Margaret Gabali Rosenfelt collection 1912-1989, 2005, 2010

The collection contains personal papers of Margaret Gabali Rosenfelt (1912-2005), including official documents as well as correspondence with family, German and French authorities, and her friend Rudolf Schneider, a Stuttgart architect. A diary and memoirs are also included.Margarete Gabali was born on Sep. 2, 1912 in Hamburg, Germany, the daughter of a Jewish father, Alfred Gabali and a Lutheran mother, Sophie Auguste Frieda née May; she survived the Nazi period in Berlin. She was confirmed as a Lutheran in 1920, taking on the middle name Lydia. Her parents divorced and her father fled the Nazis to Holland in the 1930s; her mother died in Germany in 1937.Their three children, Margaret and her two younger brothers, Hans and Karl, stayed in Germany. Hans Gabali was in the Wehrmacht, but he was eventually dismissed. He immigrated to the US and became a quite well-known muralist in Long Island, NY. Karl (the youngest) tried to flee over the border to Switzerland, but he was caught and died in Auschwitz. Margaret worked as a textile designer at IG Farben in the 1930s. She lost her job in a purge of Jews from cultural industries, but she was allowed to work as a governess for a series of doctors’ families in spite of continuous harassments by the Gestapo.After the war, Margaret tried to get to her father in Holland, but was interned in France for over a year as an enemy alien. There are notebooks from the French camps. She emigrated to the US in the 1950s, got married and embarked on a successful career as a potter. She died on March 28, 2005 at the age of 92.Biographical abstract of Margaret Gabali Rosenfeld by Andrew Lear.On her death, Margaret Gabali Rosenfelt left her papers to Andrew Lear, the son of a family friend, who gave them to the LBI.Processeddigitize