Agnes Sassoon

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Agnes Sassoon (born in 1933 as Agnes Lichtschein in Wylok , then Czechoslovakia , now Ukraine ; died January 11, 2020 in London , United Kingdom ) was a British fashion journalist and author . As a child, she survived two concentration camps in Germany, wrote a book about that time and worked as a contemporary witness in schools and in the media.

Life

Her parents were Simon Lichtschein (1895–1969) and Sarika geb. Kestenbaum (1903-1980). She had an older brother, Oskar. The family moved to Pressburg , where Agnes attended kindergarten. In the late autumn of 1938, Adolf Hitler , who had just annexed Engerau after the Munich Agreement , came to visit. He picked up one of the children and gave him a kiss. Then he spoke to the school officials. Agnes could remember one sentence in particular that she did not understand at the time: “Are there any Jewish children left? Then they have to be removed immediately! ”Later the family lived in Budapest . Often they were sent to their grandmother in the country, a winemaker. She attended a Jewish school in Budapest, which was housed in a synagogue . One day in October 1944, when she was eleven years old, large trucks belonging to the Arrow Cross , the Hungarian Nazi allies, were standing in front of the door of her school. Mothers and teachers had to get on one truck, the children on the other. Agnes Lichtschein was taken by the hand by a woman, Aranka, who she did not know, and so she got onto the adults' car. Agnes Sassoon: "You never heard from the children on the other car again."

An odyssey followed that was to lead to the Dachau concentration camp . For weeks on foot, occasionally transported in cattle wagons, the deportees froze and starved . “The old and the weak died next to me.” Aranka was also getting worse and worse. One day Aranka and Agnes were separated. Arrived in Dachau, the admission procedure followed, the disinfection, the cutting of the hair. “The guards beat the inmates at random. Somehow I panicked, I started screaming, I didn't understand any of this. ”A big boy named Alex warned her:“ You mustn't scream, they'll kill you. ”Later she became friends with him. "The guards kept shouting, they were acting like animals." She was forced to do labor. She was sent on a march towards the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. When she couldn't go any further and began to stumble, a soldier came up to her: "Come on, little one, sit down and rest." Suddenly he shot her. He hit the leg and she passed out. One of the next marching columns, French prisoners of war, discovered them and wanted to carry them to their night quarters. At first the soldiers did not want to allow it, but then she got into an ambulance and received makeshift care. In Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp guard discovered that she wanted to roast a potato in the embers of a fire. She was kicked by the woman, her hand was crushed, and she was burned. “A terrible pain ran through me. Later I was told that it must have been the notorious Irma Grese , I don't know, there were many women like that. "

Her brother and his peers perished in the Danube at the end of 1944 or beginning of 1945 , either by being shot or by drowning. The parents survived, but many relatives were murdered during the Shoah . After the liberation, 12-year-old Agnes was taken in by the city commandant of Hanover, a British artillery officer named Geoffrey Lesson, until her parents found her. The family went to Budapest, later to Prague and Bratislava. Agnes Lichtschein worked in a Zionist underground organization that supported the emigration of European Jews to Israel .

In 1950 she emigrated to Israel, where she married Charles Sassoon, who came from the Sassoon family of Jewish merchants . Her husband was a British citizen. In 1958 they moved to London, where they lived in Kingsbury . The couple had at least two sons, Robert and Saul.

Shortly after the liberation, Agnes Sassoon began to write her story. But the book wasn't published until the 1980s, after her parents died. The work, which also includes documents and photos of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp , was initially published in English, then also in German, Italian and Spanish. In May 2015, she was one of 133 survivors who took part in the commemorations for the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Dachau concentration camp. There I met the German Chancellor.

Quote

“I want people not to see us as soulless bodies. We may have looked like living corpses, but we still had the senses to feel and the brains to think with. "

- Agnes Sassoon

Fonts

  • Agnes. How my Spirit Survived . With a foreword by Sylvia Hebden. Todays Woman Publications, Edgware 1983.
  • Survived. As a child in German concentration camps , translated by Heike Brandt. Quadriga-Verlag, Berlin and Weinheim 1992, ISBN 3-88679-198-X .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Yad Vashem: Page of Testimony , accessed January 27, 2020 (The brother's year of birth is given as 1927, whereas the book mentions a three-year age difference.)
  2. ↑ Quotation from her book (English version)
  3. ↑ a b c d Der Spiegel : "I can't hate at all" , accessed on July 5, 2020
  4. ↑ Der Spiegel (Hamburg): Survival and Remember , No. 17/2006, p. 161
  5. ↑ Jennifer Breger: The end of an era , in: Shalom magazine, accessed on February 14, 2020.
  6. ^ Agnes Sassoon , accessed April 9, 2020
  7. ↑ Sassoon: Agnes. How My Spirit Survived, Todays Woman Publications, Edgware 2016, ISBN 978-1326-68749-6 p. 105
personal data
SURNAME Sassoon, Agnes
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British fashion journalist and author
DATE OF BIRTH 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH Wylok , then Czechoslovakia , now Ukraine
DATE OF DEATH January 11, 2020
Place of death London , UK