Born: Rose Zider
Paris, France
March 20, 1929
Rose Rosenthal was born on March 20, 1929 in Paris, France where her parents, both immigrants from eastern Europe, owned a grocery store in a poor Jewish neighborhood. Rosenthal remembered other children at school calling her a “dirty Jew.”
Rosenthal was only 10 years old when World War II began in September 1939. As the Germany army approached Paris in the spring of 1940, her family packed up their belongings and fled the city. Rosenthal later remembered that “the roads were all jammed with people … walking, cars, everything.”
For a year Rosenthal’s family lived with friends of her parents in a town in unoccupied France near the Swiss border. With the help of relatives in New York, the family was able to secure visas allowing them to immigrate to the United States. In 1941, Rosenthal and her family traveled through Spain to Portugal where they boarded a ship that would carry them on a three-week journey to Baltimore. Rosenthal later recalled that “we were very afraid that we would get torpedoed or we would be sunk by the mines.”
The family moved to New York where Rosenthal’s parents opened a grocery store in Brooklyn. Rosenthal resumed her education and went on to earn a degree at the City College of New York. After graduation, she married and moved with her new husband to Houston. There Rosenthal found work as a French teacher. The couple had two children.
Years later, Rosenthal learned that nearly all of her extended family—including both sets of grandparents, her aunts, uncles and cousins—had been murdered in the Holocaust. Of 12 siblings, only Rosenthal’s father and his brother survived.
Parents:
Michel (Max) Zider, survived
Perl Zahnstecher Zider, survived
Siblings:
Elise Lili, survived