Grete Rönnfeldt

Grete Rönnfeldt (nee Grete Borchert ; born November 6, 1901 , † 1981 ) was a German Righteous Among the Nations .

Life

Grete Borchert worked as a nanny in Berlin from 1925 to 1927 . She took care of the 1924 born son Harry of the Jewish family Ernst. After they got married, she gave up her job, had three daughters and lived with her family in Neuenhagen near Berlin . She stayed in contact with the Ernsthaft family even during the National Socialist era . Her husband was drafted as a soldier during World War II .

When the Ernsthaft family was about to be deported to Poland in 1943 , Lilli Ernsthaft, Harry Ernst's mother, turned to Grete Rönnfeldt for help. Harry Ernst, who was now 18 years old, went into hiding and lived with a cousin of his father's, who was a so-called half-Jew and was spared from deportation, but the situation in Berlin became increasingly dangerous for Harry Ernst. Grete Rönnfeldt's husband was at home on vacation at the time, she told him about it. The next day Lilli Ernst received a telegram with the word “of course”.

Harry Ernst Ernst moved in with the Rönnfeldts in their family home. The daughters called him "Uncle Harry" and were always admonished not to tell anything about his presence in the house. He stayed with the family until the end of the war and emigrated to the USA in 1956.

In 2003 Grete Rönnfeldt was posthumously recognized as Righteous Among the Nations.

literature

• Rönnfeldt, Grete . In: Daniel Fraenkel, Jackob Borut (Ed.): Lexicon of the Righteous Among the Nations. Germans and Austrians . Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2005, p. 231 ISBN 3-89244-900-7

Web links

• Grete Rönnfeldt on the website of Yad Vashem (English)