Margarete Landsberg née Schlesinger

Margarete “Grete“ Schlesinger & Paul Landsberg Markgraf-Albrecht-Straße 8
Margarete Schlesinger Landsberg was born in Schweidnitz in 1894, now Swidnica, Poland. She was the oldest of five children of Julius and Ruscha Schlesinger. She was a free spirit who was a non-conformist most of her life. As a young adult she married Paul Landsberg, a lawyer, in 1920 who was the son of friends of the family in Schweidnitz. By 1933, when Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany, Paul was forced to abandon his law practice because of anti-Jewish laws adopted by the Nazi regime. The Landsbergs moved to Berlin where life became increasingly dangerous for Jews. They harbored their nephew Claus Shelling (Schlesinger) from Schweidnitz (now Swidnica, Poland) after Kristallnacht in November 1938 for several months. By 1942, with the receipt of a deportation order from the Jewish Office in Berlin, Paul & Grete fled Germany with the assistance of a smuggler who got them through Germany and over the Alps to Italy then ruled by Dictator Benito Mussolini in a harrowing escape. They ended up in the Ferramonti di Tarsia internment Camp in Sicily. Ferramonti was located on a malaria-plagued piece of land, about 20 miles from Cosenza in Calabria,. Paul and Grete were in the camp from 1942-44. During that period Grete’s mother Ruscha Schlesinger was deported from Berlin along with three of her sisters (Emma, Margarethe, & Lucie) to Riga and Theresienstadt where they perished, victims of the Shoah. The Ferramonti di Tarsia camp was liberated by the allied forces in 1943. Paul and Grete continued to live in the camp until they were selected for admission to a refugee camp in the US called the Fort Ontario Refugee Shelter near Oswego, NY established by President Franklin Roosevelt shortly before he died. They crossed the Atlantic on the USNS Henry Gibbins, a troop transport ship in July, 1944. When the war ended the Refugee Shelter closed. Paul and Grete moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, California where two of her siblings, Elisabeth Lesser and Rudolph Shelling resided. Paul died in 1959 and Grete in 1970 in San Francisco, California.
Leslie Kay