Elizabeth Subercaseaux Elizabeth Subercaseaux Elizabeth Subercaseaux Sommerhoff (born 1945) is a Chilean journalist and writer. Elizabeth Subercaseaux grew up near Cauqenes, Chile at her grandparents' home called Santa Clara. Subercaseaux's father died in 1956, when he was 42 years old and she was 11. The five children of the marriage – Bernardo and Juan, older than Elizabeth, and Martin and Ximena, younger – were brought up by their mother, the sculptor, painter, and photographer Gerda Sommerhoff, who was born in Germany and grew up in Holland. She is the great-great-granddaughter of the German composer Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck. After finishing high
Michael Wieck in Scotland in a "Kindertransporte", taking the place of another German-Jewish girl who had gone to the United States. Thus, she survived the war. Shortly thereafter, young Michael Wieck was compelled to work in factories. In mid-1941 Wieck celebrated his Bar Mitzva in the small Orthodox synagogue "Adass Jisroel", as the main Jewish synogogue of Königsberg had been destroyed in the Nazi ""Kristallnacht"" pogrom of November 1938. During the pogrom perpetrators vandalized the interior of the Orthodox synagogue hall, but spared it from arson because it was housed in a residential building. Later the congregation restored a prayer hall in