Werner and Vera Gamby Family Collection

Werner Max Gembicki was born on November 25, 1915, the son of Ludwig and Camilla (née Kemlinski) Gembicki. He had a sister, Lizzie, who was twelve years older than him and a brother, Siegfried, who was sixteen years older.

Werner attended the private Bertram School in Hamburg until 1927 when he began attending the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums, from which he received his Abitur in 1935. Although he originally wished to study law and become a diplomat, that path was impossible for him once Jews were forbidden to attend university. He then found a position working for a Jewish import firm for leather and fur. During the 1930s he also met a young woman, Vera Cohn, while playing tennis.

Vera Cohn was born on June 15, 1915 in Frankfurt am Main. She was the daughter of Raphael and Erna Cohn and had an identical twin sister, Ilse. Raphael Cohn had served in World War I and in 1934 received the Ehrenkreuz für Frontkämpfer. The Cohns had moved to Hamburg after the years of inflation had disrupted the family's finances. Vera Cohn had wanted to study architecture, but after the ban on attending university she attended a secretarial school instead. On April 9, 1937 she and Werner married. On August 8, 1937 their son Peter was born.

The day of November 10th, 1938 Werner was arrested while at work. He spent the next six weeks in the concentration camp Sachsenhausen. On December 21, 1938 he was released from the camp under the stipulation he leave Germany. With the aid of the Hamburg Jewish Community he was able to enter the Kitchener Camp for refugees in Kent, England, where he stayed from July 1939 through April 1940.

On November 22, 1939 Vera Gamby and her son Peter sailed from Rotterdam for the United States along with her parents, where they joined her sister and brother-in-law who had immigrated earlier in New Rochelle, New York. Vera Gamby found a position in domestic work in a private household, with Peter staying with her parents. In May 1940 Werner arrived in New York as well.

In his first years in the United States Werner held various jobs, including in a cleaning facility, as a truck driver, as a sorter of skins in a slaughterhouse, and as a packer of women's scarves, until he eventually found a position in an import firm as a clerk in the marketing department. Coincidentally, the firm was owned by the same man in whose household Vera worked as housekeeper.

Camilla Gembicki and her sister Toni Kemlinski still remained in Hamburg. Werner's sister Lizzie had died in 1937, and his niece and nephew Herma and Gerd Schwab were also still in Hamburg with their grandmother. Although Camilla and Toni, having been born in Strasbourg, would have come under the French quota for visas, the children did not. Werner wrote to various agencies for assistance in their emigration, as well as Camilla's sisters in Switzerland. Although his aunt Jenny Marx cabled him that they had finally been sent Swiss permits at the end of December 1941, Camilla, Toni, and the children had been deported to Riga, Latvia several weeks earlier.

In 1945 Werner and Vera received American citizenship and changed their surname to Gamby. During the 1940s they had two more children, Dorothy Lizzie and Monica Camilla.

During the 1940s Werner tried to find out if his mother, aunt Toni and niece and nephew had survived their deportation, but on a trip to Hamburg in 1948 he received confirmation that they had not. He later visited Germany several times with his family. In 1968 the Gamby family moved to Mamaroneck, New York.

Werner worked for decades in the textile import industry. He established his own firm, W. Gamby & Co. He often traveled for business, including to the newly-founded State of Israel in 1948 and to China in 1972.

Werner Gamby died in 2014, Vera Gamby in 2011.