Dr. med. Anna Justine Bischofswerder

Justina Anna Horowitz was born in Thorn in 1888, attended school there and studied at home to get her high school diploma (Abitur) because girls were not allowed to attend high school. She then continued on to study medicine in Berlin, which was not easy at that time because many university professors would not accept females in their classes. She became a doctor and married her brother’s associate, the attorney Dr. Franz Bischofswerder. They had a child whom we already mentioned, “poor Ernst.” In our research Michael and I discovered that Ernst had been ill with scarlet fever when he was about five years old and developed encephalitis which resulted in mental retardation. Justina must have struggled to give her son the opportunity to acquire a minimum of knowledge. Official police records report that as an eighteen year old, in 1937, he was involved in a street argument with a Nazi. He was imprisoned and after some time transferred to a psychiatric hospital. Justina, Moni and my mother Maxa (who by then was part of that family) were able to move him into a protestant institution where he stayed until 1942 when he was deported to the Warsaw Ghetto. Justina had refused to leave for America with her husband Franz Bischofswerder because she did not want to abandon her child. She remained alone in Nazi Berlin where she continued medical practice. However, as a Jew she was not allowed to be called a doctor anymore, as she was only permitted to have Jewish patients. Her title was “Krankenbehandler” (“someone who treats sick people”). Up until the time she was deported, she lived in two small rooms in a so-called “House for Jews” in the Bavarian district of Berlin. When Hitler’s propaganda minister Goebbels declared that Berlin would be free of Jews, she was arrested on a street and deported with one of the last Berlin convoys to Auschwitz.

Eintrag im »Gedenkbuch« des Bundesarchivs:

Bischofswerder, Justine Justina Jula Anna geborene Horowitz geboren am 28. Oktober 1888 in Thorn (poln. Torun) / - / Westpreußen wohnhaft in Berlin

Deportationsziel: ab Berlin 06. März 1943, Auschwitz, Vernichtungslager

cf.: https://www.stolpersteine-berlin.de/de/biografie/2286

&: https://geschichte.charite.de/aeik/biografie.php?ID=AEIK00290

• Reference: Ancestry Genealogy - SmartCopy: Jul 13 2019, 4:13:52 UTC
• Reference: Ancestry Genealogy - SmartCopy: Jul 13 2019, 4:21:07 UTC