Adolphine Bertha Pfeiffer

Adolphine Bertha Pfeiffer (born April 29, 1889 in Kehl ; † November 9, 1971 in Warsaw ) was a German of French descent who lived in Warsaw from 1920. She called herself Else Pfeiffer and was the illegitimate daughter of the seamstress Bertha Alexandrine Salomon, a Catholic Parisian woman who presumably came from a Jewish family. She received the name Pfeiffer when her mother married the brewer Michael Heinrich Pfeiffer, who recognized little Adolphine as her daughter.

Adolphine Pfeiffer initially worked in the health resort of Königstein im Taunus . In 1920 she came to Warsaw through a co-owner of the Königstein sanatorium, where she was employed as a nanny for the Jewish family by his sister Helene Czyż. Helene's husband, Nikodem Czyż, was a co-owner of a chemical wholesaler in Warsaw and a representative of the Krakow rubber goods factory "Semperit". Adolphine lived with the Czyż family at Ulice Miodowa 21 until 1939 .

After the outbreak of the Second World War , the Czyż family fled to eastern Poland in Galicia annexed by the Soviet Union . Adolphine stayed in the Warsaw apartment of the Czyż family. After October 2, 1940, as a German, she was moved to the German residential area of ​​Warsaw.

Pfeiffer was employed as the head of a children's club in the Warsaw district of Wola . After the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto , she supported relatives and friends of the Czyż family who had moved there; among other things, she provided them with food. In her apartment in the German residential area, she first granted refuge to Max Felsen, a Jew from Leipzig , and later to Nikodem Czyż, who had previously hidden in the Lemberg area . Adolphine also gave shelter to two other Jewish families. She hoped that Jews would not be searched for in the German neighborhood. On December 29, 1942, however , the Gestapo discovered the Jews in hiding and arrested them; half an hour later, Adolphine was also brought to the Warsaw Gestapo headquarters and, after interrogation, deported to the Majdanek concentration camp .

On April 19, 1944, she was transferred to the Ravensbrück concentration camp . After the liberation there, she came back to Warsaw on June 2, 1945. She found a job as a teacher and housekeeper. Her application for Polish citizenship was unsuccessful. Pfeiffer died in Warsaw at the age of 82.

source

• Jerzy Kochanowski, O Niemce, która ratowała Żydów (About a German who saved Jews) in: Gazeta Wyborcza, January 7, 2012 (in Polish), accessed January 10, 2012