Martha Bauer

Mondschein family in Holocaust Archives Project, College of Charleston (SC): http://lowcountrydigital.library.cofc.edu/cdm4/document.php?CISOROO...

Unknown to one another, Felix Bauer and Martha Mondschein independently fled Europe and immigrated to the Dominican Republic, where they eventually met and married in 1943.

Martha Mondschein Bauer Papers at the College of Charleston, SC, Special Collections: Martha Mondschein Bauer was born on January 16, 1915, in Kassel, Germany. She received her training as a nurse at the Jewish Hospital in Cologne. In 1939, Bauer left Germany for England, where she worked as a nurse on a children's ward and learned English from her patients.

The United Kingdom ordered all enemy aliens to be interned in 1940, and Mondschein was deported to the Isle of Man and then moved to London, where she stayed during the London Blitz. She later agreed to go to the Dominican Republic, a neutral country, traveling on a ship protected by a naval convoy from England to the United States.

After a ten-day stay at Ellis Island, Mondschein obtained a transfer to the Dominican Republic and arrived in Sosúa, where she was located in a settlement of approximately 200 refugees. As a nurse, she worked with three European doctors to organize and equip a hospital. Shortly after arriving, she met Felix Bauer, a native of Vienna, Austria. They married on March 6, 1943. In October 1946, the Bauers moved to Due West, South Carolina, where Felix Bauer taught music and art at Erskine College until he retired in 1979; Martha Bauer worked as a nurse until her retirement in 1981.