The year 1933 was a dramatic one on many levels for the Kaufmann– Steinberg family, the older generation in particular. Alex, Selma's husband, died at noon on 6 June 1933. His death ended years of suffering but added to his family's gloom as the Nazis consolidated their power in Germany. (See Figure 3.1.) Although medically there was little that could be done for Alex, Selma had patiently provided her husband with vigilant and loving care. While continuing to assist her 58-year-old sister Henny with running the store on the first floor, 62-year-old Selma trekked up the stairs regularly to check on her husband in their bedroom of their second-floor flat.

The two sisters, Selma and Henny, while adjusting to the void left by Alex's passing, could not allow themselves simply to grieve and retreat from daily life. As early as March 1933 a number of Jewish retail stores as well as larger department stores in Essen, as in other cities in this industrial region, had to shut down temporarily while burly members of the Nazis' paramilitary organization, the SA or storm-troopers, dressed in brown uniforms and thus known as Brownshirts, posted themselves outside entrances. These storm-troopers intimidated the Jewish owners and potential customers and warned that real “Germans buy in German stores.” As a Jewish-owned small retail textile and dry goods store in Altenessen, a part of Essen with only 56 Jewish residents out of a population of 43,000, Selma and Henny's store was easily targeted for economic and social persecution from local Nazi officials.