Miriam Keesing:
Paul was refugee child from Austria. He arrived in the Netherlands on December 11th, 1938 with the first Kindertransport from Vienna. After two weeks in quarantine in a school in the Copernicusstraat in The Hague he lived in Ockenburgh, and in Huis ten Vijver. When he had to leave here he moved in with a family.
Paul was very good in math.
His mother, Rudolfine Freistadt, was born in 1897 in Vienna, but had passed away, his father, Josef, had escaped to Shanghai, his stepmother was in Vienna.
Last address in Vienna: Berggasse 13, Wien IX.
Source: National Archives, 2.04.58, inv. 130 and others
My name is Miron Paul Gerstmann. I am Paul's nephew and I am named after him. His father (my grandfather) immigrated to Israel in 1947 after spending the war in Shanghai, and lived there (with my mother' family) until his death in 1971. My mother, Elisheva (Lieserl) Gerstmann (Zaitschek) was one year older than Paul, which enabled her to survive the war unlike her brother. She fled Austria in December 1939 with a group of the youth - immigration (Aliyat Hano'ar) on their way to Palestine. She spent the war with that group in a kibbutz near Jerusalem, later joining the British Army ATS as a nurse during the war. She then married my father and raised her children (my ssiter Irit, my brother Itamar and myself) in Ramat Gan, Israel, until her death in 1986.