Margit Meissner

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Margit Meissner (born on February 26, 1922 in Innsbruck as Margit Morawetz ; died on July 8, 2019 in Bethesda ) was an Austro-American survivor of the Holocaust and a contemporary witness .

Life

Her father, the banker Gottlieb Morawetz, came from a practicing Jewish family in Bohemia, her mother, Lilly, came from a family of assimilated Viennese Jews. She had three older brothers, Felix, Paul and Bruno. The family lived in Innsbruck . When Margit was a small child, her father took on a new professional role and moved to Prague with the whole family , including working in the law faculty of Charles University . Margit grew up in an educated household in Prague and learned not only German but also Czech, English and French. Her father died in 1932 of complications from an embolism. As a result, she was raised by her mother and a governess. Paul and Felix left their parents' household and went overseas, Bruno stayed and studied agriculture.

After the “Anschluss” of Austria in 1938 and the dramatic rise in anti-Semitism in Central Europe, the mother decided that it would be better for her daughter to continue her education at a school in Paris where she learned to sew clothes. A year later, Lilly traveled to Paris to visit Margit. When the situation in Czechoslovakia worsened, she returned to Prague, sold her belongings and finally fled to Paris with her son Bruno after the " rest of Czechoslovakia " had been broken up. Because of his studies, Bruno was able to emigrate to England. In May 1940, Margit's mother received an order from the French police to be at a collection point in three days. Thereupon Margit bought a bicycle, joined the people who had fled from Paris and came to Etampes . Refugees gathered in a school and Margit learned that her mother had been interned in Camp de Gurs near the Spanish border. She rode off her bike to look for them, then got a train ticket to Salies-de-Béarn , a community near Gurs where friends were. In the chaos after the armistice between Germany and France in June 1940, Lilly was able to flee Gurs. The mother and daughter managed to leave the German-occupied part of France and reach Marseille . From there they fled to Spain and Portugal. During their escape, they received financial help from Varian Fry . From Portugal, Lilly contacted her son Felix in New York, who helped them immigrate to the United States. He guaranteed with an affidavit , mother and daughter received visas for entry into the USA and eventually moved to Felix in New York. Margit's brother Paul had emigrated to Australia and her brother Bruno to Canada.

Margit Morawetz married a GI three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor , the Hungarian Jewish refugee Otmar Gyorgy, whom she had met through her brother Felix. She followed him to his various training camps in the United States. Further trips with her husband took her to the Middle East and Europe. She worked as a credit manager and cashier and as a translator for the United States Office of War Information because she was fluent in six languages. During the Nuremberg Trials she was busy with the re-education of Hitler Youths on behalf of the US occupation army . A few years later the marriage ended in divorce.

She studied at the Sorbonne University in Paris, at Columbia University Teachers College and at Trinity College in Washington DC in California. She first worked as a story analyst in Hollywood. She later designed and produced children's clothing in San Francisco.

In 1953 she married Frank Meissner, a professor at Berkeley . The couple settled in Bethesda , Maryland when her husband was working for the World Bank and became parents of two children, a girl and a boy. For twenty years she has been involved in educating disabled children in Montgomery County's public schools . She also worked as an advisor to the US Department of Education.

Her husband died of cancer in 1990. At the insistence of her children, she wrote her autobiography at the age of 80, which was published in 2003 under the title Margit's story . For many years she worked in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in the archives and as a museum guide. In her old age she was also committed to helping women who survived the genocide in Rwanda . She remarried at the age of 94.

Honor

  • 2004: Montgomery County Human Rights Hall of Fame

Video and television appearances (selection)

Book publications

  • Margit's story . To Autobiography. Rockville MD: Schreiber Publ. 2003. ISBN 978-1-887563-82-6
  • The Power of Memorables Moments , in: Nancy R. Goodman, Marilyn B. Meyers (Eds.): The Power of Witnessing: Reflections, Reverberations, and Traces of the Holocaust: Trauma, Psychoanalysis, and the Living Mind , Routledge, 2012, ISBN 978-0415879033 , pp. 179–190 ( excerpts from Google Books )

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f At Holocaust Museum's Anniversary, One Survivor's Quest Continues , The Daily Beast , April 29, 2013
  2. ↑ a b c Miroslav Rechcigl: Encyclopedia of Bohemian and Czech-American Biography, Volume 2, 2016
  3. ^ A b Joseph Hawkins: My Two Cents: Margit's Story , Bethesda Magazine, Aug. 5, 2014
  4. ^ A b Montgomery County Government, Hall of Fame Page: Ms. Margit Meissner (accessed March 31, 2018)
  5. ↑ Genocide survivors share experiences, hope (August 5, 2012)
  6. ↑ Journey to Rwanda (April 6, 2014)
  7. ↑ Holocaust Survivor Margit Meissner Journeys to Rwanda with Women for Women International to Meet Sister Genocide Survivors ( Memento of the original from April 1, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Women for Women International, June 11, 2012 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.womenforwomen.org
  8. ↑ Deutsche Welle : A Holocaust survivor tells her story , Video, 10:42, January 29, 2018
  9. ^ Gwendolyn Glenn: Human Rights Hall of Fame Honors 6 Area Residents , The Washington Post, August 19, 2004
personal data
SURNAME Meissner, Margit
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Morawetz, Margit (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austro-American survivor of the Holocaust and contemporary witness
DATE OF BIRTH February 26, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH innsbruck
DATE OF DEATH July 8, 2019
Place of death Bethesda