visible, determined and vocal. Most of them are not Jewish. They want to bring back their Jewish husbands, fathers and relatives, who are being held there and are due to be deported. And they achieve something that seems almost unthinkable in the Nazi state: many of those detained are released.
Image gallery
Tuckermann, Anja, Sperber, Anja, Damals in der Rosenstraße, S. Fischer
Anja Tuckermann
How do you tell children about persecution, fear and courage? Anja Tuckermann has found a special way of doing so: drawing on historical sources and eyewitness accounts, she has crafted the story of the Gumpel family. Father Joachim is Jewish; mother Helga is not. Together with their children, Doris and Helmut, they try to maintain a sense of normality in their daily lives – yet the persecution is encroaching ever more deeply into their lives.
SS men march through the streets, Hitler Youth boys threaten the siblings on their way to school, and even at dinner, fear sits at the table with them. When Joachim is arrested and taken to Rosenstraße, Helga does not give up: she brings him bread, smuggles messages to him – and, together with other women, stands up against the regime’s tyranny.
Time and again, the book focuses on individual people – and in doing so makes history tangible. Anja Tuckermann tells not only of persecution, but also of solidarity and the question of when people find the courage to stand up for others. She says: “For children, there must always be a ‘here and now’ too; you cannot tell a purely historical story. And within that ‘here and now’, it must be shown that it is worth defending others and offering resistance.”
The book’s origins are also linked to Rosenstraße: when S. Fischer Verlag moved there in 2023, the exploration of the site’s history began. At the same time, the story traces back to Samuel Fischer, the Jewish founder of the publishing house and one of the most significant publishers of his time.
Anja Tuckermann, born in Berlin, works as an author, journalist and leader of writing workshops. In her multi-award-winning books, she repeatedly tells the stories of people whose experiences have long been overlooked – including the fate of the Sinti and Roma during the Nazi era.
Annabelle von Sperber studied illustration in Hamburg and has been working as a freelance illustrator since 2000. She lives in Berlin and the Black Forest.
- Interactive picture-book cinema for people aged ten and over
Additional information
Dates
November 2026
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