What We Know:
Family name: Köstner/Koestner
Given name: Leopold Rudolf
Date of birth/Place of birth:  3 November 1920, Coburg/Bavaria
Date of death/Place of death: 6 December 1999, Norwalk, Connecticut, USA
Age:  22 years old at deportation on 10 May 1942/79 years old at death

Leopold Rudolf Köstner was born 3 November 1920 in Coburg, Bavaria. In the official German records, he is identified as “Leopold ‘called Rudolf’ Köstner.” So for the events in the first half of his life 1920-1948, he will be referred to as “Leopold”.  For the latter part of his life, 1948-1999, he officially became “Rudolf” and will be called that.

Leopold’s birth parents were Josef Goldberg and Regine Steinfeld, both Jews. An entry on Leopold’s 1945 marriage certificate identifies Regine Steinfeld as “ledig” — that is, unmarried — and this may be why Leopold did not remain with his birth mother. Instead, Michael and  Elisabeth, née Schaller (or Schiller), Köstner, residents of Sonneberg, a town in Thuringia, adopted Leopold, and his name became “Leopold Köstner.” The Köstner family lived at Coburger Straße 21; Michael Köstner was a shoemaker and probably had his workshop at the same address.

The Nazi Regime threatened the Köstner family. Michael and Elisabeth were non-Jews, Michael catholic, Elisabeth protestant. The marriage certificate of 1945 indicates that Leopold was raised as a protestant/evangelisch. Under the 1935 Nazi Nuremberg Laws, however, Leopold was a Jew. On Kristallnacht, 9/10 November 1938, Leopold was arrested with two other Jewish men of Sonneberg — Karl Gramowsky (owner of a fashion store in Bahnhofstrasse) and Bernhard Grünspan (owner of a men’s clothing store) — and hauled off to Buchenwald concentration camp. After his release — on an unknown date — Leopold returned to Sonneberg. It was probably then that he applied to emigrate, identifying Spain as his destination and stating that he spoke Spanish. In his application to emigrate, Leopold also stated (in right-hand column) that he was a worker in the toy-making industry that made Sonneberg famous.

In 1939, thirteen (13) Jews remained in Sonneberg. By 1942, when the deportations from Thuringia took place, the number had dropped to three. Leopold, the youngest at 22 years old, was deported from Sonneberg to Belzyce Ghetto on 10 May 1942, the transport deemed a ‘work resettlement’ and thus for younger people (under 60). (Rosalie Bibo, b. 1876/66 years oldand Karl Gramowsky, b. 1878/64 years old, were both too old for this deportation. Rosalie was deported to Theresienstadt Ghetto in September 1942; the date of Karl’s deportation is unknown; he was murdered on 6 June 1943 in Auschwitz Extermination Centre.)

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The evidence about Leopold Köstner’s life after the train left Weimar for Lublin, and the Belzyce Ghetto, paints a complicated narrative. One fact is clear: Leopold Rudolf Köstner survived the deportation of 10 May 1942 from Weimar to Lublin/Belzyce Ghetto. One other possible element of his narrative exists, namely, that Leopold was never in Belzyce Ghetto. The train trip ended in Lublin and there was no train connection to Belzyce Ghetto; those who went on to the Ghetto had to walk the 24 km., which under normal circumstances, might have taken 5 ½ hours. More detailed analysis of this transport is revealing its layers; for example, that some of the men, women, and children may have remained in Lublin for significant periods of time before being moved to Belzyce or may not have gone there at all.

This is what we know: Leopold arrived in the city of Lublin on 12 May 1942 and was registered in Majdan Tatarski Ghetto, which had been established in the second half of April 1942 in the working-class district of Majdan Tatarski situated on the south-eastern outskirts of Lublin. Only Jews deemed fit to work and in possession of a J-Ausweis/Passport with a “J”were able to settle within the ghetto; initially, several thousand Jews who had survived the liquidation of the ghetto in Podzamcze were transferred to Majdan Tatarski. Upon his arrival, Leopold Rudolph Köstner was recorded as J-Ausweis Number 3452 in the “Index of persons with J-Ausweis residing in the ghetto in Majdan Tatarski (1942).”  Although the German authorities called it a “Musterghetto/master ghetto,” rapid overpopulation rapidly rendered the living conditions appalling. Selections to reduce the number of people in the ghetto started soon after it opened and continued into the fall of 1942. On 9 November 1942, the final “resettlement” was carried out: two hundred people were murdered on its premises and those who remained alive were sent to the camp at Majdanek KZ (concentration camp).

