Gerty Spies (13.1.1897 Trier – 10.10.1997 Munich)

Gerty Spies (née Gertrude Elisabeth Gumprich) came from a respected, well-established German-Jewish family in Trier, where her father Sigmund Gumprich (1861-1926) ran a clothing store and was renowned as a dialect poet. She benefited from a progressive education and, after finishing high school, passed the state exam in domestic science at the 'School for Women' of the Auguste-Viktoria-Lyceum in Trier. She subsequently trained as a childcare worker at the Froebel Seminar in Frankfurt am Main. Having married the chemist Alfred Spies in 1920, they separated in 1927. In 1929, Gerty Spies relocated to Munich with her daughter, while her son resided in Bethel.

In Nazi Germany, she was considered 'privileged' among the persecuted Jews due to her marriage to a non-Jew and their children. She initially escaped the ghettoization and deportation of the Jewish population that began in 1941, but was forced to work in the Bruckmann publishing house, among other places. Deportation to the Theresienstadt ghetto followed in July 1942. She pitted her words against the forced labor, hunger, and cold, as well as the daily confrontation with death, writing poems and prose sketches on stolen packaging paper over her three years in Theresienstadt.

Spies survived. She was among the approximately 160 Jewish residents of Munich who returned home from Theresienstadt in June 1945. Unlike her daughter, who left Germany and emigrated to the USA in 1949, Gerty Spies stayed. She turned the notes that she took while detained at the concentration camp into a poetry collection, which was published under the title 'Theresienstadt' by the newly established Freitag-Verlag in Munich in 1947. However, she did not manage to find a publisher in the young Federal Republic for her autobiographical recollections 'Three Years in Theresienstadt' and her novel 'Bitter Youth.' It was not until the 1980s that Spies's literary oeuvre was rediscovered, and to some extent published and appreciated for the first time. The author, who was always committed to fostering dialog and had been the honorary president of the Munich Association for Christian-Jewish Cooperation since 1984, passed away at an advanced age in the Jewish Nursing Home on Kaulbach Street in 1997.