Overview
- Date
-
January 1932
- Locale
- Hamburg, [Hansestadt] Germany?
- Photo Credit
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Carl H. Rosner
Rights & Restrictions
- Photo Source
-
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial MuseumProvenance: Carl H. RosnerSource Record ID: Collections: IRN 539408Second Record ID: Collections: 2016.308
Keywords & Subjects
Administrative Notes
- Biography
- Karl (later Carl) Heinz Rosner was born the oldest of David and Rachel (nee Hausner) Rosner's three children in Hamburg, Germany on April 19, 1929. He had two brothers, Wolfgang and Elliot. The Rosner family lived in Hamburg among Rachel's extended relatives, many of whom were early Zionists. Rachel's parents emigrated from Germany to Palestine in 1934. The following year Rachel and David Rosner divorced. Shortly thereafter David returned to Romania where he held citizenship leaving Rachel to care for their three sons. Rachel sought ways to protect her family from increasing persecution by attempting to get the family out of Germany. First she secured a place for Eliot on a Kindertransport to Sweden, and by 1939 she joined him there.
After the departure of their brother and mother, Karl Heinz and Wolfgang Rosner were left in the care of an orphanage run by the Hamburg Jewish community. While some of the Jewish children cared for there were without parents, many others belonged to families separated or pushed to the brink of destitution as a consequence of Nazi strictures. In late 1941 deportations targeting Hamburg's Jewish population for "resettlement" in the East began en masse. During this time several adolescents who had been in the care of the Hamburg Jewish community, as well as younger children with extended families, were sent to Riga. In July 1942 the remaining staff and children of the Hamburg Jewish orphanage were deported to Auschwitz where they perished. Karl Heinz and Wolfgang were spared from deportation as a consequence of the Romanian citizenship conveyed on them from their father. For a short time the brothers lived in an old age home operated by the Jewish community of Hamburg until the residents too were deported. The boys then came to live in the home of a couple in a protected mixed marriage.
The remaining Hamburg Jewish community leadership continued to see to Karl Heinz and Wolfgang's welfare however they could. Harry Goldsstein was particularly instrumental in arranging for the shipment of aid parcels to the boys via international aid networks based out of neutral countries. In June 1944, however, the brothers were sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. After Karl Heinz and Wolfgang were liberated, they eventually reunited with Rachel and Eliot in Sweden. Karl Heinz met Polish Jewish survivor Freida Zeidshnur in Sweden whom he later married. The couple later settled in the United States with their children.
- Record last modified:
- 2017-03-21 00:00:00
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- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1182976
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