Sotschek Hannah ; Daughter: Cassirer Eva

Sotschek, Hannah Cassirer, Eva Bruno and Ella Jacoby lived in Berlin with their children, Hans and Elisabeth. Bruno Jacoby had been a journalist at Berliner Tageblatt, but when the Nazi Party came to power, he was fired and the family suffered the many restrictions imposed on Jews. In September 1942, Bruno and Ella were deported to Riga, where they were murdered. Hans and Elisabeth were spared because they were employed as forced laborers in the Siemens-Halske factory. One day in January 1943, when they returned from work, the siblings found a notice on their apartment door ordering them to present themselves at the Grosse Hamburger Strasse, a main street in the Jewish quarter of the city. Knowing this meant deportation to the east, they decided to go into hiding. They first stayed with their former nanny, but when her house was destroyed by a bomb they had to leave. For several weeks they wandered in the streets, hiding in the ruins of bombed houses without any means of survival. At one point Hans disappeared; Elisabeth believes he was caught and deported. Elisabeth continued her homeless existence on her own, hiding wherever she could find, sometimes even in the restrooms of the railway station. One day, as she was walking along the street, she heard someone call: "Lilo, Lilo! I want to talk to you." It was her old school friend Eva Cassirer. Cassirer was the daughter of Hannah Sotschek and Alfred Cassirer, a Jewish industrialist. Soon after Eva's birth in 1920, her parents divorced. Alfred Cassirer died in 1932. Eva was raised by her mother as a Christian, and despite her Jewish father, was not marked as a Jew by the Nazi regime. She lived with her mother in an elegant villa in the Grunewald suburb. Cassirer realized that Elisabeth was in dire straits, and told her to come to her home that evening. When Elisabeth arrived at the Sotschek home, she was immediately taken in and given her own room. She was presented to the frequent guests as a maid.Elisabeth soon discovered other "illegals" in the cellar, all avoiding registration with the police. Part of the villa was rented to a Prince zu Lippe, who worked in the Propaganda Ministry but pretended not to notice the illegals staying there. Peter Paret, a relative of Cassirer who left Germany for the United States before the war, visited Sotschek many years later. He told Yad Vashem that although Sotschek was a tough and aggressive woman, "she was free of antisemitism… whether somebody was Jewish or not made no difference to her. She was not the perfect hero, but was certainly a woman of considerable courage." After the war Elisabeth Jacoby married Ernst Joseph, a Holocaust survivor who had survived in hiding in Berlin. The couple immigrated to the United States. On January 11, 2011 Yad Vashem recognized Hannah Sotschek and her daughter Eva Cassirer as Righteous Among the Nations.