Family members listed in 1939 at Blyth Road camp
Salomon's widow and daughters survived the Nazis
After Salomon Paechter's death in 1915, his 60-year-old widow Emilie moved in with her older daughter's family at Nestorstrasse 4, just off the Kurfürstendamm in Halensee. Kaethe Simonsohn and her husband Max had likely raised their two children there after coming to Berlin from Tiegenhof sometime after 1902.
Kaethe's sister Lisbeth was off in America of all places, together with her husband Leonard Weissberg. For a decade between 1914 and 1923, they lived on W. 150th Street in New York. In 1917, Leonard registered for the U.S. military draft as an alien "declarant," indicating his intention to become a U.S. citizen.
Instead, they returned to Berlin and may have lived together with the family at the Halensee address. They did not have children.
There was more room in the apartment now that Ernst, the older child, was away at university. Then Max Simonsohn died in 1924 at age 53, the same year that Ernst graduated from Greifswald Medical School and begun his research career in the physiology of work.
Charlotte Simonsohn, Ernst's sister, married Alexander Rosam in 1926, but that union did not last. She married again in 1936 to Siegfried Dagobert Priester, a lawyer.
Ernst joined the faculty at the University of Frankfurt/Main in 1928. There he married Sophie Schemel, a local Lutheran girl. He excelled in Frankfurt (more on his career in a future post) but in 1933 he went to the USSR as the director of an institute of industrial physiology in Kharkiv, Ukraine. There, a son, Walther Ernst, was born.
After a further year in an academic job in Prague, the family was able to escape Europe and reached the U.S. in 1939.
Charlotte and her husband Siegfried managed to get out, too—first to Antwerp and then on a passage to Brazil, where they would settle in Rio de Janeiro.
The other four family members—Lisbeth and Leonard Weissberg, Kaethe Simonsohn, and 82-year-old Emilie Paechter—were evacuated by some means to London. I haven't found details of their journey, but they show up together in a 1939 all-England census living in a refugee camp in Suffolk, England.
On that register, Leonard's occupation is given as "importer of foodstuffs."
Kaethe did not stay long in England, departing in August 1940 to join Charlotte and her husband in Brazil. A few months later, Emilie died at age 83 and was buried in Blackburn, Lancaster, England.
Lisbeth and Leonard may have stayed in that area, as Lisbeth was buried in that same cemetery after her death a decade later, in December 1951. I don't have a record of Leonard's death.
Ernst with wife and child went first to Milwaukee. He dropped the aitches in his last name and son's first name. When the kid started school, he was Walter Simonson. After a few years, Ernst took a professorship at the University of Minnesota, and the family settled in the Minneapolis area.
Ernst went twice to Brazil, in 1948 and 1959, to visit his mother and sister there. One imagines they may also have visited in the U.S., but I don't have a record of that.
Walter Simonson went on to a distinguished career himself as a computer scientist working in the Virginia/D.C. area for companies such as Burroughs and Control Data. He had two sons and two daughters, who represent the future of the Salomon Paechter branch of the family.
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