Witte Susanne

Witte, Susanne Susanne Witte was born in 1895 in Berlin. She was a Catholic social-welfare worker and in the course of her training in pre-Nazi Berlin, had befriended Ruth Casper. Casper, a convert to Catholicism, was the youngest daughter from the second marriage of Regina Kirschbaum, a Jewish chamber singer from Leipzig. Her mother and sisters took exception to her conversion and remained faithful to Judaism. During the 1930s, Casper’s two elder sisters managed to emigrate to England, while she and her mother remained trapped in Hitler’s Third Reich. Ruth Casper did not survive the war. She was deported to Auschwitz in the summer of 1942, and did not return. However, before she left, she asked her good friend to take care of her mother should anything happen to her. Witte’s home in the Putlitzstrasse in Berlin-Moabit lay close to the bridge across which the Jewish transports were brought from the assembly camp at the Levetzowstrasse to the train station. Sometime in 1943 she received information that Regina Kirschbaum, Casper’s mother, was being held by the Gestapo in a hotel together with other Jewish artists pending their deportation. Witte went to the hotel to check on the report and found out, through a friendly doorman, that Kirschbaum was in fact hiding in the cellar. On the same evening, Regina came to Witte at her home and asked if she could stay with her. Witte agreed and, in fact, kept her there until the end of the war. Although she took the brunt of the risk upon herself, the Catholic social worker did not stand alone. She was assisted by sympathetic colleagues and a young Catholic priest who provided food-ration cards and an alternative hiding place when this proved necessary. During the frequent air-raid alarms, both women would go down to the shelter. Fortunately, everybody was too much preoccupied with his own safety to ask questions. In the course of her long stay, Kirschbaum even took care to observe the Sabbath and mark the Jewishholidays. After the war she left for England to join her two surviving daughters. Although she had been saved physically, however, mentally she was never the same. Distraught by all she had gone through, she had to be hospitalized in a sanatorium for the rest of her life. On September 6, 1998, Yad Vashem recognized Susanne Witte as Righteous Among the Nations