Jettchen Henny Heilbrunn was born on 21 February 1893 in the small town of Sontra, in the Werra-Meißner district of Hesse, Germany. She was the sixth child in a large Jewish family, born to Meier Heilbrunn and Caecilia (Cäcilie) Cohn. Jettchen grew up alongside eight siblings, Hugo, Meta, Leopold, Minna, Emil, Gustav, Victor, and Grete, in a close-knit household shaped by family, tradition, and Jewish life in pre-war Germany.

 

Viktor Eisner was born a few years earlier, on 25 November 1889, in Mělník (Mittelböhmen), in what was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and later became Czechoslovakia. Like Jettchen, he was Jewish and grew up in a Central European Jewish community at a time when borders, languages, and identities were in flux.

  

On 6 January 1920, shortly after the upheaval of the First World War, Jettchen and Viktor were married in Sontra, Hesse. Their marriage marked the beginning of a shared life that bridged Germany and Czechoslovakia and reflected the optimism of the post-war years, when many Jewish families sought stability and renewal after years of hardship. 

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Together, Jettchen and Viktor built a family and became parents to three children: 

• Rolf Manfred Eisner, born in 1920 in Germany, 

• Ellen “Mitzi” Eisner, born on 30 May 1923 in Leipzig, Saxony, 

• Edith Margarethe Eisner, born on 26 January 1925. 

 

Their early family life unfolded during the fragile years of the Weimar Republic, a time of cultural vitality but also growing political instability. Like many Jewish families, the Eisners would soon find their lives irrevocably altered by the rise of National Socialism. 

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As Nazi persecution intensified during the 1930s, the family’s security steadily eroded. Anti-Jewish laws, social exclusion, and violence stripped Jewish citizens of their rights and livelihoods. While their eldest son Rolf Manfred ultimately survived the Holocaust and later settled in England, where he died in 1995, the rest of the family was not spared. 

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During the Holocaust, Jettchen Heilbrunn Eisner, Viktor Eisner, and their daughters Ellen (“Mitzi”) and Edith Margarethe were deported to Terezín (Theresienstadt)1, the ghetto-concentration camp used by the Nazis as both a transit camp and a place of imprisonment and death. Ellen and Edith were murdered there on 12 June 1942, still children. 

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Jettchen and Viktor also perished in 1942 in Terezín, victims of Nazi genocide. Their deaths, recorded by Yad Vashem, stand as testimony to lives cut short not by fate, but by systematic hatred and state-sponsored murder.

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Though their lives ended in tragedy, Jettchen and Viktor are remembered through surviving family, historical records, and the preservation of their names. Their story reflects the broader history of European Jewry in the early twentieth century, rooted in family and community, destroyed by persecution, and carried forward through remembrance.