Museum Blindenwerkstatt Otto Weidt –biographie

The Jewish twins Marianne and Annelies Bernstein were born in Königsberg in 1922. Their father died by suicide in 1933 after public antisemitic humiliation. In the hope of emigrating, the sisters moved to Berlin and began learning a trade in 1940. Annelies trained as a seamstress, while the almost blind Marianne Bernstein learned brush-making at Otto Weidt’s workshop.
After their mother was deported in 1942, Marianne and Annelies Bernstein decided to go into hiding. Hedwig Porschütz took the sisters into her home in January 1943. When the Gestapo found a Jewish couple hiding in the same building, the twins left the apartment in the summer of 1943. Hedwig Porschütz continued to provide them with food.
After a denunciation in summer 1944, they left Berlin and found work and shelter near Breslau (Wrocław). Both sisters survived the war. Marianne and Annelies Bernstein emigrated to the United States in the spring of 1946.