Berta Sänger

Berta Sänger was born on June 26, 1890, in Augsburg, the oldest child of Julius Sänger and his wife Rosa, née Einstein. The Jewish Sänger family had been living in Augsburg since 1881. Berta’s siblings Alfred, Siegfried Friedrich (Fritz), Else (Elsie), and Stephan Franz were also born in Augsburg. Surviving photographs show a happy family. Little is known about Berta Sänger. She never married and remained very much within the immediate family circle. In 1919, for example, she answered several letters sent by Munich University to her brother Alfred concerning upcoming engineering examinations while he was serving in the military.
It is unclear what Berta Sänger’s life was like in the first years of the Nazi dictatorship. From 1939 she lived in Munich with the family of her brother Fritz Sänger in Maria-Einsiedel-Straße 4. She was certainly a loving aunty to her young niece Anneliese. Berta Sänger was 51 years of age when she was deported on April 4, 1942, along with her brother Fritz, her sister-in-law Irene, and her niece Anneliese, to the Piaski ghetto. There are no known survivors of this transport. The conditions in the Piaski ghetto were barbaric: there was a horrendous shortage of food and medicine, the hygiene conditions were catastrophic, the living quarters extremely cramped. Many of the deportees did not survive the summer of 1942 because of the extremely strenuous forced labor in road construction details and the surrounding camps. In 1943 the SS began transferring those still alive to the extermination camps and murdered them there in the gas chambers. When, where, and under which circumstances Berta Sänger died remain unknown. Most of her relatives did not survive the Shoah. Only her sister Elsie Götz, my great grandmother, succeeded in emigrating to the United States. (Text Nancy Freund-Heller, editor C. Fritsche, translation C. Hales)