Bertha was born on March 20, 1912 in Rokitho, Poland, the daughter of Leiba and Szyfra Pieszczanska. She had two siblings, a sister and a brother. (The Maisel's son located at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum the names of Bertha's father and sister in a list of those who were killed during the Holocaust. Her brother escaped to Israel.) Bertha attended a Catholic school, which was the only school in the town. She maintained her Jewish religious practice throughout her life, and later in life, she would be heard saying her prayers as she got her children ready for school. She studied nursing and worked as a nurse, apparently in a Soviet hospital in the area of Poland that later became first the Soviet Union and then Belarus.

David was born on September 15, 1906 in Hantsavichy, which was in Poland before the war, in the Soviet Union after the war, and in Belarus after 1991. The Wikipedia article on Hantsavichy reads: "Before WWII, 60% of the population was Jewish. In the '20s and '30s there were four synagogues, a Jewish library, an orphanage, a Tarbut school and school in Yiddish. Under Polish administration, in 1939, the town was occupied by Soviets. The German army arrived on June 29, 1941. From June 30 to July 1, 1941, a pogrom occurred in which 16 Jews were murdered. On August 15, 1941, 350 Jewish men were executed in the forest 11km away from Gantsevichi. 600 Jews were shot in the town's market place. During another action 1,000 Jewish men were taken to the forest 1km away and shot dead. A concentration work camp was established in November 1941. Besides the local Jews, there were 230 Lenin Jews and 120 native to Pogost. Small executions of 70-150 Jews took place constantly. During one of those executions, 100 Jewish refugees from Warsaw, along with two local families, Fish and Zeiger, were executed and buried in the Peski ravine. On August 14, 1942, more than 300 Jews fled the camp and others were shot. In all, during the occupation, 3,500 Jews were murdered by the Nazis in the district of Gantsevichi, including 1,500 women and 850 children."

David's family missed all that carnage because they had come to the United States prior to 1910; David stayed behind. (His wife and children, he found out later, had been lined up with others and shot in the head. We don’t know if that was done by the Nazis or the Soviets.) David worked in a forest near the Radziwill Castle as a tree grader, which was his profession. He seems to have been drafted into the Soviet army, and when wounded in the war, he showed up at the hospital in which Bertha worked as a nurse (according to what David and Bertha told their children).

We have a notarized statement made in August 1947, made by a couple who claimed to "have personally known for many years David Meisel and his wife Bertha," asserting that David and Bertha were married on July 15, 1939 in Hancewicze, Poland. That date seems problematic, especially because of Bertha's age: she would have had to have finished nursing school and begun her practice as a nurse by age 19. Then on the other hand there is Bertha's Petition for Naturalization in July 1954, in which she states that she and David were married on October 15, 1945 in "Pop, Russia." (We are unable to locate the existence of such a place.) The problem with that is that their daughter Shirley says this about her parents during the war: "My father would brag that he would not break down and eat the broth that was made with horsemeat. That wasn't kosher. But my mother said, 'Well, I’m starving.'" The story implies that they were together during the war. Then there is David's registration of residence in the town of Bytom, Poland, dated October 23, 1946. On the space next to "wife's name," there is written this mark: ؉ Was he not married in October 1946? And then there is the matter of their children's birth: Leon was born in 1948, Samuel in 1950, and Shirley in 1954. That would suggest a later rather than an earlier marriage.

So what we know for a fact is that David and Bertha told their children that when they met in a hospital, David already knew that his first family had been killed. They got to know each other and were married soon after. They seem to have moved around a lot, apparently on the run. On one occasion Bertha, in a hurry, grabbed the wrong suitcase and in the process lost all her remaining possessions. They seem to have experienced a considerable amount of hunger, and they seem to have found themselves in difficult wartime circumstances. Bertha talked of having had her hair burned off by a bomb or shrapnel.

After the war the couple applied for an immigrant visa to the United States, but they were turned down because of quota constraints. They were allowed into the Dominican Republic, and went there in July 1947. We have a document giving David permission to re-enter the Dominican Republic, so it seems that he had gone to the United States, probably to touch base with his relatives in Mobile. The Maisel's first child was born in December 1948 in Mobile, so they moved to Mobile either in late 1947 or in 1948. David worked in his brother's construction business until he had enough money to open a neighborhood grocery store. David and Bertha operated a grocery store until they retired.

David died on May 23, 1979 and Bertha died on February15, 1983. Both are buried in Ahavas Chesed Cemetery in Mobile.