Bertha Elias, née Frank was born in Bad Kissingen on June 9, 1871 as the daughter of the cattle dealer Raphael Frank who lived in Bachgasse and his wife Hannchen, née Löwenthal. Her mother came from Kissingen.

Bertha married the merchant Julius Elias and moved to Kassel with him. In 1895, their daughter Martha was born, two years later followed their son Otto Max. The family lived together in Kassel in Schillerstrasse 38 until 1933 and ran a sports shop in Kleine Rosenstrasse 1. In 1932, Bertha’s husband died.

After an anti-Semitic attack on the shop in April 1933, Bertha emigrated to the Netherlands in July 1933 together with her children Otto and Martha (in the meantime Burghardt because of having married) and Martha’s daughter Ruth Marion Pauline. They lived in Amsterdam and the German-Jewish family became an immigrants’ family in the middle of lots of German immigrants there. 

After the invasion of German troops, the family was caught up by Nazi terror again. From the collective camp of Westerbork, Bertha was deported to Sobibor on March 10, 1943 and killed there few days later at the age of 71. As her date of death March 13, 1943 is stated. Her two children Martha and Otto Max became victims of the Shoa in Auschwitz/ Oświęcim and Dachau one year later. 

Only Bertha’s granddaughter Ruth Burghardt survived as part of the Resistance and emigrated to Uruguay in October 1946. Her father Albert Burghardt also survived the Nazi era. He had fled to Argentina. Descendants of Martha’s granddaughter are living in Switzerland and France these days.

(For details see Link „Stolpersteine Kassel/ Biografien“!)