born 7 January 1923 in Cottbus
died 15 August 1941 in Bernburg
Stumbling stone Christophorus Shop
at the entrance to the Samaritan Institutions,
August-Bebel-Straße 1–4
Date of stone-laying 30 November 2005
Wera Gosdzan was born in Cottbus on 7 January 1923. She started school in 1930 but had to leave after only one week when she was classified as “unfit for school”. On 30 September 1930, a doctor arranged for Wera to be transferred to a sanatorium on the grounds that she was “very noisy and motorically very restless” and that “all educational measures in the parental home had so far come to nothing”.
Over the next eleven years she lived in various institutions. She spent the longest period in the State Mental Hospital Lübben, from where she was transferred to the State Mental Hospital Görden in Brandenburg. From 31 January 1934, she was a resident at the Samaritan Institutions Fürstenwalde/Spree in Ketschendorf. She remained there for one and a half years until she was transferred to the State Sanatorium and Mental Hospital in Bernburg on the River Saale – via the state mental hospitals in Landsberg an der Warthe (Polish: Gorzów) and Teupitz. On 5 August 1941, she was murdered in the killing centre in Bernburg as part of “Aktion T4”, a mass murder campaign targeting sick and disabled people.