Elsbeth Rosen and her family moved to Berlin-Charlottenburg in 1940, having had to give up their restaurant in Pomerania since they were Jewish. From July 1941 she performed forced labor for the Siemens & Halske company. On January 7, 1943, Rosen went underground after being warned. She approached the police sergeant Georg Bruns, who had fought in the First World War with her father, and asked him and his wife Elisabeth for help. The couple, who lived in Berlin-Steglitz with their two children, took her in and passed her off to strangers as a cousin of Georg Bruns whose papers had been destroyed in an air raid.
The Bruns family home was destroyed in an air raid on March 1, 1943. They found new quarters in Charlottenburg, taking Elsbeth Rosen with them. When this building was also hit by a bomb in November 1943, Elisabeth Bruns left Berlin with the children.
She left her employment record booklet for Elsbeth Rosen, who used it to register and obtain food ration cards. She lived in a furnished room with Georg Bruns until the end of the war. In 1959, Rosen’s engagement to Hans Herzberg, who had been deported to Auschwitz at the end of 1943, was posthumously legalized as a marriage.