Käte Laserstein was classed as a “non-Aryan Christian” and dismissed from her teaching post in 1933. She met her fellow teacher Rose Ollendorff at a Jewish private school. A joint attempt to escape to Switzerland failed.
When Ollendorff was threatened with deportation in January 1942, Laserstein took her into the apartment she shared with her mother in Berlin-Steglitz, despite the extreme risk. On July 13, 1942, Laserstein also had to go underground. Her mother Meta Laserstein was deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp, since she had not betrayed her daughter’s location.
After a number of hiding places, the couple found refuge in a primitive garden house in the Wilmersdorf district, which belonged to Ollendorff’s former teacher Gertrud Kopitsch. They also took in Ollendorff’s former partner Lucie Friedländer there.
In February 1945 the three Jewish women moved in with Elisabeth Wust, whom they had met in a restaurant. Wust claimed to her neighbors that they were “bombed-out cousins from Frankfurt.” Käte Laserstein emigrated to Sweden to join her sister, the painter Lotte Laserstein, in 1946 but returned to Berlin in 1954.