Factory-printed Star of David badge printed with Jude, belonging to a German Jewish woman

Sigrid Ansbacher (later Strauss, b. 1928) was born in Dinkelsbühl, Germany, to Selma Schlossberger (1897-1959) and Ludwig Ansbacher (1888-1950). She had two older brothers, Manfred (1922-2012) and Heinz (1925-1942). Ludwig served in the German army during World War I, where he lost an eye. In 1935, he was awarded the Iron Cross for his service. Early in his career, he worked as a cattle dealer before transitioning into selling fabrics. The family lived in an apartment above Ludwig’s fabric store in Dinkelsbühl. Hitler came to power in 1933, and Ludwig was forced to close his store after the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935. He then began to work as a traveling fabric salesman, riding his bike into the countryside to sell to farmers. The family attended an Orthodox synagogue and had many good friends that were non-Jewish. However, those relationships changed as anti-Semitism increased. Dinkelsbühl did not have many Jews or children in the town, and Sigrid attended a public elementary school for two years, until she had to leave it in 1936 due to anti-Jewish legislation. That same year, Manfred was sent by his parents to an agricultural school near Hanover; by 1939, he immigrated to Australia, changed his surname to Anson, and eventually joined the Australian army. In 1937, anti-semitism in the small town had grown so much that the family decided to re-locate to Frankfurt, joining extended family. In Frankfurt, Sigrid attended a Jewish school and her father began working in the office of the Jewish community.

The Ansbacher family did not live in Frankfurt’s central Jewish neighborhood, and therefore avoided the vandalism and damaged stores of the Kristallnacht attacks on November 9-10, 1938. The following day, however, the SS arrested Ludwig, sending him and 10,000 other Jews to Buchenwald concentration camp, where they received extremely cruel treatment. Ludwig was sent home after 2-3 weeks, and Selma attempted to obtain paperwork for the family to immigrate to America. The United States had a quota system for German immigrants, and the Ansbachers’ numbers were too high to make immigration an option. When Sigrid was 13, the Jewish schools closed and she began working in the Jewish hospital while Heinz did gardening at the cemetery. In May 1942, 17-year-old Heinz was assigned to a transport and the rest of the family volunteered to go with him. Heinz was separated out at the collection center; the guards prevented the rest of the family from getting on the transport and they were sent home, perhaps due to Ludwig’s military service. Heinz died on August 1, 1942 at Majdanek killing center in German-occupied Poland.

Sigrid credited her father’s war injury with the rest of the family being sent to Theresienstadt ghetto-labor camp in German-occupied Czechoslovakia. They were deported as part of Transport XII/3 on September 15, 1942. Sigrid was assigned to live in a children’s home for German and Viennese children, sleeping with 25-30 other girls in a room, supervised by a Zionist Czech woman. There was no formal schooling, but she and the other children were sent to work in the vegetable gardens. On Rosh Hashanah in 1943, their chaperone found scraps of fabric and Sigrid made a box out of cardboard covered with fabric as a gift for her parents. Initially, Selma worked as a group leader in the kitchen, but after some time was reassigned to a factory that split mica for the war effort.

In October 1944, at age 16, Sigrid was assigned to a transport out of Theresienstadt. Upon arriving at Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, she had to surrender all of her belongings, but managed to hide pictures of her family crumpled in her hand, later keeping them in the bottom of her shoe. In the winter of 1944, after several weeks, she deported to Kurzbach labor camp, a subcamp of Gross-Rosen concentration camp in Germany, where she was forced to dig ditches in the frozen ground, to be used as fortifications against the approaching Soviet Army. In January1945, the camp was evacuated and Sigrid was sent on a death march. They were moved on cattle cars every couple of weeks, first to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, and then back to Germany to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. When they arrived, Sigrid was too weak to walk and was dragged by two of her friends, whom she credits with saving her life. At Bergen-Belsen, they were put to work dragging trees from the woods to the camp. On April 15, 1945, British forces liberated the camp. By that point, Sigrid had contracted typhus and had to be carried to the hospital on a stretcher, where she was cared for by English nurses. Sigrid volunteered to be part of a contingent to travel on a ship to a Swedish hospital on July 26. Upon arrival, she weighed only 32 kilograms (about 70.5 pounds); once she was well enough, she got a job in a chocolate factory in Alingsas, Sweden.

In October, Sigrid began making plans to join her brother, Manfred, in Australia, but changed her mind when she learned her parents would be immigrating to the United States. Selma and Ludwig Ansbacher had continued to live at Theresienstadt until the Soviet Army liberated the camp on May 9, 1945. They moved back to Frankfurt before immigrating to the United States in July 1946, settling in New York City. They met Sigrid on the dock when she arrived in New York in December. She met her future husband, a fellow refugee, Fred Strauss (1926-2013), at Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach while on an outing with friends. They married in September 1948 and had two children. Manfred Ansbacher immigrated to the United States in 1961.