Rolf Berditschewsky was born in Bad Kissingen on June 23, 1925 as the second child of Michael Berditschewsky and his wife Anna (Chana Eichle). His father was from Mariupol/ Ukraine and his mother was born in Swienciany near Wilna (Vilnius)/ Lithuania (which belonged to the Russian Czar’s Empire in those days). His mother Anna had emigrated to Germany together with her parents and siblings and temporarily lived in Würzburg and Bad Kissingen. She married the goldsmith and watchmaker Michael Berditschewsky from Ukraine and first lived with him in Fürth, where Rolf’s older sister Marthe was born in 1919. Rolf himself was born in Bad Kissingen, where at times his mother lived with her parents in Salinenstrasse in the summer months of 1925 and 1927. 

At the end of June in 1933, the Berditschewskys moved from Fürth to Straßburg/ Strasbourg, where they lived in the following years and were registered as “Russian refugees”. Rolf’s father ran a radio shop there. When a German attack on France became increasingly probable, the French government had Alsace evacuated in September 1939. Rolf Berditschewsky moved to Perigueux with his parents. When the situation became also more and more perilous for Jewish refugees in the unoccupied part of France, the 14-year-old boy adopted the name “Jean Schneider”, hid with a farmer in Dordogne and survived the Nazi Era that way. In June 1945, the 20-year-old young man left Marseilles on board the ship “SS Ascanius” and emigrated to Palestine. There he lived in a kibbuz but wanted to go back to France after only six months. He could only make this wish come true by taking uncommon measures. He joined the French “Légion étrangère” (Foreign Legion), fought as a soldier in the Indochina War for three years and then could return to Strasbourg in 1951. In 1951 he married Jeanette Weintraub and had two children with her, Patrick and Nadine.

Rolf’s parents survived the Nazi Era in Departement Dordogne and returned to Alsace afterwards. In December 1957, Rolf’s father died in Strasbourg, his mother died in August 1968. Rolf’s older sister Marthe survived Nazi-Germany as well; she died in France in 2001. Rolf Berditschewsky died in Straßbourg in July 2003 at the age of 78. He never returned to his place of birth Bad Kissingen.