Rolf Gottlieb was one of a group of holiday children that were taken during the summer holidays in 1938 for three weeks rest in the home of the Jewish Women's Association in Neu-Isenburg. Rolf lived in 1938 in Frankfurt in Musikantenweg 4. In the early 1940s, he lived in Ober-Klingen im Odenwald, Mühlstraße 13, with the Wolf family. Rolfs mother Martha, née Herz, widowed Gottlieb, had married after the death of her first husband Leopold Wolf and had moved to Ober-Klingen with their son.

On March 25, 1942, 1000 men, women, and children were deported from the cities of Mainz and Darmstadt and various circles of the People's State of Hesse from Darmstadt. Among them were the eight-year Rolf Gottlieb also his mother and stepfather and seven other members of the Wolf family.

The transport led to the ghetto Piaski in Lublin district. From March 1942, the ghetto served as a transit camp for Jews from the Reich and the "Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia" on the way to the death camps in the Lublin area. In the ghetto, it was said, many people died on the transport from Mainz and Darmstadt (Gottwaldt / Schulle, S. 186 f.).

Rolf’s fate after the deportation is uncertain. If the eight-year-old had survived the journey to Piaski and did not die in the ghetto, he was probably abducted in one of the transports from Piaski to the extermination camp Sobibor and murdered.

At the age of 83 years Rolf’s paternal grandfather, Lazarus Gottlieb, a worker living in Frankfurt, was deported from Frankfurt to the Auschwitz concentration camp on February 11, 1943, where he died, according to the death certificate, six months later. Rolf’s aunt, his mother's sister, survived the Shoah.

 :