After her mother was deported at the end of 1942, Ilse Lewin decided to evade her own impending deportation. Her friend Greta Schellwort warned her of the huge round-up planned for February 27, 1943, in which all the Jews in Berlin, especially those from armament factories, were to be arrested and deported. Greta Schellwort, who was a doctor in the police hospital, had heard rumors to this effect.

At first Ilse Lewin was taken in by acquaintances in Strausberg, but after that she had no permanent shelter until mid-1944. She lived from food that Greta Schellwort slipped to her. She was able to earn some money as a cleaner in a tailor’s shop until the tailor exploited her desperate situation to sexually harass her. Ilse Lewin’s friend, Vera Freyer, gave her forged identity papers with which she was able to obtain a postal identity card in Vera Freyer’s name. In the summer of 1944 another non-Jewish friend, Ilse Glondajewski, helped Ilse Lewin to find a hiding place in the Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg, where she managed to stay until the end of the war.

Later she married an old friend, Günter Stillmann, who returned from Palestine in 1948. Ilse Stillmann worked from 1954 on at the Children’s Books Publishing House in East Berlin, where she died in 1988.

Johanna Putzrath and Else and Hans Ackermann

Johanna Putzrath lived in Breslau with her family. They moved to Berlin in 1931. Her husband, Eduard Putzrath, and her two sons, Heinz and Alfred, were able to emigrate before 1939.

In 1942, at the age of 53, Johanna Putzrath was compelled to work as a forced laborer in a firm in Tempelhof in Berlin. She knew that Else Ackermann and her brother Hans had offered help to another Jewish worker at the firm. When this woman was unexpectedly deported, Johanna Putzrath turned to the Ackermanns. Else Ackermann, a retired teacher, and her brother Hans, a former municipal civil servant, were devout Protestants and adherents of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophic philosophy. Without hesitating, Hans Ackermann took the unknown Jewish woman into his two-roomed apartment in Tempelhof. His sister Else, who lived in Steglitz, joined him in helping the refugee Johanna Putzrath.

At the end of January 1943 Hans Ackermann also gave shelter for over a month to a married couple, Ines and Max Krakauer, until they found other places to stay in southern Germany. When the Ackermanns’ apartments were destroyed by bombs in May 1944, they moved to 57 Alboinstraße, where they continued hiding Johanna Putzrath. After almost two-and-a-half years, the three of them witnessed the end of the war together.

Johanna Putzrath emigrated to the USA and lived in New York until her death in 1975. Else Ackermann died in the 1940s in Berlin; her brother Hans died in 1959.