Life and Work of Curt Bloch

Life Before Hiding

Curt Bloch was born in Dortmund in 1908 to Paula and Siegfried Bloch. His sisters Erna and Helene followed in 1912 and 1923. His father had a delicatessen on Reinoldistrasse in the center of Dortmund that also sold kosher foodstuffs. After graduating from high school, Bloch studied law in Bonn, Freiburg, and Berlin and earned his doctorate at the University of Erlangen. This was followed by legal clerkships in Lünen, Cologne, and Dortmund. In April 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service ruled out a future for Bloch as a lawyer in Germany. In addition, the politically leftist Bloch was personally threatened, whereupon he fled to the Netherlands, settling first in Amsterdam. After engaging in various activities, among them writing for a German-language exile newspaper—Bloch had previously penned articles for the Dortmunder General-Anzeiger—he was employed in 1935 as a salesman at the Persian carpet dealer E. Perez in The Hague. There he was joined by his mother Paula and younger sister Helene in the spring of 1939, after antisemitic smears and the forced closure of the family business led them to flee Germany.

On May 10, 1940, the Germans invaded and occupied the Netherlands. Only four months later, the Blochs had to leave The Hague after non-Dutch Jews were forbidden to live in towns along the coast. The family moved to the eastern city of Enschede on the German border, where Bloch continued to work for E. Perez at their branch in the city until October 1941. Thereafter he was able to sell carpets and other art works independently and thus provide for his mother and youngest sister. In December 1941, his sister Erna and Max Levy, whom she had married in 1935, were deported from Düsseldorf to Riga.

Het Onderwater-Cabaret and Secret Service

The title Het Onderwater-Cabaret appears first in a booklet written for and sent to Karola on the occasion of her twenty-third birthday on August 14, 1943: Coba’s Verjaardags-Cabaret (Coba’s Birthday Cabaret), a festive presentation of the Onderwater-Cabaret. On the following day, August 15, Bloch produced “A Special edition of the ‘Onder Water Cabaret’ instead of a long letter,” with the title Secret Service. Just one week later, the first issue of Het Onderwater-Cabaret proper “appeared.”

For the next seven months, Bloch worked simultaneously on Het Onderwater-Cabaret and Secret Service, each produced once a week. Both had the same format (13,5 x 10,5 cm) and the covers of both were adorned with photomontages and collages that Bloch made using materials from newspapers and magazines available to him. Secret Service comprised almost exclusively love poems, written mostly in German and very often in an endearingly amusing style, whereas the verses of Het Onderwater-Cabaret were primarily political satire and in the first four months were composed mainly in Dutch. While the satirical poems were known to and shared with the Mennekens, Bruno Löwenberg, and other friends and visitors to the house, the love poems remained eponymously secret, and Curt went to great lengths to keep them so. Both “periodicals,” as Bloch referred to them later, were sent in sealed letters via different messengers to Karola, the only recipient of Secret Service and the primary reader of Het Onderwater-Cabaret. In a letter written in October 1943, Bloch explained the purpose of the latter series:

“If you contribute to making the German evil spirit ridiculous—ridicule kills!—then you not only help the German people, but at the same time work in the interest of Europe and the world.”

In the same letter, he expressed the hope that

“through my poems I might play an educational role, especially in the spiritual and intellectual construction of a new Germany.”

After Liberation

The freedom that Curt Bloch had so longed for was unfortunately not immediately accompanied by happiness. Shortly after the end of the war, he received the devastating confirmation that his mother and sisters had not survived. Paula and Helene Bloch, together with Berthold and Elise Löwenberg, were deported from Westerbork to Sobibor and murdered upon arrival there on May 21, 1943. Curt’s sister Erna Levy perished in Stutthof in fall 1944. A rekindling of the romance with Karola Wolf did not materialize.

Regrettably, Bloch apparently did not pursue any further literary ambitions. Although he had apparentely given some well-received readings of his poems in the weeks after liberation, his hope that his writings might be used for reeducation in Germany was not realized, something he attributed to his not having had the necessary connections. Added to this was the fact that he was obligated to provide proof of his antifascist sentiments, as testified by several letters of support written by Dutch citizens, among them Pastor Leendert Overduin— a situation that must have been particularly demoralizing for someone like Bloch who had so fiercely written against the Nazi murderers and their accomplices.

After remaining for some months in Borne and Enschede, Bloch moved to Amsterdam in the first few weeks of 1946 and worked for a time in a law office. In the spring of that year, he met Ruth Kan, who like him was born in Dortmund, in 1925, and whom had known his sister Helene. The couple married in July. Ruth had moved to Amsterdam with her parents and brother in 1939, her father being Dutch, but she too was the only one of her family to survive. Benjamin and Bertha Kan were murdered in Sobibor in May 1943, and Heinz Kan a year later in Auschwitz. Ruth herself had been brought in June 1943 to the Vught concentration camp in Noord-Brabant, where she carried out forced labor for the Philips company. She was deported to Auschwitz a year later, but after one week was taken to a camp in Reichenbach, south of today’s Wrocław. She later survived various camps, marches, and transports and was liberated in Denmark at the beginning of May 1945.

The Blochs’ first child, Stephen, was born in May 1947. One year later, in April 1948, the family emigrated to the United States and settled in New York, where their daughter Simone was born in 1959. Curt Bloch held various jobs until the late 1950s, when he established his own antique store called Continental Antiques Corporation. He died at the age of sixty-six on February 14, 1975. Before leaving the Netherlands, Curt Bloch had the ninety-five issues of Het Onderwater-Cabaret bound in four volumes, and his other writings in a fifth. In January 2023, all five volumes came to the Jewish Museum Berlin, where all the individual issues and works were carefully separated and restored in preparation for display. Through the exhibition, publications, and the presentation of the entire OWC online, Bloch’s verses, known to only a small number of people at the time of their composition, will now find the recognition and appreciation they so greatly deserve. And in today’s world, in which war, disinformation, discrimination, exclusion, and persecution are widespread, they remain highly pertinent.

We extend our sincere thanks to Simone Bloch for her trust in the Jewish Museum Berlin and for the close cooperation; to Robert Saunders, son of Karola Saunders née Wolf, for his donation of the thirty-six surviving issues of Secret Service and other writings and letters of Curt Bloch to his mother, as well as further correspondence and photographs; to Tamara Goldstoff-Loewenberg and Marcel Loewenberg for materials pertaining to their father Bruno Löwenberg, and to Lide Schattenkerk née Hulshoff, for her donation of items made by Curt Bloch for her family. Last not least, many thanks to Gerard Groeneveld for the helpful information he provided.

Since 2001, Aubrey Pomerance has been Head of Archives at the Jewish Museum Berlin and of branches of the archives of Leo Baeck Institute New York and of the Wiener Holocaust Library at the museum. Together with Ulrike Kuschel, he is the curator of the exhibition "My Verses are Like Dynamite” Curt Bloch's Het Onderwater-Cabaret.

This article was first published in 2024 in issue 26 of the print edition of the JMB Journal.