Christine Roth (13.11.1927 Munich – 24.1.2015 New York)

Christine Roth’s father Bruno (1896-1984) was a member of a Jewish flour merchant family in Munich. Working for various companies as a commission agent for textiles and haberdashery, he left the Jewish religious community in 1924 and the following year married Else Walter, a Catholic. Christine Roth and her younger sisters Gertrude and Elfriede were baptized and brought up as Catholics. The family lived in Bogenhausen, initially at Cuvilliésstraße 1, and from 1934 at Schneckenburgerstraße 42. Christine Roth attended a private kindergarten, then the elementary school on Versailler Platz (now Ernst-Reuter-Straße 4) and the Catholic girls’ secondary school at Angerkloster.

After the National Socialists came to power, she and her siblings initially had a fairly sheltered upbringing in the Catholic milieu, but when the ‘Nuremberg Laws’ came into force in 1935, the increasingly harsh anti-Jewish measures impacted more and more on the family’s life. It became increasingly difficult for Bruno Roth to get commissions and finally, in July 1938, people of Jewish origin were generally prohibited from working as commercial agents. Bruno Roth now attempted to secure the family’s livelihood as a photographer – something he had previously done as a hobby – and one of his most important customers was the Catholic newspaper Münchner Katholische Kirchenzeitung.

After the November pogroms of 1938 he tried to emigrate to the USA, which he succeeded in doing in the summer of 1939. However, plans for the family to follow failed to materialize due to the start of the Second World War, and the financial situation of the family members who had remained in Germany became increasingly precarious. At the end of 1940, they moved into a smaller apartment at Richard-Strauss-Straße 1, with savings and support from relatives ensuring their survival before Christine Roth’s mother found a job as a seamstress.

During her school days at Angerkloster, Christine Roth had belonged to a girls’ group of the Heliand-Bund, an organization that had emerged from the Catholic youth movement. Even after all Catholic youth groups were banned in 1939, the girls met secretly almost every week for discussions and singing lessons, sometimes going on outings together, too. The group was supervised by Father Alfred Delp, who was arrested, sentenced to death and executed for his membership of the Kreisau Circle after the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944. When a decree was passed in July 1942 banning even those classified as ‘half-Jews’ by the Nazi regime from attending secondary schools, Christine Roth had to leave school. One of her mother’s brothers managed to find a job for her as a junior worker (apprentice) at a chemistry laboratory at the clinic on Nußbaumstraße.

In 1946 Cristine Roth emigrated to the USA with her mother and sisters to join her father. There she studied education and worked as a primary school teacher and private secretary. In 1959 she married Max Schurtman, a Jewish lawyer from Vienna who had escaped the Shoah by emigrating to Shanghai. The couple had two daughters and lived in New York, where Christine Roth died in 2015.