Ursula Finke weighed less than 5st (31kg) and by her own description was only a “skeleton”, when Lola Alexander tracked her down in bombed-out Berlin in the last days of April 1945. Both had repeatedly, narrowly escaped deportation to Auschwitz, unlike many of their closest Jewish relatives.
Lola and Ursula had become “friends”, as their survivors’ testimony from the 1950s put it, while in hiding from the Gestapo at the home of a resistance member. After Lola rescued Ursula, badly injured and chained to a bed in the dank cellar of a Jewish hospital, they would remain together for the rest of Lola’s life.
