Strauss/ Sterzelbach Family papers

The Strauss and Sterzelbach families came from Weiden, Bavaria, where Immanuel Strauss, grandfather of the depositor, was teacher, rabbi and shochet of the Jewish community. He was  a teacher at the small Jewish school in Weiden for many years.

Kossy Strauss, the second of six children of Immanuel strauss, attended high school in Karlsruhe and then studied chemistry and metallurgy in Munich. Having heard Hitler ranting in a bierkeller, he decided to leave Germany for England in 1933. He married Berta Sterzelbach in the UK and set up a company, 'Foundry Services Ltd'. Kossy was instrumental in assisting all his close family and many friends and acquaintances in their efforts to leave Nazi Germany. His sister, Relly and her husband, Moritz went to Kenya. His brother, Hermann also spent some time in Kenya. Minni and Gustav Roseman along with Hannah and Willy Marx went to Montevideo, Uruguay. David, Kossy's youngest brother, came to Birmingham.

The Sterzelbach family in Weiden consisted of the depositor's grandparents, Leo and Elise, owners of a haberdashery store. Leo ran it together with his brother, Moritz and they lived on the premises. Berta, the donor's mother, was the eldest of three daughters. Her middle sister, Hanna, married and went to live in Paris from where she had to flee at the outbreak of war. Her husband, Max Schloss, joined the Foreign Legion to escape, and Hanna and her small daughter met him again in Spain after she had trekked across the Pyrenees. The youngest sister, Hedwig, came to England as a student nurse and trained at the general hospital in Birmingham. Leo's brother, Moritz, went with his wife, Irene (nee Frank) to Montevideo, Uruguay, where they lived until 1957, when they came to England to join their only son, Heiner, who had come to Birmingham in 1939 as an electrical engineering apprentice.