Do you know how many different "Happy 100th Birthday" cards are in stock at the Papyrus greeting card store in the Village Shopping Center?

Three. 

Why do I know this? I picked one of them up on my way to visit Elizabeth Pschorr, a Greenbrae resident who will be turning 100 years old in 2011. But while simply reaching triple digits in age would seem like a crowning achievement, Pschorr's life has already been quite a tale.

Born to a well-to-do family in 1911 in Hamburg, Germany, Pschorr not only lived through the Holocaust as a German-Jew, but she also published autobiographies in English and German recounting her truly unique life experiences.

Pschorr is petite in that grandmothery sort of way with short, wavy salt-and-pepper hair. If you were to see her shopping at her favorite grocery store – Mollie Stones in the Bon Air Shopping Center – you wouldn't guess that she is almost 10 decades old. And if you had a chance to speak with her, you'd be convinced she wasn't.

Pschorr exudes youthful wit, confidence (bordering on boldness), audacious charm, and a sense of independence that you would never expect from a 99-year-old woman. 

Elizabeth, or "Leisel" for short, was born and raised in Germany, and is the product of a prominent Hamburg family. Her father was the long-time president and "guiding star" of Schencker & Company, a successful international transporting company that is still in business.

Despite growing up comfortably with few worries in the 1920s, Pschorr lived in the eye of the Nazi hurricane for most of her youth. Much of Elizabeth's story focuses on love: love of her family, and a slowly developing love for Friedal Pschorr. After years of courting and writing love letters to one another, Elizabeth and Friedal got engaged and married. But life wasn't simply happily ever after that.    

The slow and secretive way in which the Nazis obscured their ultimate desires, especially in the mid to late-1930s, and their pervasive social restrictions, made it impossible to predict just how terrible everything would turn out in the end.

"If you don't know what it all means, and where it ends, you're not scared," Pschorr said.

Even when neighbors would mysteriously disappear, people merely thought that the family had moved, Pschorr said. It was far more conceivable at the time than the later discovered truth. But despite being somewhat oblivious to the day-to-day politics, Elizabeth's life was forcefully intertwined with the uprising of the Nazi culture.

On February 27, 1933, on the eve of Elizabeth and Friedal's long-awaited wedding, a distant, glowing red fire lit the sky as the Reichstag German parliamentary building went up in flames. The act, possibly ignited by the Nazi's themselves, eventually allowed Adolf Hitler to blame the communists for the fire, suspend German civil liberties, take over a majority of the German government, and, ultimately, consolidate his power leading to totalitarianism. 

On the day after the fire, with the smoke of confusion still hanging heavily over Germany, Elizabeth and Friedal were married only miles away. 

As the Nazi Party grew stronger in Germany, so did Elizabeth's understanding of her own ancestry. While Elizabeth was Lutheran and never practiced Judaism, that mattered little to the Nazis. Because Elizabeth had two grandparents who were Jewish, she and much of her family were considered Jewish. Without any notice, her father was thrown into a Nazi prison. Though he was mysteriously released, Elizabeth still does not know why he was imprisoned. She only remembers that it was "a nightmare" to have the rock of their family dragged away from them with no explanation. 

As Elizabeth writes in her autobiography, A Privileged Marriage, her personal situation was exceptional. Soon after her father was released from prison, he was ordered to leave the country and all of his possessions behind. She stayed and gave birth to a son, Rainer, in late 1934. A year later, the Nazi Party adopted the now infamous Nuremburg Laws. One of the provisions, the "Law for Protection of German Blood and German Honor," set special restrictive legislation for people of Jewish ancestry like Elizabeth. But because of her "privileged marriage" to Friedal, a "pure-Aryan" man, and via their "Mishilinge" son, her marriage was exempt from the normal Jewish family scrutiny.   

Elizabeth gave birth to two more children, and continued to live in the precarious situation as a German-Jew until eventually emigrating to the United States. The whole incredible story is captured with great detail in A Privileged Marriage, a valuable history lesson and love story all wrapped in one. 

Elizabeth never intended to write an autobiography. While cleaning out her mother's closet following her death in 1974, Elizabeth found hundreds of letters her mother had kept memorializing years of communications between family members. Elizabeth organized them and then wrote an extensive manuscript for her family while splitting her time between the U.S. and Switzerland. She later found Windgate Press, a Sausalito publisher, contacted the reluctant owners and turned on her "charm," as she puts it, to get them to read it. The rest is history. 

So how does Elizabeth feel about turning 100 in September 2011? 

"I think it's a nuisance," she said with a sly smirk. "Everybody talks about it, and . . . I have to be polite and thankful, and it's very boring." 

Some people celebrate their birthday with a whole week of festivities. Elizabeth might be entitled to the entire year. Happy 2011, Elizabeth, you deserve it. 

To read more about Elizabeth's story, or to purchase a copy of her autobiography, go to http://elizabethpschorr.com/. Brett Gibbs is an attorney, and he also blogs for the Marin IJ via his blog, "Brett's Journey."