page_title: Max Samuel
section_title: Family
hierarchical_section_title: Max Samuel / Family
caption_attribution_description: Historisches Foto von Güstrow. Pferdemarkt. Camera location53°&#160;47′&#160;41.16″&#160;N, 12°&#160;10′&#160;28.56″&#160;E&#160;&#160;&#160;View this and other nearby images on: OpenStreetMap - Google Earth
context_page_description: Max Samuel was a businessman and self-made man, founder and managing-director of the EMSA-Werke, chair of the Jewish congregation in Rostock and head deputy of the Israelite Upper Council of Mecklenburg-Schwerin.
context_section_description: His parents Jacob Itzig and Rosalie (Rosa), née Schrubski from Inowrazlaw, were pious Jews and very poor. His father was a pedlar of everyday items who travelled between villages with a horse-drawn cart. Eventually the children had to leave, which is why Max Samuel's school education stopped when he was 14 years old. Max Samuel had five brothers and one sister, and their surname at birth was Itzig, but the family changed their name to Samuel when he was five years old. 
   
  After giving control of the shoe business to Max Samuel in 1906, Isidor 'James' Samuel (1871–1933) kept his 1905-founded rubber factory in Güstrow, which supplied rubber parts for the EMSA-Werke, and operated it until his death from diabetes. James Samuel was active as the treasurer in Güstrow's Jewish congregation (German: Israelitische Gemeinde Güstrow) and worked with his partner Paul Eggert, who took control of the factory after James' death. In 1938 Max Samuel's sister Frieda (1886–1965) emigrated to Chile with her Dutch husband John Joseph Meibergen (1875–1958) and his sister Karoline (1877–1953), who was James Samuel's widow. 
  Two of Max Samuel's brothers perished in the Shoah: the tailor Gustav Samuel (1881–1943, Bełżec Camp) was deported on 12 February 1940 from Stettin to Bełżyce Ghetto and on 15 August 1941 onwards to Bełżec Camp, and the watchmaker Julius Samuel (1878–1943, Sobibór Camp) with wife Gertrude, née Gellhorn (1878–1943, Sobibór Camp), and son Kurt (1905–1942, Auschwitz), all having moved to Delmenhorst in 1920, when their home place Argenau had been seized by Poland, and escaped from Delmenhorst to the Netherlands, where they were deported from Westerbork in 1943. Their brother Feo(dor) Samuel survived in the French Foreign Legion and lived as a pensioner in Strasbourg in Alsace. His daughter Carla Claudie survived hidden in a French nunnery. The brother Wilhelm 'William' Samuel (1876–1948), who had lived with his first wife Paula Dreyfus, their three sons, and his widowed mother Rosalie (1849–1934) in Cologne, later escaped with his sons to New York, where he remarried in 1946.  
   
  Before his marriage Max Samuel lived with his elder brother James and his wife Karoline Meibergen in their flat right above the shoe shop on Pferdemarkt 57 in Güstrow. On 14 August 1906 Max Samuel and Berta Geßner (1878–1937) married in Halberstadt, whose Jewish community (German: Synagogengemeinde zu Halberstadt) formed a centre of Modern Orthodoxy, where at times her father Jakob Geßner (1848–1937) had served as the hazzan. Jakob Geßner was a Bavarian teacher, long serving in Hammelburg, where Max Samuel, travelling as a salesman, got to know Berta. While living in Güstrow the members of the Jewish congregation there elected Jakob Geßner their vice chair. Berta's and Max Samuel's son Herbert (1907–1992) and daughter Käte (1910–1987, later altered to Kate) were born in Güstrow. In Rostock on 17 March 1930 Käte married Hermann Georg Kaiser (1904–1992, later altered to Herman Geo. Kaiser) from Mardorf in Hesse. One of Käte's grandchildren is Tim Blake Nelson. 
   
  On 5 December 1936 Herbert Samuel married Ilse Steinfeld, whom he had known for two years. Between Christmas 1936 and New Year 1937 they then visited family in Rostock and Berlin, where their families bought them real furniture with paper reichsmarks and exported it to furnish their recently found two-room flat in 139, Empire Court, Wembley. Both working, they saved every penny to establish themselves and help friends escaping Germany. From their first Blackburn home on Barker Lane they moved in 1943 with the Geßners to their last home on 73, Higher Croft Road in Lower Darwen. 
  They were naturalised as British subjects only in 1946, thus between 1941 and the end of the war they were stateless. During the war Herbert and Ilse housed many refugees, three to seven at a time, and gave them funds and employment. Although they suffered many difficulties, including Security Service (MI5) surveillance (1932 to 1951) due to Ilse's acquaintance to Germans who, once in British refuge, sided with the Sovie
caption: Güstrow: Schuhwaaren J. Samuel on Pferdemarkt 57 on the right of the Post Office with corner tower, by 1900
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