Berta Zarnowi(e)tzki (different spellings in the sources: partly Zarnowiecki or Zarnowietzky), née Wexberg and her husband Hermann belong to the immigrants from Eastern Europe who wanted to escape from the poor and depressing conditions in their home region and looked for better lives for themselves and their children in the West. There, they often lived at a certain place for only a short time and then moved on to find better living conditions for providing a living for their families. Therefore, it is difficult to follow their itinerary.

Berta Zarnowitzki was born in Wulcain (Wladowitz) on January 9, 1873 as the daughter of Philipp Wexberg and his wife Leni nèe Wulcain. She married Hermann Zarnowitzki who came from nearby Auschwitz/ Oświęcim. Their oldest daughter Josefine was born in Vienna in 1898, their son Philipp was born in his father’s birthplace of Auschwitz/ Oświęcim.

Then the family seems to have left their home region. As the first tangible stage you find Würzburg in the sources as according to the register of residences of Würzburg Municipal Archive, the family moved from Textorstrasse in Würzburg to Weingasse in Bad Kissingen in December 1902. On April 10, 1903 Jetty (Jeanette), the second daughter of the Zarnowitzkis, was born in Bad Kissingen. Soon after, in February 1904, the family left Bad Kissingen again and moved to Nuremberg. Their further places of residence can often only be deduced on the basis of the birth certificates of the following children.

The stay in Nuremberg can’t have been really long, as daughter Anna was already born in Ludwigshafen in June 1905. Rosa, the next daughter, was born in Fürth in 1909 and Lenchen, the youngest child, was born in Ludwigshafen again. Maybe the unsteady life of the family also has got to do with Hermann Zarnowitzkis profession as in the meantime he is registered as “travelling salesman” in the files. He must also have lived in Rohrbach (not clear which Rohrbach is meant!) because he moved to Gailingen from there in January 1919 (Information obtained from Joachim Klose, Jüdisches Museum Gailingen, Mail from August 26, 2018).

The little town am Hochrhein (on the High Rhine) with a long Jewish tradition became the centre of life of the family for the next two decades. Berta already went there in March 1919 with their youngest daughter Lenchen. The family lived in a house with two entrances in Bergstrasse 15 directly opposite the Catholic church. Their son Philipp had been living in Gailingen since August 1919 and worked there till his emigration to Palestine in 1933 as a gardener (presumably in the Jewish Old People’s Home “Friedrichsheim”). In the later 1920s even more children and grandchildren moved to the town on the Hochrhein. Their daughter Rosa – a seamstress – lived there with her daughter Edith Rachel from 1927 till 1939. The two of them managed in the same year to flee to London just like Lenchen, Hermann Zarnowitzki’s youngest daughter (Ibid.).

Kurt Erich Zarnowitzki (who was later called Kurt Felsberg after his adoptive father), the son of Kissingen-born Jetty (Jeanette) Zarnowitzk lived with his grandparents in Gailingen since 1929. Of his grandmother Berta he remembers “that she wore a clean, starched, white pinafore with lots of pockets and that she had photos of all her six children in them and cried when she looked at them.” Hermann Zarnowitzki’s grandchild Kurt Erich, who was ten years old in the meantime, went to Belgium on a children’s transport in April 1939, where he met his parents. He lived in the underground with them from 1941 to 1944. He was supported by the “White Brigades”, a group belonging to the Belgian Resistance and survived in a hideout in the Ardennes. His parents were found, however, deported and murdered (See: Homepage “Survivor Story, Erich Kurt Felsberg”).

Another two daughters of Hermann and Berta Zarnowski became victims of the Shoa: Josefine was deported with two of her children in 1941. Anna who had married Gedaila Wander and had emigrated to Belgium was also deported and murdered in Auschwitz/ Oświęcim Extermination Camp in 1942.

Berta and her husband could also not escape Nazi terror. The special tragedy of their lives was that they landed where their lives had begun as a consequence of the so-called “Polen-Aktion”. Their birthplace Auschwitz/ Oświęcim had become one of the biggest places of extermination of human lives” (Joachim Klose, Verein für jüdische Geschichte Gailingen, Mail from August 26, 2018). The Zarnowitzki couple had to leave Gailingen as part of the mass designation ordered by Heinrich Himmler in which 17,000 Polish Jews living in Germany were deported across the Polish border. There is no definite place noted. Presumably they returned to Hermann’s place of birth Auschwitz/ Oświęcim (Ibid.). Both were taken into Auschwitz/ Oświęcim Extermination Camp in August 1943 and died there.