Emilie Schwed, geb. Bergmann

Emilie Bergmann was born in Gochsheim near Schweinfurt on October 17, 1859 to the Jewish merchant Michael Bergmann and his wife Babette, née Prager. Nothing is known about her childhood and youth. Emilie Bergmann married the merchant Fritz Schwed on July 26, 1885. After their wedding, the couple lived in Nuremberg and had three children: Else, born in 1887, Mathilde, born in 1889, and Karl, born in 1892. Fritz Schwed died in Nuremberg on September 7, 1915. Emilie Schwed spent nearly all her life in Nuremberg. It was only in 1933 that she moved to Munich to live with her married daughter Else Samuel, at first at Tengstraße 26 and from 1936 at Possartstraße 6. Her daughter Mathilde Mahler, too, lived with her family in Munich. Emilie Schwed had to undergo the painful experience of separation from her children and grandchildren when her grandchildren Paul Walter Samuel, Lieselotte Samuel, Edgar Mahler and Rosemarie Lisbeth Mahler emigrated to New York in 1935 and 1936. Her daughter Else Samuel, Else’s husband Max and her daughter Mathilde Mahler followed them between the end of 1938 and the beginning of 1939. Nothing is known about the fate of her son Karl. In February 1939, Emilie Schwed had to move to Trogerstraße 17, and just under two years later she was put in the Jewish retirement home at Kaulbachstraße 65. On June 10, 1942 the Gestapo (Secret Police) deported the 82-year-old with 50 others from the home to Theresienstadt ghetto. Emilie Schwed only survived the catastrophic living conditions, the hunger and the deliberate neglect in the so-called “old people’s home“ in the Kavalierkaserne (cavalry barracks) for a short time. She died in Theresienstadt ghetto on September 20, 1942.