Manfred Ralf Litten was born on 20 January 1909 in Posen (now Poznań in Poland), the son of Raphael Litten and his wife Gertrud (née Loewy).1
Manfred Litten attended the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Gymnasium state grammar school in Poznań until April 1921. When Poland annexed the still German city of Poznan after the end of the First World War, the family moved to Berlin. There, Manfred Litten attended the Treitschke School in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, where he passed his school-leaving examination in 1930.
From a personal conversation with his son, Gideon Lottan, we learnt that Manfred Litten was already a convinced Zionist as a young man. He was a member of a Zionist religious youth organisation and later became its leader himself.
From 1930 to 1933, Manfred Litten studied at the Faculty of Philosophy at Berlin University, mainly history and geography, in which he also obtained his doctorate.2 His doctoral supervisor was Professor Dr Walther Vogel, who spoke up for him before the university council and strongly supported him during the steadily increasing disabilities due to his Jewish origin. His doctoral thesis was entitled "The Dutch political parties from 1848-1914". As part of his studies, he worked in the Amsterdam University Library from the summer term of 1933 until January 1934. In order for Litten to be allowed to do his doctorate as a "non-Aryan", he had to apply for special authorisation, which he was granted. He received his doctoral certificate on 11 November 1935.
After obtaining his doctorate, Manfred Litten worked as a teacher in a Jewish grammar school. It was there that he met his future wife, Janse Schoschana Serlui. She was born in Amsterdam and worked as a nursery school teacher in an orphanage called Beit Ahavah. Manfred and Janse married on 14 June 1935.3 In 1936, they first went into exile in Gdansk and from there to the Netherlands because they hoped that the Netherlands would be a safe place for them.
Manfred had a brother, Harry. He also studied at Berlin University and graduated with a degree in humanities. Harry emigrated to Palestine in 1936 and died on 26 May 1948 in a bombing during the Israeli War of Independence.
In Danzing, Manfred Litten again worked as a teacher in a Jewish grammar school. The couple's only son, Gideon Leo Lottan, was born there on 7 August 1936. The son was the only member of the family to survive the war.
From January 1939 to 23 April 1943, Manfred Litten was the director of the Hachschara farm for Jewish youths who were being prepared there for the move to Palestine.
When the Nazis occupied the Netherlands, the Litten family and the young people at the farm went underground. The family split up and never met again. Manfred Litten and his wife Janse became staunch members of the resistance during this time. Their six-year-old son Gideon was hidden with the Ten Berge family in Amersfoort.
Manfred Litten was captured and deported to Westerbork in May 1943. From there, he was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto on transport XXIV/7 on 4 September 1944. On 1 October 1944, he arrived in Auschwitz on transport EM-115, where he died on 28 February 1945.4
Friends of Manfred Litten told his son how they had tried to persuade him to emigrate to Palestine as well. He refused, however, partly because his work was very important to him and partly because he was convinced that his knowledge of Hebrew would not be sufficient for life in Palestine. He only wanted to emigrate when his language skills were good enough.
Manfred Litten had probably already realised his fate: he gave a photo album of himself and his family to a boy from the farm who had emigrated to Palestine. He asked him to look for his bar mitzvah-aged son in case something happened to him, so that he could give him the album as a memento of his parents. The boy later did so and found Gideon Lottan at the time of his bar mitzvah. So at least Gideon Lottan has photos of his parents, whom he hardly knew personally.
Gideon Lottan, Manfred Litten's son, now lives in Israel with his wife and three children and does everything he can to keep the memory of his parents alive, as he told us in a conversation in December 2009.
The Stumbling Stone was sponsored by the scholarship holders of the EVZ Foundation's Berlin Scholarship Programme 2009/10.
