Gabriele Charlotte Derenberg (Schiff)
Vita
(MK) Gabriele Schiff
Even before she left Germany in 1938 at the age of twenty-one, Gabriele Schiff had already been actively involved in trying to smuggle Jewish children out of Germany and in attempting to persuade young people to emigrate to Palestine. Her primary interest was in becoming a social worker but it was evident that she would never be able to obtain a degree in Germany. Her father was a physician in Hamburg and she had many relatives in the United States, but she did not want to be "the poor European relative who had to be supported." Although she was a member of the wealthy Warburg family, she determined to make it on her own. She was fortunate to land a job in Philadelphia taking care of children in the household of a University of Pennsylvania professor who encouraged her to apply for a scholarship to college.
During the war she worked in a psychiatric hospital in Maryland and then was sent by the War Relocation Authority to Oswego, New York, to help administer a refugee camp.
At the time of this interview, 1981, Dr. Schiff was one of the directors of Selfhelp Community Services, the nonprofit welfare organization founded in 1936 by a group of German émigrés to assist Jewish refugees in finding homes and work. My friend Walter Hess is present and asks some of the questions.
GS. Oswego was the only camp that ever existed where President Roosevelt brought a thousand refugees to live in this country behind barbed wire. They were predominantly Jewish refugees who had landed up in Italy. The secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, had sent his assistant, Dr. Ruth Gruber, to Italy to look over the Italian camps and she came back with a thousand people.
It was a wild mixture of nationalities and religions, though predominantly Jewish because the Italians had put the Jews into camps. They were not concentration camps, though people always say they are, but you can't compare them. They were detainment camps, I guess. (S. 202)
(USHMM) Oral history interview with Gabriele Derenberg Schiff
Gabriele D. Schiff, born in 1914 in Hamburg, Germany, discusses her childhood in an assimilated Jewish household; her encounters with antisemitism; her job as a social worker in a Jewish orphanage; moving to England for school and then returning to Germany; immigrating to England and then to the United States in 1937; graduating from Swarthmore College with a B.A. in English and then earning a degree in social work from the University of Pennsylvania; her knowledge of the situation in Germany during the war; working with the American Friends Service Committee to help refugees get affidavits of support to immigrate to the United States; working as a counselor at a refugee vacation camp set up by the Quakers in Nyack, New York; working for a year at a state psychiatric hospital in Maryland and serving as the director of recreation at a camp for conscientious objectors; being classified as an enemy alien during the war but then becoming an American citizen; being asked by the War Relocation Authority to work at the refugee camp in Oswego, New York in 1943; going to Italy with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in 1946; her observations on the suffering of refugees after World War II; the desire of refugees to immigrate to Palestine; leaving Italy in 1948 and working for the Joint in Brazil; returning to Europe and working for the Joint in Germany; suffering injuries in a car accident and recuperating in a hospital in Italy where she met her husband; returning to the United States in 1950, marrying, and starting work; and her experiences working with Holocaust survivors in the United States.
Q: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn506744
(obit) Gabriele Schiff Obituary
SCHIFF-Gabriele D. Selfhelp Community Services, Inc., and United Help, mourn the passing of a devoted staff member of thirty-eight years. Her passionate commitment to services for victims of Nazi persecution inspired everyone with whom she worked.
Published by New York Times on Sep. 8, 2002.
Notes
(geni.com) Tochter von Dr. Julius Derenberg und Louise Martha Derenberg
Ehefrau von David Schiff
Schwester von Carl J. Derenberg; Walter Julius Derenberg und Ruth Olga Nieuwenhuis