Anne-Lisa Silberstein: personal papers

This collection contains the personal papers of Anne-Lisa Silberstein, a Jewish girl from Berlin who emigrated to Palestine in 1939. Included are certificate of inheritance and her father's last will, birth and marriage certificates of her parents, family register, photocopy of Anne-Lisa's Palestinian certificate of naturalisation (1743/1-) and some family correspondence (1743/2). Also included are two of Anne-Lisa's diaries (1743/3) in which she refers to the political situation and how it affected her life as a Jewish girl in Berlin. She discusses her fate and the meaning of life, and her emigration with her mother to Palestine via Amsterdam in 1939.

Anne-Lisa Silberstein (born in 1921) is the daughter of pharmacist Rudolf (1882-1932) and Gertrud Klara Silberstein (1889-1953) who lived in Berlin. Anne-Lisa moved to Amsterdam with her mother in 1938 and emigrated to Palestine in 1939. She obtained Palestinian citizenship in 1941. Anne-Lisa Silberstein later got married to Oliver Lawton and three daughters.

Anne-Lisa's aunt Gertrud Sommerfeld and grandmother Dorothea Fischer (née Hadra) perished at Auschwitz and Theresienstadt concentration camps respectively. Her cousin Ingelore ('Illo') Sommerfeld (b 1926) was sent to England as a young girl and taken into the care of a business colleague of her father's. She later worked for the BBC and became a designer.

Chronological

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Donated by Sylvia Gold

2007/41