Yetta Rosenberg survived the Holocaust and managed to keep part of her family together in the midst of World War II, relatives said.
"She saved my aunt and my cousin's life," said her daughter, Carol Rosenberg Derman. "She was absolutely resolute."
Mrs. Rosenberg's father and two sisters were killed by Nazis, but she eluded authorities by hiding in a brick oven for nearly a year, emerging from her refuge only at night. When the war ended, her sense of loyalty kept her from immigrating to the United States until her surviving sister and her sister's daughter were able to join her.
Mrs. Rosenberg, 88, died Thursday, Nov. 16, in her West Rogers Park home of complications from a brain tumor. She had lived in the home for 52 years, said her son, Michael.
Mrs. Rosenberg was born Yetta Schuessler, the youngest of four sisters in Ozeryany, in what is now Ukraine. Her mother died when she was 2, and she was raised by an older sister, Regina, until she was 15, her son said.
She was a high school math teacher until war broke out.
According to "Surviving the Holocaust," an essay Mrs. Rosenberg wrote about her experiences, her family was forced into a Jewish ghetto in the early 1940s. She lost her father and two sisters in the chaos that followed.
Mrs. Rosenberg, her daughter said, took on the responsibility of caring for her sister, Regina, and her sister's infant, Gloria. They hid until it was too dangerous to remain together, and Mrs. Rosenberg made the difficult decision to split up and entrusted the child with strangers for safekeeping. To survive, she hid in friends' farmhouses, cellars and even a brick oven.
Near the end of the war, she found the child--then 4 years old--in a Catholic orphanage, less than a week before she was to be adopted.
"It took determination to get her back," her daughter said.
The three made their way to liberated Germany, where Mrs. Rosenberg worked as a translator at an immigration office.
She met Sam Rosenberg there, after he had escaped death at Flossenburg concentration camp. He moved to New York, and she joined him in 1947. They were married in the U.S.
The couple moved to Chicago in 1948 and settled in West Rogers Park, starting a dry goods store, her daughter said. Mrs. Rosenberg used her math background to handle the accounting for the family business as she raised two children.
When she wasn't taking care of the books or the children, Mrs. Rosenberg loved to go on walks, read and tend her garden. Her son called her a "21st Century woman in the 20th Century" who encouraged him to read encyclopedias--for fun--as a child. She also was a great cook, making delicious kreplach dumplings, or "duckies," for her grandchildren, family members said.
Mrs. Rosenberg's husband said he would miss his wife's wisdom and beauty.
"She was a good wife, a good mother," he said.
Other survivors include six grandchildren.
Services have been held.