Betty Rosenfeld

Stumbling blocks for Betty and her family

Betty Rosenfeld (born March 23, 1907 in Stuttgart , † 1942 in Auschwitz ) was a Jewish nurse who participated in the Spanish Civil War as a volunteer in the International Brigades .

Life

Rosenfeld grew up with her sisters Charlotte and Ilse in a middle-class family at Breitscheidstrasse 35 (at that time, Militärstrasse). The father Benjamin was a businessman and owner of a small cleaning agent factory. Mother Theresa was a housewife.

As the three sisters grew up, they began to be interested in emancipation and socialist ideas. They spent their free time in the environment of the Stuttgart Friends of Nature . An important source of political inspiration for Betty Rosenfeld was her neighbor Sepp Dieringer, a communist shoemaker. From 1932 to the beginning of 1933 Dieringer was a passionate amateur actor in the Agitprop theater group Spieltrupp Südwest in the Stuttgart area.

Betty Rosenfeld trained as a nurse at the Katharinenhospital and then worked in a clinic. In 1935 she emigrated to Palestine with her sisters and worked there in a kibbutz . Her sisters returned to Stuttgart in 1936 to help their mother after the death of their father.

For Dieringer it was a matter of course to help the Rosenfelds, his persecuted Jewish neighbors. When the deportations at the Nordbahnhof began at the end of 1941 - Betty's sister Charlotte was deported to Riga on December 1, 1941 and murdered there - Sepp Dieringer and his wife Emma temporarily hid Betty's mother and Betty's aunt at their home. August 1942 were deported to Theresienstadt and shortly afterwards murdered in Treblinka . The Gestapo later arrested the Dieringer couple and interrogated them at the Stuttgart Gestapo headquarters, the infamous Hotel Silber . Sepp Dieringer was tortured. Heavily pregnant Emma lost her child in the cell.

Rosenfeld learned of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in the summer of 1936. She decided to join the International Brigades. In March 1937, Betty Rosenfeld traveled on a steamer from Haifa to France, and from there to Spain. The base of the International Brigades was in the city of Albacete . In the personnel office, Betty reported to the brigade medical service. She was sent to the hinterland of the Levant coast . In Murcia , she worked as a nurse in a clinic specializing in the treatment of serious internal diseases, particularly typhoid . In a document from the International Brigades, Betty Rosenfeld is described as a hardworking and conscientious nurse and a "reliable anti-fascist". In the spring of 1938 the Murcia clinic was evacuated. In the following months, Betty Rosenfeld cared for wounded interbrigadists in a military clinic in Mataró near Barcelona . Here in March 1938 she married Sally Wittelson, a volunteer in the International Brigade whom she had met in Spain. Wittelson came from Leipzig and was also Jewish. After 1934 he emigrated to Czechoslovakia and was active as a secret courier in the communist resistance.

The International Brigades were disbanded in autumn 1938, and in spring 1939 Franco declared the war over. Rosenfeld and her husband crossed the Pyrenees border to France with other refugees . At first they lived in the small community of Sévérac-le-Château . Betty learned to make gloves and worked in a factory for scarce wages. In June 1939, she and her husband were taken to the adjacent Gurs internment camp by the French police . Later Sally Wittelson was interned in the Vernet camp, Betty Rosenfeld was sent further north to the small women's camp in Rieucros , and in February 1942 to a women's camp in Brens . On August 7, 1942, Betty was taken to the Gurs exit camp completely unexpectedly. Germany had demanded the extradition of the Jews and the Vichy regime followed the orders of the German occupiers. The next morning, all Jewish camp inmates from Germany, including Betty Rosenfeld, were loaded onto trucks and transported to the train station in Oloron-Sainte-Marie . A freight train to Paris was waiting for her there, where she was taken to the Drancy assembly center. There she found her husband again. On the morning of September 7, 1942, convoy 29 left the Drancy rails. Together with 998 other Jewish women and men, Betty Rosenfeld and her husband were finally deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they arrived two days later. There is no information about the exact date of her death in the gas chamber . Today a " stumbling block " reminds of the place where Betty once lived with her sisters, her parents and her aunt. Betty Rosenfeld was the only woman from Stuttgart who took part in the Spanish Civil War as a volunteer in the International Brigades. In addition to her, the Stuttgart-born photo reporter Gerda Taro was there as a civilian .

Web links

• Betty Rosenfeld took part in the Spanish Civil War and died in Auschwitz - The Freedom Fighter , Stuttgarter Zeitung, March 21, 2017
• For freedom - Via Betty Rosenfeld on stumbling stones-stuttgart