Obituary of Elisabeth Zink

Elisabeth was born in Tscherwenka, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, on October 23, 1922 to the late Franz Hoffmann and Ida Neider Hoffmann. Even though Germans were an ethnic minority in Yugoslavia, the small town of her birth was predominantly protestant German, and German is the language that she spoke at home and in prayer, even unto the end of her life. Today the town is known as Crvenka, Serbia, and the population is mostly Serbian, virtually no Germans remaining. At the age of 13, her family sent her to serve as a housemaid for a family in the capital city of Belgrade, where she also worked in a paper mill for a short time, until she fled the city one week before it was bombed in WWII. At 18 years old, she crossed illegally into Austria and worked there during the war, were she met her first husband, an Austrian soldier named Herbert Anthofer. When Herbert was MIA in Croatia, she was left a single mother. After the war, Elisabeth met her second husband, Nikolaus Zink, who she dated for 11 years before immigrating to the USA to marry him in 1956. She spent some time in the 1970's as cook at a German Deli in Manhattan owned by her son Herbert, but for most of her life in America, she was a mother and homemaker. She lived for many years in the Bronx, NY, with a summer home upstate; and later in Sullivan County's villages of Callicoon Ctr, White Sulphur Springs, and Monticello; as well as a home in Deltona Florida. She spent the last few years of her life living on her own near her family in Rock City Falls, NY. Elisabeth is survived by her son Robert Zink, his wife Nancy Keane Zink, and grandchildren Katharina, Magdalena, and Nathaniel of New York; her daughter-in-law Gail Smith Anthofer, granddaughter Heather Anthofer Hynes and her husband Kevin Hynes of Florida; nephew and niece Günter and Gerda Wartinger, and their families, of Austria. She is predeceased by her first husband Herbert Anthofer, her sister and her husband Anna Hoffmann Wartinger and Ernst Wartinger, her second husband Nikolaus Zink, her sons Herbert Anthofer and Richard Zink, and her grandson, Nikolaus Anton Zink. A memorial service will be held from 11a-12p on Saturday, March 14, 2020 at Colonial-Ramsay Funeral Home, 275 S. Main Street, Liberty, NY. Arrangements under the care of Colonial-Ramsay Funeral Home, for further information call 845-292-7160 or visit www.colonialfamilyfuneralhomes.com