After her first husband’s death, Anna Keue continued to run their store for hairdressing equipment and mustache trainers. Later, her son Harald Gambke completed a commercial apprenticeship and joined the company. The two of them lived together in Berlin-Kreuzberg.
When a frightened man, Paul Spitzer, knocked at their apartment door in the fall of 1944 and said he was Jewish, Harald Gambke consulted his mother briefly and then took him in. Anna Keue provided Spitzer with ration cards and food from the black market. After around six months, in the spring of 1945, the situation in the apartment became too dangerous since Harald Gambke’s brother-in-law, a senior court-martial judge, threatened to betray them. Gambke took Paul Spitzer to an acquaintance, with whom he spent the last few weeks of the war.