Before the Second World War, the "Waldfrieden" estate on the eastern shore of Scharmützelsee was owned by the Berlin furniture manufacturers Richard Hecht and Paul Feivel Korngold, who were related by marriage. The extended family often spent carefree holidays here.
A niece, the well-known Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer, writes in her book "Try to make your life": "When we moved to the Waldgut at the beginning of summer with a wagon full of suitcases and our maid, it seemed to me as if we would never have to return to the city. There was no boredom at Scharmützelsee, after all I had nine uncles and two aunts, and therefore a lot of cousins with whom we could play, swim and go on boat trips."
When the Nazis seized power, however, dark clouds also gathered over this Jewish family. The Waldgut was converted into a summer pension, and the furniture factory was liquidated in 1941. Paul and Martha Korngold brought their four children to safety in the USA and fled to relatives in the Netherlands. But after the German occupation of Holland, they were arrested there, ended up in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and, shortly before the end of the war in April 1945, were loaded onto one of the "lost trains" that were supposed to transport concentration camp prisoners to Theresienstadt. There was no way to get there, however; the trains wandered through devastated Germany and finally ended up in Tröblitz, a small town in the south of Brandenburg. Martha Korngold died of typhus on the train here, one day before the train was liberated by soldiers of the Red Army. Her husband Paul only survived her by three weeks. He died on May 14, 1945.
After the war, several families were housed on the estate. At some point, all residents abandoned it and it began to decay. There is hardly any trace left of the carefree summer holidays of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The building has long since fallen into disrepair.
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