BY JANET SILVER GHENT
This is a story of two Gertrudes in my family tree who died tragically, and too soon. One was Gertrud Feiertag (1890-1943), a noted German educator who was murdered at Auschwitz, despite her neighbor Albert Einstein’s best attempts to save her. The other was American-born coloratura soprano Gertrude Silver (1872-1907). She died in Brussels at age 35, of an illness that could have been cured today, just as she was about to return from Belgium to her family in New York.
The stories of the two Gertrudes — a first cousin twice removed and a great-aunt — move me to tears. They deserve to be shared.
My family did not know about the Berlin-born Gertrud, a first cousin of my paternal grandfather. Because all my great-grandparents had immigrated to the United States in the mid-19th century, we were unaware of relatives who had died in the Holocaust. Yet I suspected that if I probed, I would find them. A link to the Silver family tree on Geni.com confirmed my suspicions. Yellow Stars of David and memorial candles accompanied the names of Gertrud and her siblings. All died in the camps.
Closer to home, I knew my great-aunt Gertrude was an opera singer in Europe, but she was just a name and, unfortunately, it was the wrong one, as she had performed under the alias Gertrude Sylva. Then Ancestry.com led me to second cousins in Southern California who had fleshed out her story with amazing photos and stellar reviews.
According to her obituary in The Theatre magazine, she left New York for Europe in 1897 “to seek abroad the recognition on the operatic stage she had been unable to secure in this country. …Gifted with a fine soprano voice and no mean powers as an actress, her success on the continent was immediate.” As I continued my search, I unwrapped a rare gift: turn-of-the-20th-century recordings on YouTube.
The story of Gertrud Feiertag is also virtually unknown in America. However, the German Wikipedia site and others reveal stories of her heroism. Gertrud was a childhood educator who launched a boarding school in 1931 in Gertrud Feiertag
Caputh, a few miles from Potsdam. Initially, the school sheltered and educated children of all faiths, including the late Jewish American journalist Tom Tugend. But in 1933, after the Nazis came into power, the school became a refuge for about 100 Jewish children.
Gertrud’s goal was not only to educate the children in the arts, Jewish culture and sciences, but to ensure their safety during horrendous times. To meet a growing need, she expanded the school, using Albert Einstein’s summer villa next door after he immigrated to America in 1933.
During the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the Nazis brought foreign visitors to the school to showcase progressive Jewish education. But in 1938, during Kristallnacht, townspeople vandalized the school, which the Nazis swiftly shuttered.
Gertrud returned to Berlin, where she worked with Jewish agencies to evacuate more children. Some of the children and teachers in Gertrud’s school survived the Shoah in England, where Gertrud personally shepherded children through the Kindertransport. She could have saved her own life but did not.
Gertrud “subordinated her own fate and was finally murdered,” said German public health researcher Benjamin Kuntz, who provided me with a translation of his 2021 talk at a ceremony in Caputh honoring Gertrud. She “has rightly gone down in history as an important reform educator,” he added.
In Caputh, a Stolperstein (brass plaque) commemorates her life, her work and her murder. Streets are named for her in Caputh and in Potsdam, where the university established the Gertrud Feiertag Scholarship to benefit female post-graduate and re-entry students.
With the other Gertrude, few Americans have heard of her, but now they can hear her on YouTube. The recordings from wax-coated cylinders are pocked with static, and Gertrude’s speaking voice sounds chirpy.
But boy could she sing.
On a 1902 Pathé disk, she recorded an excerpt from the famous mad scene in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” that displays her incredible range and talent as an actress. Listen to the laughing song (“L’éclat de rire”) from Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut,” recorded on a Bettini cylinder in 1906. Listen and weep.
I sent the links to Billie Bandermann, a voice teacher and director of HaShirim, a local Jewish choral group. “A powerhouse of a coloratura with a passion for drama,” she wrote.
Meanwhile, I play the recordings and research lives lost. I can best honor these women by telling their stories.
This column ran on Nov. 1, 2024, in J. The Jewish News of Northern California.
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