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.

is an Associate Professor at the University of Warwick.