But the story behind that document is not one of marriage, nor of vanity. It is a story of escape.
In England, Joyce worked as a cook’s assistant, then a nanny, then a secretary for a Jewish relief committee. She never spoke of the Frankenbergs. Her parents were not so lucky: Elias was deported to Theresienstadt in 1942; Helene followed voluntarily and died of typhus in 1944. Joyce learned of their fate in a Red Cross letter delivered on V-E Day, May 8, 1945.
Joyce’s triple middle name was a testament to Helene’s romanticism: Penelope for fidelity, Wilhelmina to honor the old Kaiser’s Germany (a futile gesture of patriotism), and Frankenberg itself — a name meaning “mountain of the Franks,” suggesting ancient lineage. But in 1933, when Hitler came to power, “Frankenberg” ceased to be poetic. It became a target. joyce penelope wilhelmina frankenberg current name
Joyce Penelope Wilhelmina Frankenberg was born on a damp November morning in 1915, in the Berlin suburb of Wilmersdorf. Her father, Dr. Elias Frankenberg, was a respected Jewish ophthalmologist; her mother, Helene (née von Voss), was a Lutheran aristocrat who had converted to Judaism out of love — a decision that would later be scrutinized by the Nuremberg Laws as “racial defilement.”
She sat on the floor of her tiny bedsit in Pimlico and wept for three hours. Then she walked to Somerset House and requested a deed poll form. She could not resurrect her father. But she could decide, for the first time, what her name meant. But the story behind that document is not
Among her possessions was the original deed poll. On the back, in her elegant calligraphy, she had written:
Joyce Penelope Wilhelmina Carnegie never married, never had children, and rarely spoke of her past. She became a librarian — fittingly — at a Carnegie-funded branch in Bethnal Green. Colleagues knew her as “Miss Carnegie,” a stern but kind woman who always wore a silver locket containing a photograph of two people she called “her late aunt and uncle.” She never spoke of the Frankenbergs
On June 12, 1947, Joyce Penelope Wilhelmina Frankenberg swore before a magistrate that she would abandon her birth surname “for all purposes and forever.” The deed was published in the London Gazette . No one objected. In fact, no one noticed.