Jeanette (Jetti) Zarnowiecky was born in Bad Kissingen on April 10, 1903 as the daughter of the shoemaker Hermann Hirsch Zarnowiecky and his wife Bertha, née Wexberg. Her parents came from Poland and had moved from Würzburg to Bad Kissingen in December 1902. The family lived in Kissingen for only a short time between December 1902 and February 1904, before they moved to Nuremberg.

Later, Jetty lived in Mannheim where her son Kurt was born in 1929, whose father is unknown. Jetty married Karl Felsberg who adopted Kurt. Before 1929, she lived in Großkrotzenburg and then in Dortmund. Between 1929 and 1939, her son Erich Kurt lived with his grandparents Hermann and Berta Zarnowitzky in Gailingen am Hochrhein.

In the Nazi Era, an odyssey started for the family in order to escape Nazi persecution and terror but only Jetty’s son Kurt managed to survive. At the beginning, Jetty was imprisoned in a concentration camp together with her husband but later freed by an underground group (Data from Homepage “Survivor Story”). In the Pogrom Night of 1938, Jetty’s husband and his brother Julius were arrested and abducted into Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, from where they were released on November 28, 1938.

Jetty and Karl emigrated to Belgium and Kurt was taken to a children’s home in the Black Forest. In April 1939, the then 10-year-old Kurt also got to Belgium with a children’s transport and lived with his parents again. In May 1940, the family was surprised by the invasion of the German troops. Jewish emigrants had to report to the Belgian authorities and the Felsbergs were taken to the Pyrenees in France with other Jews and stayed there for three weeks. Then they walked to Paris together with other Jewish emigrants. When in February 1941 the German occupation troops in Paris ordered that all the Jews gathered at the train station with a suitcase each, 1000 Jews came and were taken to Lummen in Belgium by train, according to reports. These 1000 Jews were used as forced labourers in a weapon factory. A Belgian resistance group, the ‘White Brigades’, warned them that all Jews would be taken to concentration camps by the Germans. This caused the Felsberg family to go underground. From February 1941 to May 1944, they lived in a tiny apartment of two rooms and a toilet. The apartment was in a run-down district of Brussels in which according to Kurt Felsberg “no honorable Jew ever would have lived”.

In May 1944, Jeanette (Jetty) Felsberg and her husband Karl were arrested, deported to Auschwitz/ Oświęcim and murdered there. They were in the last transport of Jewish citizens leaving Belgium. Fortunately, their son Kurt was not in the apartment when they were arrested but watched from a distance how his parents were led away. He remembers his mother’s last look that urged him to flee. Kurt Felsberg went into the apartment again the next day and took some personal memorials and photographs with him. Then he turned to the ‘White Brigades’ for help and was hidden in the Ardennes where he survived till the end of the war.