Schoenberner Gertrud ; Daughter: Anna

Schoenberner, Gertrud Schoenberner-Müller, Anna In two separate cases during the Nazi period, Gertrud Schoenberner (b. 1877) and her adoptive daughter, Anna Schoenberner-Müller (b. 1894), gave shelter in their Berlin apartment to Jewish persons threatened with deportation. The first woman to be rescued by the two, Mrs. Alice Schneider-Didam, attempted suicide in the summer of 1942, and was subsequently hospitalized at the Jewish Hospital of Berlin. As she went into “illegality” after her release from the hospital, she turned for help to the Schoenberners. They accommodated her in their apartment in Berlin-Charlottenburg for a full year, from the autumn of 1942, sharing their food rations with her, until they had to vacate the house after it was completely destroyed in November 1943. The other ward, Mrs. Rosa Jaerschky-Zacharias, was the Jewish widow of a Christian medical doctor, who, as a result of her husband’s death in 1941, was faced with deportation. Jaerschky-Zacharias and her daughter, Lola – who, by Nazi law, was considered a “Mischling of the first degree” – lived as illegals in the Schoenberners’ new home in Berlin-Zehlendorf, from September 13, 1944, until the liberation on April 26, 1945. The Schoenberners had been patients of the late Dr. Jaerschky. Gertrud Schoenberner, a secondary-school teacher, was forced into early retirement in 1933, when she refused to take the oath of allegiance to Hitler. On August 27, 1997, Yad Vashem recognized Gertrud Schoenberner and Anna Schoenberner-Müller as Righteous Among the Nations.