Lisamaria Meirowsky

Lisamaria Meirowsky was a German dermatologist and pediatrician, born on 17 September 1904 in Graudenz and murdered at Auschwitz on 9 August 1942 because of her Jewish heritage. The daughter of the Cologne dermatologist Emil Meirowsky, she studied medicine at Bonn and Munich, graduated in 1929 and received her doctorate from the University of Munich in 1933 with a dissertation on hereditary symmetrical palmoplantar erythema. She then obtained a doctorate in pediatrics in Rome, where she met the Dominican friar Franziskus Maria Stratmann and converted to Catholicism in October 1933. Persecuted as a non-Aryan, she moved to Utrecht in 1938 and from October 1941 hid in the Trappist abbey of Koningsoord near Tilburg, working as a doctor and porter. She was arrested on 2 August 1942 with other converts, among them Edith and Rosa Stein, and deported to Westerbork and then Auschwitz. A paving stone commemorates her in Cologne.