Leopold was  among those sent to Majdanek KZ; the post-war registration card for him (below) in the file “Displaced person inside and outside of camps” identifies Majdanek, Lublin as his last concentration camp. Majdanek was liquidated in 1944 when the majority of the remaining prisoners were either shot or forced on a death march heading to the killing centre at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Some estimated 300 prisoners were left behind and were later liberated by Soviet soldiers. The post-war file suggests that Leopold was among those liberated.

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We next find Leopold, now called Rudolf, Köstner in Munich, where, on 21 July 1945, he married Anastasia Ilasch. Anastasia was Polish, daughter of Greek-Catholic farmers Timotheus and Anna (née Baran) Ilasch, born in 1922 in the village of Makowice, about 52 km south-west of Wroclaw.

It appears likely that Rudolf and Anastasia met when she worked as forced labour for the Siemens-Schuckertwerte electrical engineering company in Sonneberg in summer of 1941. The work record (below) identifies an Anastasia Ilasch, born 1922 in Makowice,  who started to work as an assembly line worker/Montiererin in Sonneberg on 22 July 1941.

The one hitch is that the dates entered for her birth day & month are incorrect. However, given that the same day & month of birth is also the same as the day & month on which she started work in Sonneberg, it is highly probable that the record keeper erred in the birth entry.

A year later, in 1946, Anastasia and Leopold welcomed a baby girl, Traudl (later Trudy), into their family. Two years later, on 12 March 1948, the family left Germany and Europe to immigrate into the United States. They travelled under President Harry Truman’s Directive of 22 December 1945 that the immigration quotas for 1946 give preference to victims of Nazi persecution who were in U.S. zones of occupation at the time of the executive order. They sailed from Bremerhaven, Germany on the MARINE TIGER, arriving in New York on 23 March 1948. American records, such as the ship’s manifest, established him as “Rudolf Koestner.”

In April 1950, the US Federal Census recorded Rudolf, Anastasia, and Traudl, who was now called Trudy, living in Yonkers, Westchester County, New York.

As Rudolf was “unable to speak a word of English, he made his living by driving a bread delivery truck in the winter and an ice cream truck in the summer. To earn more money for his family, he sold stuffed toys, designed and sewn by his wife. Setting up his displays of cuddly animals on the fender of his ice cream truck, he ended up selling more teddy bears than ice cream bars.” In 1954, the family moved to Newark, Connecticut. “During the late 1950s and 1960s, Trudy Toys became one of the largest sellers of stuffed toys in the United States.”

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Little is known about the children of Rudolf and Anastasia: in 1957, Rudolph Leopold Köstner Jr. was born. In 1961, Rudolf and Anastasia took Trudy and Rudolf Jr. with them on a trip to Europe. The 1999 obituary for Rudolf Koestner Sr. (below) identifies Elizabeth A Thyssen as a daughter but does not mention Trudy.

In 1979, about to turn 60, Rudolf sold Trudy Toys to William W. Burnham and retired, living for the next twenty years in both Naples, Florida and Newark.

Rudolph L Köstner died 6 December 1999 in Norwalk, Connecticut. The funeral service was held in a Lutheran church. Michael and Elizabeth Schiller Koestner were named as his parents; the obituary made no mention of his Jewish heritage. 

Anastasia died in 2010. Their graves are in Conrad Memorial cemetery, Kalispell, Flathead County, Montana.

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Footnote: To date, no details about Joseph Goldberg, Regine Steinfeld, Michael and Elisabeth (née Schaller) Köstner have been found.

Should anyone reading this page know more about Leopold Rudolf Köstner/Koestner, please contact Sharon Meen @ [email protected]