My great aunt Helene Rothschild was born on the 6 May 1862 in Ottenstein, the daughter of Siegmund Rothschild. She never married. She stayed in the village and ran the grocery business among her other activities. Family lore recalls that she kept charge of the sefer torah from the synagogue built by the family, and that it was one of the possessions she tried to protect till the end – but while my grandmother saw much of her furniture and linens and silver and art work after the war in the houses of her erstwhile neighbours, the scroll disappeared.  We have one beautiful tablecloth of hers that one neighbour gave to my grandmother.

She had expected to die where she had been born and lived, where her family owned the Jewish cemetery and her father and mother were buried.  Indeed family lore speaks of the grave she had organised for…