Betty Twiasschor was apparently separated from her husband Pinkas
Back in Berlin after getting married in London, Betty and Pinkas produced two daughters, Edith and Geena, in the following years, let's say before 1920. I have not found their birth records and there are not any residence records for the family in those years. The next time Betty shows up it is in a 1926 address book and she is living at 54 Lothringer, apparently without Pinkas.
In my experience with German address books it is usually the husband's name that is listed. When a women is the head of household, she is listed under her married name with her maiden name identified. That's how Betty's listings read: Betty Twiasschor, geboren Ringel. She is in the directory in 1926, 1929, 1931 [recheck these] that I have found so far. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the address is an apartment adjacent to another one where her sister Rosa lived with her two children. Later Rosa moved to the Tiergarten district, but they shared a floor of an apartment building for at least five years, maybe more.
I lose track of Pinkas through these years but he shows up again rather dramatically in 1944, when he is among the passengers on a celebrated refugee ship that came to the United States, and who were held for nine months at a military base in Oswego NY. The ship had refugees from various locations. Pinkas Twiasschor came from a intern camp in Italy, where he had been a prisoner. The plight of the refugees was the subject of a Congressional investigation and a 1983 best-selling book, Haven, by Ruth Gruber.
The image shows Pinkas registering for the U.S. military while in the Fort Ontario refugee camp. Later, he re-enters the United States at Niagara, New York, and becomes a legal U.S. immigrant.
So what was the deal with Betty's marriage to Pinkas? Am I reading too much into the address listing? Maybe they stayed together until he was possibly forceably expelled from the country in the so-called Polen-aktion of October 28, 1938. That is exactly what happened to his brother-in-law Israel Goldstein, who, on grounds of his Polish birth, was separated from his family on that day in Berlin, transported to the Polish border and forced to leave German territory.
I learned all about his experience, and what happened next to Israel and Dina Goldstein, at a wonderful site that tells the stories behind Berlin's memorial "stumbling stones," or Stoperstine. Read on.
