The story of a Berlin-born Jewish woman who lived through the turbulent times of Imperial Germany, the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, all while growing up, falling in love and starting a family. With charming snapshots of holidays, kindergartens and Purim parties, Rosa shows us how integrated, assimilated Jewish families lived in Germany then.
In 1939, a few weeks after the war had started, her Hungarian husband Michi insisted on fleeing to Budapest, where he felt they would be safe. They weren’t. Both Michi and Rosa were arrested and put in a camp, and Michi perished in a forced labor brigade. Rosa survived by hiding in Budapest — but not until she sent her two daughters off to Palestine and saw them safe.
After the war, Rosa married a Viennese Jewish man, Alfred Rosenstein, and started another family in Vienna. Her son Georg moved to Israel, where he began a family of his own and lived for a long time before finally moving back to Austria. Rosa Rosenstein lived until she was ninety-eight years old, and died in 2005.