Gebrauchtwarenhandel Levy
Leo and Toni Levy moved from Bad Segeberg to Ratzeburg in 1929/30 with their son Max-Erwin and ran a used-goods business in Langenbrücker Straße, today number 7, which gradually expanded [1]. In 1936 the family left Ratzeburg for Altona, from where they managed to emigrate to the Netherlands [1].
Ratzeburg as a location
Most of Ratzeburg lay in the Duchy of Lauenburg, the later Prussian district of Herzogtum Lauenburg, and only the cathedral precinct belonged to the Principality of Ratzeburg and thus to Mecklenburg-Strelitz [3]. The sources give no information on which part Langenbrücker Straße belonged to.
The business
In 1929/30 Leo and Toni Levy moved from Bad Segeberg to Ratzeburg with their son Max-Erwin [1]. There they ran a used-goods trade in Langenbrücker Straße, today number 7 [1]. At first raw materials such as iron and rags were traded; later used furniture and clothing were added, and finally textiles and shoes [1]. The business lasted until 1936 [1].
Whether the boycott of 1 April 1933 affected the business is not recorded, but it can hardly have been left alone. This is merely a supposition and not evidence.
1936 and emigration
The son Max-Erwin, born in 1922, attended the Lauenburgische Gelehrtenschule from Easter 1932 to the end of August 1936. In spring 1936 he was the victim of a presumably antisemitic assault. A medical certificate issued in the 1950s records that the boy had been brought to the doctor's practice with a heavily bleeding nose and several bruises on his face after a fellow resident of the house had repeatedly punched him in the face [1].
In 1936 the family left Ratzeburg for Altona, where relatives lived [1]. Leo Levy emigrated to Eindhoven on 15 December 1937, and his wife and son followed in April 1938 [1]. A press report on the Stolpersteine in Bad Segeberg gives the flight of Johanna Levy, her daughter Toni, Toni's husband Leo and Leo's mother Adelheid to Eindhoven as "two years" after Adolf Levy's house sale in 1934, that is 1936 [2]; this, however, differs from Lopau, who gives 1937/38, so that the year of emigration has come down to us differently. That the Segeberg family of Adolf Levy and Toni Levy of Ratzeburg belong together follows from the press report explicitly naming Toni as the daughter of Adolf and Johanna Levy, Leo as her husband and Adelheid as his mother, which agrees with Lopau (Leo, Toni, Adelheid, Johanna, Eindhoven, Stolpersteine in Segeberg) [1][2].
Fate of the family
When the Germans invaded in 1940 Leo Levy escaped to England, but the plan to bring his relatives over failed [1][2]. His mother Adelheid was deported in 1943 and murdered in Auschwitz [1]. Toni Levy and her mother Johanna went into hiding in summer 1943 and experienced the liberation of Eindhoven in September 1944 [1]. The son Max-Erwin fled on to Palestine, returned to Germany after the war and died in Frankfurt am Main in 1988 [1]. Stolpersteine in Bad Segeberg commemorate the Levy family [1][2].