Gertrud Betti Fink

Gertrud was my first cousin once removed. She was deported from Vienna to the Łódź Ghetto along with her parents, my great-uncle Theodor and his wife Rosa, on 10th October 1941. She was 14 year old. Neither she nor her parents survived the Holocaust. Theodor perished in the ghetto on 29 April 1942, but neither the exact date or place of Gertrud or Rosa's deaths are known. Theodor had desperately attempted to get his family out of Vienna for years. There are records of him meeting every escalating demand of the nazis to allow him him to leave the country, all to no avail. Gertrud's older sister Ernestine and her husband Kurt had managed to escape to the UK in 1939, where they were interned in Boxhill, Surrey, prior to travelling to New York in May 1940. On 4th March 1941 she deposited $ 1,149 with the Jewish Transmigration Bureau of the JDC, hoping to secure the crossing to the USA of her parents and sister. This too was to no avail. Gertrud and her parents were just 3 individuals of 6 million, each of whose lives were valuable, who were tortured and murdered, for the only reason of being Jewish.