Annette Eick
(September 13, 1909 - February 25, 2010)
Annette Eick was a poet, author, and educator whose life and quest for survival transcended national boundaries. As a Jewish lesbian in Nazi Germany, her life was in constant danger. On the eve of World War II, she fled to England, where she fell in love and forged a new life.
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This page tells the story of one person. Read this introductory essay for an overview of the history of the Nazis' persecution of LGBTQ+ people.
This essay was written by Pink Triangle Legacies Project Advocate Sarah Ernst. It is based on the important research of Dr. Claudia Schoppmann and Meghan Paradis, as well as the documentary Paragraph 175. Thank you for your work in preserving queer history.
Poet, writer, preschool teacher, Holocaust refugee and survivor. In her 100 years of life, Annette Eick experienced both turmoil and strife amidst peace and love. Born in 1909 in Berlin to an assimilated Jewish family, Annette attended a private school in the city. In an interview with renowned historian Dr. Claudia Schoppmann, Annette noted how her experience was much like the 1931 film Mädchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform). In the fiction - as well as her real life - the tolerance of one teacher led to a budding crush and an introduction to the poet Sappho that shaped Annette’s understanding of her own lesbian identity.
This early awakening to her self-identity allowed Annette to experience the emerging queer landscape of Berlin in the late Weimar Republic. Among the clubs she visited were the Dorian Gray and the Monbijou: “That club, Monbijou, was on Bülow Street and it was totally pleasant and friendly.” The introduction to a space with like-minded people allowed Annette to produce poetry and short stories for the weekly newspaper Frauenliebe (Women’s Love). In her interview with Claudia Schoppmann, Annette also talked about her parents’ relationship to her sexual identity: “What did my parents think? My mother knew it all the time. My father was naive; he never noticed.” This “relatively uncomplicated” relationship allowed Annette to bring girlfriends home.
The life Annette lived during this time quickly changed, however, with the rise of the Nazi government under Adolf Hitler in 1933. Because of their Jewish identity, Annette’s family soon faced economic strife in the boycotting of their furniture store in the Charlottenburg District of Berlin and the limited options for jobs for her as well. After 1933, she began to prepare to move abroad. She kept in touch with an acquaintance in England, as well as getting involved learning agricultural and manual skills on a Hachsharah farm to prepare to move to the British Mandate of Palestine.
Date unknown, courtesy of The Guardian
The 2000 documentary features an interview with Annette Eick.
Date unknown, courtesy of The Guardian
On the day of November 9, 1938 - what became known as the November Pogrom or Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) – the farm Annette was staying at with Jewish youth was surrounded by the Nazis. With the barn destroyed, they were brought to the local police prison under “protective custody”and were only able to escape through an open door about two or three days later. In that moment of freedom, she not only found her passport in the wreckage of the barn, but intercepted the mailman who had a letter from her friend, Ditt, in England, which held her ticket out of Germany: an immigration permit. In both her interview with Claudia Schopmann and her appearance in the 2000 documentary Paragraph 175, Annette notes how important this interception was: “Had I missed the mailman I would have ended up in Auschwitz along with my parents and almost all my relatives. They were all killed.”
From there, Annette began her life in England, where she would live until her death in 2010. The immigration permit provided by Ditt ensured she could start working as a maid; at this time, Annette also tried to convince her parents to emigrate too, but the increasing restrictions made it impossible. After the war, she discovered that her parents - alongside other relatives - were murdered at Auschwitz. This left only herself and her brother (in Denmark) as survivors. In light of this new reality, Annette battled bouts of severe depression and began to write in English instead of her native German.
Amidst this pain, however, after several years she met her long-time partner, Gertrud (Trud) Klingel, a non-Jewish German living in England since the 1930s. Although at first Trud was “not Annette’s type,” she soon became so: “Our friendship developed into a really close emotional relationship. She had a very strong character, was very respectable, absolutely trustworthy and dependable.” Annette would remain with Trud until her partner passed from complications of Alzheimer’s in 1989. In February of 2010, at the age of 100, Annette passed away in Devon, England
Annette’s story is one of survival and finding oneself, of using the arts to understand and grapple with the immense emotions of being one of two family survivors of the Holocaust. In her multitude of journals - of which there are over 90 from the 1970s to the early 2000s - she notes how her sense of belonging has always been in flux as a lesbian Jewish Holocaust refugee. Yet, even with that, she found a sense of Heimat (home), as told to Claudia Schoppmann in a poem:
​HOME
Home is people
That you don’t forget
And sometimes someone
Who can offer the best
Profound understanding.
(Original German)
HEIMAT
Heimat sind Menschen
Die man nicht vergisst
Und manchmal einer
Der das Beste gibt
Tiefstes Verstehen.
Sources & Further Reading
Claudia Schoppmann, “‘Had I Missed the Mailman, I Would Have Ended Up in Auschwitz’: Annette Eick (b. 1909),” in Days of Masquerade: Life Stories of Lesbians During the Third Reich, trans. Allison Brown (Columbia University Press, 1996), 102-115.
Meghan Paradis, “Shame, Desire, and Queer Jewish Girlhood in Annette Eick’s
Semiautobiographical Fiction, 1929-1930,” Feminist German Studies 39, no.1 (2023): 73-98.
Paragraph 175, directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (Channel Four Films, 2000).
Immortal Muse, directed by Sue Giovanni (Culture Unplugged, 2005).
For Citation
Sarah Ernst, "LGBTQ+ Stories from Nazi Germany: Annette Eick," (2025) pinktrianglelegacies.org/eick
(Updated Jan. 2025)