Yolanda Nanette Entz

Yolanda (Yola) Entz of Westlake Village died on Tuesday, April 29, at the age of 99. She was born on January 31, 1926, in Berlin, Germany, where she grew up the only child of an electrical engineer and inventor father and a shopkeeper mother in the incubator of intellectual and cultural life that was post-World War I Berlin. She loved to sail on Berlin’s Wannsee, play with her terrier Dolly and spend time with her closest friends Ulli and Erika. Her Jewish father left the country February 22,1938, for America where he hoped to find employment and later be joined by his family.

Those plans dissolved under the relentless juggernaut of Naziism. On November 9, 1938, which came to be known as Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”), Yola’s adolescent life took an ominous turn as synagogues across Germany were burned, Jewish businesses were vandalized and the nightmare of the Holocaust began. One day when she left her mother’s shop on an errand, she returned to discover the SS had just left. They had come to pick her up. She was forced to spend her teen years hiding and being hidden until American forces arrived in 1945. After detention in a Displaced Persons camp, she and her mother finally made their way to America and reunion with her father. She swore she would never return to Germany.

God had other plans, she later described in her autobiography, Yola. After meeting and marrying Sam Entz, both were led to return to Germany to work with refugee youth. Later the Entz family would maintain a dual life being near family in California and ministry in Germany: Yola to youth in a coffee house outreach to young people, Sam to American military forces through a film ministry with the Billy Graham Association. After Sam’s death on February 13. 1985, Yola spent a brief interval contemplating the direction of her ministry. She founded a ministry utilizing breakfast meetings reaching out to women throughout Germany who were strangers to the Gospel of Christ. She retired in 2013, settling in Westlake Village where she was actively involved in Calvary Community Church.

Yola is survived by her children Joy Soleida, Richard Entz and Sharon Blackmon; by five grandchildren and by five great grandchildren.

Family and friends are invited to attend a Memorial Service Saturday, May 31, 11 a.m., at Calvary Community Church, 5495 Via Rocas, Westlake Village 91362.