Betty Katz née Falk

Location 
Wrangelstr. 6 -7
District
Steglitz
Stone was laid
02 December 2017
Born
21 August 1872 in Posen / Poznań
Deportation
on 14 September 1942 to Theresienstadt
Murdered
06 June 1944 in Theresienstadt
Betty Katz was born on August 21, 1872 in Posen. Her parents were Felix and Agnes Falk. She studied and became a schoolteacher. Betty Falk married Leopold Katz. They had two sons, one of whom died in 1918 in the war in Macedonia. Her husband died in October 1926.

It was likely after her husband's death that she moved to Berlin. She worked in Berlin as the director of the Jewish Home for the Blind.

In the fall of 1941, Betty and the blind women and men in her care at the Jewish Home were moved to the Blind and Deaf Home in the Weissensee District of Berlin. In September 1942, Betty and fifteen former residents of the Jewish Home for the Blind were deported to Theresienstadt. 

Among the 1000 people deported in Berlin’s second large “Transport of the Elderly” were approximately 82 residents of the Home for the Blind and Deaf in Weissensee, which had become a pre-deportation collection point for residents of other Jewish facilities. 

Before deportation, Betty Katz filled out and signed the required Assets Declaration forms for many of the blind people in her care. She looked after them, helpless and entrusted to her care, until the very end of her life. 

Betty Katz died on June 6, 1944 at the transit camp at Theresienstadt. Each of the fifteen residents who had been deported with her had already been murdered by this time.