Gerda Schild Haas papers
Extent and Medium
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1
Creator(s)
- Gerda Schild Haas
Biographical History
Gerda Schild Haas was born in 1922 in Ansbach, Germany to Siegfried and Paula Schild. Her family was forced to sell their home after Kristallnacht, and they moved to Munich. Siegfried left Germany for the Kitchener Camp in England with a group of Jewish refugees in 1939, and he immigrated to the United States in 1940. Gerda moved to Berlin in 1939 for nurse's training, met Adolf Eichmann, Rolf Günther, and Alois Brunner while working at the Jewish hospital there, and was deported to Theresienstadt in March 1943. She was liberated as part of an exchange transport to Switzerland in February 1945 (the Musy negotiations) and joined her father in the United States in 1946. Her mother and her sister Elfriede (Friedl) Schild are both believed to have been deported to Riga and killed in 1941.
Archival History
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Acquisition
Funding Note: The cataloging of this collection has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
Gerda Haas donated the Gerda Schild Haas papers to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1989 and 2000. The collection previously cataloged as accession 2000.28 has been incorporated into this collection.
Scope and Content
The Gerda Schild Haas papers include Gerda’s notes on her experiences of Jewish persecution in Berlin from 1940‐1943 and correspondence among Gerda’s family members documenting their efforts to leave Germany from 1939‐1941 and to trace Gerda’s mother and sister from 1945‐1946. Gerda Haas compiled her notes “Das Leben der Juden in Berlin in den Jahren 1940 bis 1943” in 1945 after arriving in Switzerland from Theresienstadt. The notes describe her memories of life in Berlin during the Holocaust, the Jewish hospital where she worked as a nurse, the organization of transports to Theresienstadt, and the cruelty of SS‐Obersturmführer Alois Brunner. Correspondence includes letters dated 1939‐1941 from Paula Schild in Munich, Gerda Schild in Berlin, and Friedl Schild in Frankfurt to Siegfried Schild in New York City describing their lives in Germany and documenting their efforts to join him. Letters dated 1945‐1946 are primarily between Siegfried and Gerda Schild and document their efforts to locate Gerda’s mother and sister and to bring Gerda to the United States. Some of the letters are undated or have been separated from their first or last pages.
System of Arrangement
The Gerda Schild Haas papers are arranged as two series: I. Notes on Jewish persecution in Berlin, 1945, II. Correspondence, 1940-1946
Conditions Governing Reproduction
Copyright Holder: Gerda Schild Haas
Corporate Bodies
Subjects
- Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Personal narratives.
- World War, 1939-1945--Deportations from Germany.
- Berlin (Germany)
- Jewish refugees--Switzerland.
- Holocaust survivors.
- Les Avants (Switzerland)
- Lucerne (Switzerland)
- Jewish nurses--Germany--Berlin.
- Germany--Emigration and immigration--Government policy--20th century.
- Jewish refugees--America.
- Jews--Germany--History--1933-1945.
- United States--Emigration and immigration--Government policy--20th century.
- Jewish refugees--Germany.
- Jewish hospitals--Germany--Berlin.
- Munich (Germany)
Genre
- Document
- Letters.
- Personal narratives.