Inge Deutschkron (1922–2022)

Inge Deutschkron was born in Finsterwalde, Germany, to a Jewish family. They moved to Berlin in 1927. With the rise of the Nazis to power in 1933, her father Martin Deutschkron, a teacher and Social Democrat, was fired from his job. He fled to the UK in 1939, but the outbreak of World War II prevented Inge and her mother Ella from joining him as planned. In 1941, she was sent to forced labor at ACETA, a parachute silk factory belonging to the IG Farben group, but deliberately injured her knee and was discharged. Between 1941 and 1943, she worked for Otto Weidt in his brush workshop. He employed mainly deaf and blind workers, a large proportion of whom were Jewish, and it was with his help that Inge managed to avoid deportation. From January 1943, when her workplace was shut down, she and her mother went into hiding, moving from apartment to apartment. Although they had close brushes with death, they survived thanks to luck, their own resourcefulness, and the courage of their friends. In 1946, Inge and her mother were reunited with Martin in London. She studied foreign languages and went to work in the offices of the Socialist International. Beginning in 1954, she traveled to India, Burma, Nepal, and Indonesia and wrote articles for several journals before eventually returning to Germany in 1955. She worked in Bonn as a freelance journalist. In 1958, she was hired by the Israeli newspaper Maariv as a correspondent and reported on the Frankfurt Auschwitz war crimes trials in 1963. She became an Israeli citizen in 1966 and moved permanently in 1972 to Tel Aviv, where she was named an editor of Maariv. Since 1992, she has been a freelance writer in Tel Aviv and Berlin, where she gives public talks and also helps to oversee the work of the Museum of Otto Weidt and the Silent Heroes Museum. She has written 10 books for children and adults about the Holocaust and about her life, including Outcast: A Jewish Girl in Wartime Berlin (aka I Wore the Yellow Star).