After their parents’ deportation in 1943, the Jewish brothers Rolf and Alfred Joseph went into hiding in Berlin and were forced to spend the next few months sleeping in forests or stations. A non-Jewish acquaintance of their mother’s whom Rolf Joseph asked for help refused out of concern for her children, but too him to Marie Burde. Living in abject poverty, she was spontaneously willing to take him into her basement apartment in the Wedding district and share her meager food rations with him.
One day, Rolf Joseph was arrested when spot-checked by the Wehrmacht. He managed to escape from a train bound for Auschwitz. Several days later, he was picked up again and handed over to the Berlin Gestapo. Once again, he managed an adventurous escape and returned to Marie Burde, who had meanwhile also taken in his brother Alfred and his friend Arthur Fordanski.
Her basement apartment was destroyed in an air raid at the end of 1943, and in the spring of 1944 Burde took the three men to stay on her plot of land in Schönow, north of Berlin. Rolf Joseph remained there until the Red Army’s arrival at the end of April 1945.