In 1914 the Veit Simons family was one of the oldest and best known Jewish families in Berlin.
Their diligence and enthusiasm for education had garnered them wealth and social recognition
the Holocaust should rob them off both. Drawing on the biographies of the last bourgeois Veit
Simon his Gentile wife and their six children the authors show how the Nazi genocide
destroyed any prospects for the future the social environment livelihoods and eventually
bare existence. Some family members emigrated stepping into an uncertain and deprived future.
Of those who were not able to flee the Gentile mother and one daughter were the only ones who
survived. The story of the surviving daughter Etta in particular who was able to assert
herself in Theresienstadt ghetto even under the most adverse of circumstances sheds new light
on gender and the genocide.
