In 1930, Yva moved into a new, large photographic studio in Bleibtreustraße 17. Many of her photographs were now taken on the studio’s expansive terrace. In 1934, she married the merchant Alfred Simon, who took over the commercial management of Yva’s studio.
At first, Yva was successful in continuing to work under the National Socialist government after 1933, despite her Jewish origin. In the course of the so-called “Aryanisation” – the expropriation of Jewish citizens and their expulsion from the economy, culture, science and social life – Yva transferred the management of her studio to her friend Charlotte Weidler, an art-historian who is partly controversial today. Only two years later, however, in the course of the occupational ban issued in 1938, Yva had to permanently close her studio. Yva and her husband Alfred were forced to give up their flat in Schlüterstraße 49. The National Socialist “Reichskulturkammer” (“Reich Chamber of Culture”) moved into the expropriated building. To begin with, the couple moved into a smaller flat; later they had to share a furnished room. In the meantime, Yva was working as a radiographer in the Jewish hospital; Alfred, as a forced labourer, had to sweep streets in Berlin-Zehlendorf.
On 1st June 1942, the couple was arrested by the Gestapo. Just two weeks later on 13th June, they were deported by train in the direction of the extermination camp in Sobibór. 1030 of the train’s occupants were subjected to a selection in Lublin and some of these were sent to the nearby concentration and extermination camp in Majdanek. It is not known whether Yva and her husband were among these. They were probably murdered in Majdanek or Sobibór shortly after their deportation. On 31st December 1944, they were officially declared dead.
Shortly before their deportation, Yva and her husband had apparently tried to emigrate. At this time, more than 30 crates with furnishings from her photographic studio were stored in Hamburg free port. The majority of these crates were destroyed in a bomb attack and the rest later auctioned off.
Yva was one of several German-Jewish artists and intellectuals who were no longer able to emigrate, one of more than six million Jews murdered in the extermination camps. Today there is a “Stolperstein” (small paving stone bearing a brass plate inscribed with the name and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution) in front of the Schlüterstraße 45 in Berlin in memory of Yva and her husband Alfred Simon. In addition, the passage between Hardenberg- and Kantstraße at Bahnhof Zoo (railway station in Berlin) also bears the name “Yva Bogen”. In the remembrance project “Wir waren Nachbarn” (“We were neighbours”) in the Schöneberger Rathaus (Schöneberg City Hall), there is an album dedicated to Yva. Besides this, we also have her photographic work which, with its mixture of elegance and avant-garde, has not lost any of its impressiveness up to the present day.
