Overview
- Her family said she died on New Year’s Day at her home in San Francisco at age 91.
- In 1935, Joseph Goebbels selected her six-month portrait for the cover of the pro-Nazi magazine Sonne ins Haus as the regime’s ideal baby.
- Photographer Hans Ballin later told her parents he knew she was Jewish and submitted the image deliberately to mock Nazi racial doctrine.
- Fearing exposure, her parents kept her indoors, then left Germany in 1937, moving through Latvia, France, and Cuba before settling in New York City in 1949.
- She earned chemistry degrees at Barnard and Columbia, spent more than three decades at Educational Testing Service overseeing AP chemistry, later taught at St. John’s University, and is survived by her sister Noemi Pollack, children Nina and Alex, and four grandchildren; her husband, Earl Taft, died in 2021.