United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Steven N. Montrose was born Stefan Joachim Natan “Natek” Rozenberg in Łódź, Poland, in 1938 to Marcel Rozenberg and Stefania Fajner Rozenberg. Stefania died from lung disease while he was an infant. Bernard Fayner, Stefania’s brother, his wife Yetta, and daughter Helenka, moved in with the Rozenbergs to help raise Natek, and Natek believed that his aunt Yetta was his mother. The families were very wealthy and owned several textile factories and pieces of real estate in and around Łódź. They managed to delay their forced resettlement in the Łódź ghetto through bribery until March 1940, and Marcel continued to operate his textile factory. They lived in a small apartment, hiding in a family factory attic, in a small hospital, and in various bombed out buildings until they were evacuated. Natek was sent with his aunt Yetta to the Ravensbruck concentration camp where Natek’s job was carrying the soup pots back to the kitchen after meals. Natek and Yetta were transferred to Königs Wusterhausen, a sub-camp of Sachsenhausen, where they were reunited with Marcel and Bernard through a barbed wire fence. Natek was transferred without his family to Sachsenhausen, where he went into hiding under the barracks and scavenged for food at night. Natek’s uncles Bernard and Dudek arrived at Sachsenhausen during the week after its liberation in April 1945 and found him starving. They reunited him with his aunt Yetta in Königs Wusterhausen. The family returned to Łódź to find their home occupied by a Polish family, so they stayed in a family textile factory. His father, who had been sent on a death march and was presumed dead, also returned to Łódź weeks later. Marcel and Natek were relocated to a displaced persons camp in Berlin and then to an apartment in Hanover. Marcel changed their last name to Montrose and Natek’s name to Steven, and he sent his son to live with the family of his brother Joseph Mountrose, a respected heart specialist, in London. Marcel met and married a German concentration camp survivor and immigrated with her to the United States in 1950; Natek joined them a couple of years later.
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The Steven N. Montrose papers are arranged as a single series.
The Steven N. Montrose papers consist of photographs depicting Montrose (born Nathan Rozenberg) and his parents and other relatives in prewar and wartime Łódź and postwar Germany. The collection also includes birth and naturalization certificates for Montrose and his father and a book proposal for an autobiography by Montrose describing his prewar and wartime life in Łódź, the Łódź ghetto, concentration camps, postwar Germany, immigration to the United States, and new life in America.
Steven N. Montrose papers