After Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the German Reich on 30 January 1933, life changed fundamentally for the Jewish population. A first incisive event was the call for a boycott of Jewish shops in April 1933. On March 31, 1933, the local newspaper "Cottbuser Anzeiger" published this message: "Whoever buys from the Jew is a traitor to the German people." Thus, not only the Jewish merchants, but also their customers were intimidated. But the call for a boycott was only the beginning. Until 1938, many Jews were forced to give up their business.
Steffi Pinkus (née Lewin) and Max Schindler were the children of Cottbus merchants. They witnessed their families' economic and social situations getting worse and worse after 1933.
Steffi Pinkus (née Lewin) was born in 1924 in Wroclaw as the daughter of a Jewish merchant. With her parents, she moved to Cottbus in 1932, where her father ran a shoe shop. Steffi Lewin suffered from anti-Semitism as a student. In 1938, her father's business was "aryanized". After „Crystal Night“, he was imprisoned for several weeks in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. At the beginning of 1939, the Lewin family was thrown out of their apartment, but in March 1939 they managed to emigrate to the USA. There, Steffi Lewin later married the antiques dealer Ernst Pinkus. After her husband's death, Steffi Pinkus emigrated to Israel with her daughter in 1985. The interview with her was recorded in Haifa in 1997 by the USC Shoah foundation.