Born: Marion Fernich
Frankfurt, Germany
January 7, 1931
Died: August 24, 2006
Marcella Newman was born in Frankfurt, Germany on January 7, 1931. Two years later, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor. When she was a young child Newman’s parents, a butcher and housewife, moved the family to the city of Mannheim about 50 miles to the south. Her family attended synagogue regularly and she attended a Jewish school.
Newman was seven years old on the night of November 9, 1938, when Nazis “came storming through our door” during the pogrom of Kristallnacht. Her father was arrested and sent to Dachau. He was eventually released, and two years later Newman and her parents were among the approximately 2,000 Jews rounded up and deported to the Gurs camp in southwestern France. Newman recalled “mud up to your waist… it was dirty and the barracks were cold.”
In February 1941 Newman was rescued by an organization of the French resistance. Disguised as a Catholic orphan, she was given a new name and hidden in a children’s home in France. Her parents were not as fortunate. They were ultimately deported and killed at Auschwitz.
Newman immigrated to the U.S. in September 1946 and stayed with relatives in New York. At her junior high school Newman met sisters and fellow survivors Lea Weems (née Krell) and Ruth Steinfeld (née Krell). When she was 18, Newman put herself through night classes at a beauty school. She married in 1951 and six years later the young family moved to Houston. There Newman raised her daughter and operated a salon with her friend Ruth Steinfeld. Newman retired to Palm Springs, California where she died in 2006.
Parents:
Moritz Fernich, d. Auschwitz, 1943
Bertha Wilmersdorfer Fernich, d. Auschwitz, 1943