Hans Rosenthal had to perform forced labor in Neuendorf near Fürstenwalde. He moved back to Berlin after his mother’s death in November 1941. A year later his younger brother Gert, who lived in a Jewish orphanage, was deported. Hans Rosenthal escaped deportation because he was temporarily in a home for youths due to “insubordinate” behavior. He went underground at the end of March 1943. His non-Jewish grandmother Anna Rosenthal could not take him in but sent him to her acquaintance Ida Jauch, who lived in the Dreieinigkeit allotment gardens in the Lichtenberg district. Jauch hid him in a tiny space inside her garden house. He could only leave his hiding place at night, during air-raid alarms. His grandmother brought food now and then. When Ida Jauch died suddenly in July 1944, Rosenthal asked her neighbor Maria Schönebeck for help. An anti-Nazi, she took him in and shared her food rations with him. Hans Rosenthal was liberated by the Red Army in April 1945.
In 2011 a stone was installed at Bernhard-Bästlein-Straße 22, the site of the former allotment gardens, commemorating Rosenthal and his courageous helpers.