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Ginger Lane was at home with her mother in their Berlin apartment in the spring of 1943 when the Gestapo arrived. She doesn’t remember now, 80 years on, why exactly she hid behind a door as the two men led her mother—a Jewish woman born in Hungary—out of their home. But she does remember climbing onto a windowsill and looking down at the street below as the men put her mother, Lina Weber, into a black car, and drove away. It was the very last time Ginger saw her alive. She was 3 years old.
It wasn’t until early the following year that Ginger’s family were told, in a letter from the police, that Lina was dead. “They told us, of course, that it was influenza or something like that,” Ginger tells the Daily Beast. “But the family knew that she had been murdered.” Lina was killed in Auschwitz—the extermination camp built in Nazi-occupied Poland where around 1 million Jews were murdered by the Third Reich during the Holocaust.
Ginger, along with her six older siblings— Alfons, Senta, Ruth, Gertrude, Renee, and Judith—were also listed on a manifest to be deported to Auschwitz. “I don’t know where the document came from or how we learned, or how my father [Alexander Weber] learned that we were supposed to be on the next transport,” Ginger says. “All I do know is that Arthur Schmidt, I believe, told my father that we were scheduled to follow the next week. So he absolutely had to get us out of there.”