Gerda Leser
1905 - 2000

In October 1931, Gerda Leser was accepted into the Frankfurt on the Main section of the German and Austrian Alpine Club on the recommendation of her husband, lawyer Dr. Albert Leser. Her husband had joined the section in 1928 on the recommendation of the lawyer Dr. Bruno Wendt and the public prosecutor Dr. Curt Albrecht, an active member of the Frankfurt section's board.

Due to a lack of sources, we are currently unable to say how Gerda Leser participated in Section life. It is also unclear whether she left or was expelled from the Section in 1933 or later due to her being Jewish.

Gerda Leser was able to move to Denmark with her husband and two children in the fall of 1934 and escape direct persecution by the National Socialists at their second home there. While the Lesers were still listed as living at "Guiolett street 43" in Frankfurt in 1931, they were listed in the Bad Godesberg address book in 1936 with the address Büchel street 55. Their brother-in-law Dr. Paul Leser and mother-in-law Helene Leser were also registered in the same Bad Godesberg house.

In 1937, the Leser family emigrated to the USA. There, Gerda and Albert Leser divorced. In May 1942, Gerda married the journalist Will Schaber, whom she had met through the German American Writers Association, and from then on went by the name Gerda Schaber. Will Schaber had emigrated to the USA in October 1938. They lived with their daughter Bettina, born in 1926, from her first marriage, initially in Leonia (New Jersey) and later in Washington Heights (New York City).

Gerda Schaber died in 2000 at the age of 95, her daughter Bettina Coon in 2020. Her first husband, who went by the name Albert Lestoque in the USA, died in 1960 on a trip to Germany in Bonn, while her second husband Will Schaber died in New York City in 1996 at the age of 91. Gerda and Will Schaber were both burried in the Bolton Rural Cemetery in Bolton, Warren County (New York).

Paul and Helene Leser fled from Germany to Sweden in February 1936. Helene Leser died there in November 1940 at the age of 72. Paul Leser then also emigrated to the USA. After serving in the American army in North Africa and Italy, among other places, he became a professor of anthropology at the University of Hartfort (Connecticut) in 1952. He died in December 1984.