Heinz Steinitz
Heinz Steinitz was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) on April 26, 1909, to Walter Steinitz (1882-1963), a cardiologist and zoologist, and Marta Schindler Steinitz (1885-1926). He grew up in Breslau and was greatly inspired by his father to study science and to be an active Zionist. He studied medicine from 1927-1933 in the universities of Breslau, Freiburg and Berlin. Although he passed the Medical Board examination in 1933, and would have started work in a hospital in Berlin and in the Jewish hospital in Breslau, he was prohibited from practicing by the Nazi regime which came to power that same year. Together with his wife Ruth Aber Steinitz (1907-1995), a medical student as well, he left Germany in 1933 and immigrated to Palestine.
Otto Zoff
After 1931 Zoff spent most of his time in Italy. However, it was in Berlin that in 1933 he met Liselotte Kalischer whom he married shortly afterwards. 1933 was also the year in which the Nazis took power in Germany and lost little time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship. Otto Zoff and his young wife were politically leftwing and Zoff's mother was Jewish. At one point during the mid-1930s Zoff's novels were publicly burned and placed on a list of banned books in Nazi Germany (which after 1938 would also include Austria). Otto and Liselotte settled in Milan, where Liselotte and her sister ran a "movement therapy" clinic. Their daughter Constance ("Stanzel" / "Stanzi") Zoff was born in 1938. In the meantime, under circumstances that remain unclear, the ban against publishing Zoff's books had been lifted in Germany where his historical presentation "The Huguenots" appeared in 1937. During the later 1930s Zoff ostentatiously turned his back on authorship, preferring to earn his living by playing roulette. He was joined in this enterprise by the (originally Viennese) archaeologist Guido Kaschnitz von Weinberg. Sources indicate that gambling produced a negative income, however, and the Zoffs were dependent on Liselotte's earnings during these years.