Frieda Nagelberg was born on November 30, 1889 in Stryi in Galicia – in what is now Ukraine. Her father Joel Nagelberg and her mother Scheindl Eisenstein came with her in 1896 to Hohenems, where they made a living as peddlers (clothes and linen). Joel Nagelberg was orthodox and soon came into conflict with the liberal community and Rabbi Tänzer, which took on increasingly violent forms and eventually cost him his peddler’s permit. The family lived in misery when Joel Nagelberg died in 1924. Frieda Nagelberg moved to Dornbirn in 1929, worked as a needleworker in home work and as a domestic helper in changing jobs. In 1930 she joined the Adventist community in Dornbirn. Her mother died soon after. Frieda herself fell seriously ill and was finally taken back to Hohenems, in the public poorhouse of the town.

As an Adventist, she was not registered as a “Jew”, when the Nazis came to power, but was reported by Mayor Josef Wolfgang in 1939, together with Gisela Figdor, who also lived in the poorhouse. But in 1940 Frieda Nagelberg was again “forgotten” during the forced relocation to Vienna. It was only at the personal instigation of Mayor Wolfgang that she was marked with the Jewish Star and transported to Vienna in January 1942, although some Hohenems residents intervened against this. From Vienna, she was deported a little later to the Izbica camp in the south of Poland, where her trail disappears.