Letterhead stationery of The Jewish Brigade kept by a young female recruit

Jutta Levitus was born on July 30, 1928, in Strasbourg, France, to Ignatz and Regina Lesegeld Levitus, born on June 18, 1902. She had two older sisters, Hanna, born in 1924, and Cilly, born in 1925, both in Frankfurt, Germany, where their parents ran a kosher hotel, and then a cinema. The family moved to Strasbourg and ran a restaurant for two years, but returned because Ignatz was ill. A son, Josef, was born on February 23, 1930. Ignatz died in 1931. The Nazi dictatorship became established in 1933 and Jews were targeted for harsh persecution. Regina worked as a housekeeper and in the kitchen of a Jewish orphanage. After the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938, she sent Cilly and Jutta on a kindertransport to the Netherlands, where they were placed in the Jewish Girls’ Orphanage at Rapenburgertraat 173 in Amsterdam. Nazi Germany occupied the Netherlands in May 1940. In 1942, the Germans began large scale deportations of Jews to concentration camps. On February 10, 1943, police came to remove all the children from the orphanage. But Cilly and Jutta escaped the roundup and went into hiding with the assistance of the Dutch underground. For a time they were hidden in the home of two schoolteachers, Cornelia Ouweleen and Maria Hoefsmit. One day, Jutta was discovered and taken to Schouwburg prison. But she was rescued from the prison, as Jutta recalled: "I was sitting in a red velvet chair in this huge hall with hundreds of prisoners. Someone called out: 'Is there a girl all on her own here called Jutta?' I raised my hand and he told me to follow him out of the gates of the prison. I remember there were two guards who just looked away." After the war ended in May 1945, Cilly and Jutta emigrated illegally to Palestine. Their sister Hannah had been living there since her escape from Germany in 1940. Their mother and younger brother had been deported from near Lublin, Poland, in 1942, and assumed killed in a concentration camp, probably Auschwitz. Jutta joined the Jewish Brigade of the British Army in Palestine which was disbanded in July 1946. She later married, took the surname Rosen, and had a son.