After learning this winter that the city of Bayreuth paid tribute to Hanna and some of her companions, I wondered if anything had been done to Lili in Augsburg. It was in this city of Bavaria that her body was landed on March 4, 1945 after she had succumbed to typhus in a convoy of women from Ravensbrück. As I couldn't find anything on the Internet, I promised myself that I would go and see for myself.

The opportunity having arisen in July 2015, I plan two days with my wife to do research in the cemeteries of Augsburg: seven municipal, one Catholic, two Protestants and two Jews. Arrived on site on the evening of July 15, we are preparing for a long day in the heat of this beautiful summer. But thanks to a series of meetings, we will succeed much more quickly than we thought.

On the instructions of the staff at one of the first cemeteries we visited, we went to the Westfriedhof (West Cemetery), where the central administration of municipal cemeteries is located. The man who greeted us couldn't find Lili in his file, but told us that the cemetery had two sections devoted to the world wars. We easily found the one for the second, which contains the graves of soldiers and victims of aerial bombardments, but no victims of the camps. I struck up a conversation with an elderly man on a bicycle who had come to visit his mother's grave. He took us to the First World War sector and told us that there was also a memorial to the victims of the camps, which included Jews, something the man from the administration hadn't told us.

There, on either side of a monument "in memory of the 235 concentration camp victims †1945 who lie here", we discover around thirty engraved stone plaques scattered across the grass. Most of them bear crosses, only one the Star of David. On one of those bearing a cross, I discovered the inscription:

STRAUSS Lilli 45 years (45 years old)

After the man had left us, we paid our respects for a long time in front of the plaque, in this sober and quiet place, a little out of the way.

I soon began to have doubts. Is this 'our' Lili or someone else's? The spellings of the name and surname are different, the age is wrong (Lili was only 38) and why a cross and not the Star of David as on a neighbouring plaque? Lili was certainly baptised at KatalinBut she was deported as a Jew. What is certain, however, is that she was indeed a victim of the camps, dying in 1945 in Augsburg. Where else would her memory be honoured?

We find answers in the afternoon at the Jewish cemetery in Haunstetterstrasse. Amongst the graves from the Second World War, some small plaques caught my eye: most of them bore names that had been found on the Star of David plaque at the Westfriedhof in the morning! I realised that the reason Lilli Strauss wasn't on the Star of David plaque was that she wasn't from here. The plaque in fact features members of Augsburg's Jewish community, buried in their cemetery. I confirmed this the next day at the town hall, where for the third time I found the names from the Westfriedhof and the Jewish cemetery on a plaque commemorating the murder of "Augsburg Jews". There are Strauss names on this Town Hall plaque, but no Lilli or Lili.

I'm now firmly convinced that it was indeed 'our' Lili (with one l) who was listed by the town of Augsburg, which set up this memorial in 1950 for victims of the camps who came from Augsburg or died in Augsburg. In fact, on "her" plaque, there are five other women. It's the only plaque with so many women's names. Perhaps women from the convoy whose bodies were unloaded with hers at Augsburg station on 4 March 1945? Eva Danos speaks of five new deaths this early morning.

Back at the hotel, I discover that everything was already on Internet A simple question about the spelling of his first and last names made me miss it...

EL