The Rappoport house

This is the house of my maternal grandparents in Barmen. The photo was taken in the 1910s. They had a double-storied villa, they were wealthy. On the ground floor there was the office, on the first floor the entertainment rooms, the music room and the huge dining room. So they had a really good living. The dining room was very nice and elegant. Above it, on the second floor there were the bedrooms, the living rooms and there was the attic, where we had a small room where we could play. We could do anything, there could be chaos, nobody heard it. There was also a maid's room in the house. Behind the house there was a church, behind the church there was a street, and I saw marches on that street several times. This was already the Hitlerjugend, only I didn't know it. The house had a tiny little garden. In the middle of the garden there was a cherry tree. The cherries that grew on this cherry tree were as sour as vinegar, we couldn't eat them, and I felt insulted, that the tree was there for nothing, because we couldn't eat its cherries. Inside the patio there were all kinds of patterns painted here and there on the wall, which a patient of my grandfather's had painted in gratitude for the treatment because he didn't have money to pay for it. There were two domestic servants there, too. A maid and a cook. Cooks at that time didn't take jobs like this, they rather worked in restaurants. But my grandparents had a cook; my grandmother didn't do any housework.

Photos from this interviewee