Lydia Hocke lived with her orphaned granddaughter Felicitas in Petershagen, east of Berlin. In March 1943 Chawa Berman knocked at her door. Persecuted as a Jew, she was actually looking for Hocke’s neighbor Clara Donath, a former colleague. Since Donath had died, however, Lydia Hocke took in the distraught stranger and let her live in the next-door building, for which she had a key. The house’s owner, Donath’s daughter Elvira Neumann, traveled constantly as a ticket inspector for the Reichsbahn and eventually moved to Kiel. She agreed to Berman hiding in her house.
Lydia Hocke managed to prevent soldiers from being billeted in the house, and her granddaughter made occasional trips to Berlin to get hold of food. When the Red Army liberated Petershagen on April 21, 1945, Chawa Berman identified herself in Russian as a Jewish survivor, which protected other people from violence. She worked as an interpreter for the Soviet forces until the summer of 1945. Lydia Hocke died in Petershagen on June 26, 1945 as a result of a dysentery infection.