#Weremember: Maria Forescu

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Today is the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, another occasion to remember every of the 6 million innocent people murdered only because they were Jewish. A sad moment in the history of humanity which took place less than a century ago. The date commemorates the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, by the Russian troops.

Hopefully, there were survivors who were strong enough to share with us the stories of the horrible lack of humanity humans can be capable of. Most of the people who were sent to the camps didn't survive though and it is our duty to remember them, because our memories of them keep them alive. 

One of the many who were sent to death and didn't come back was the actress and singer Maria Forescu, whose full story is relatively less known. I first read about her during a recent visit at the German Film Museum in Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, where her activities and short details about her life, mostly undocumented, are mentioned. 

She was born in Czernowitz, nowadays Ukraine, at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1875, as Maria Füllenbaum. She changed her family name into one sounding Romanian in order to avoid the obvious anti-Semitic intolerance at the time. She attended a boarding school in Paris, studied music and singing as well as drama at the Prague Conservatory. She secured a position at the Viennese Carl Theater as an operetta singer. She was on tours all over the world, including the Theatre of the West in Berlin or the famous Metropolitan. Since 1915, she decided to leave the singing career, moved to Berlin and dedicate all her energies and talent to the film, playing in various movies famous at the time, including Zwischen Nacht und Morgen or Danton, both launched in 1931. In total, she acted in around 160 films, only few of them archived. She was married with Harry Piel, an actor himself together with whom she appeared in many movies.

In 1932, her career was shortly cut by the racial laws of the Nazis. She decided to stay in Berlin, ending up completely isolated and expelled from the main professional organisations. After a short time during which she found refuge together with other Jews in Motzstrasse in the Wilmersdorfer borough of Berlin, she was sent to death, probably Buchenwald concentration camp where she died at the end of 1943.