Gerda B. Mosse, 90, a Holocaust survivor who devoted her career to helping people and improving their well-being, died January 7 in Los Gatos. Gerda worked for many years as a county social worker in northern California. After her retirement at age 65, she worked as a psychotherapist at Hope Services until age 83, when she retired a second time.
The daughter of Ilse and Richard Bloch, Gerda was a native of Berlin who escaped Nazi persecution in Germany and went into hiding in the Netherlands as a teenager. She survived largely with the aid of families in the Dutch countryside where Gerda worked quietly as a nanny, caring for the children of her protectors, Reverend Adriann Faber and his wife Ank. Though her formal education had been interrupted by the war years, Gerda resumed her schoolwork in September 1945 in Holland and took her secondary school examinations in May 1946.
In 1947, Gerda immigrated to the United States, settling initially in Massachusetts to attend college. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a degree in philosophy and received a master's degree from Columbia University School of Social Work two years later. In 1952, Gerda married Albert Mosse, with whom she had two children, Elise and Jacques. She married Benjamin Kazan in 1988.
Late in life, Gerda Bloch Mosse returned to Holland to honor the families who had kept her safe from the Germans, succeeding in getting the Fabers entered on the rolls of Yad Vashen, Israel's Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority.
Her son and her sister Doris predeceased her; she is survived solely by her daughter, Elise Mosse, of San Jose.