Coat worn by a female German Jewish member of the Red Orchestra resistance group

Lisa Gervai Egler was born on May 19, 1924, in Budapest, Hungary, to a Jewish Hungarian mother, Margit Gervai, and a non-Jewish German father, Alfred Egler. She was raised in Berlin, Germany. Inn 1933, the Nazi dictatorship took power in Germany. In her late teens, Lisa enrolled in the Museum School of Fine Arts. She joined an anti-Nazi resistance movement known as the Rote Kapelle (Orchestra). This group smuggled coded messages on troop movements and other strategic information to the Russian Front. Lisa was captured while on a mission in Poland and imprisoned by the Germans. At least two friends and members of the Red Orchestra group, Cato Bontjes van Beek and Heinz Stroller, were executed by the Gestapo. Toward the end of the war, Lisa met an American soldier, Sergeant David Eizenberg, a US military intelligence officer who was serving as a Russian translator. She was leaving on a mission when her car got a flat tire and David stopped to fix it. After the war ended in May 1945, David remained in Germany, working with the Joint Distribution Committee and HIAS in displaced persons camps near Berlin. He and Lisa met again and married in 1946. When they moved to the US, they settled in the Boston area and had three children. Lisa was a noted sculptor and poet. David passed away in 1993. Lisa, 79, died in August 2003.

The coat was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2015 by Daniel Eizenberg, Michael Eizenberg, and Nina Schuessler, the children of David and Lisa Eizenberg.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of the family of David and Lisa Eizenberg

Funding Note: The cataloging of this artifact has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.