Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies

Center Symposium on the Holocaust features Testimony by Kindertransport and Child Survivor Margot Lobree (Thurs., July 22)

The Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies invites the public to an online program with Margot Lobree, a child survivor of the Holocaust, who escaped Nazi Germany on a Kindertransport to the UK in April 1939. Now in her nineties, Lobree will give testimony in a session moderated by Appalachian State professor Chris Patti, a specialist in ethnographic work with Holocaust and other trauma survivors. The testimony will take place on Thurs., July 22, from 9:00 - 11:00 am EST and is part of the 19th Annual Martin and Doris Rosen Summer Symposium organized and hosted by Appalachian State University’s Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies. It follows renowned Holocaust scholar Porf. Deborah Dwork's lecture on this topic on Wednesday.

The program with Lobree is free and open to the public. To register for this event, please click here. 

Margot Lobree, née Hirschmann, is a native of Frankfurt/Main, Germany. She is the second child of a German-Jewish family, residents of the Bockenheim district, where she spent her early childhood during the years of the Weimar Republic. Her father Lazarus Hirschmann ran a wholesale trade for stationery with his brother. Her mother Hedwig also worked for the successful family business. In 1935, the Nazi regime forced the Hirschmanns to dissolve the business. After the death of her husband in early 1938, Hedwig Hirschmann raised the children on her own. The horror of the November 1938 pogrom prompted her to explore any option for her and her children to escape Hitler Germany. Faced with enormous obstacles to emigrate, she managed to get the papers for her oldest child Helmut to immigrate to Palestine. Margot, on the other hand, was sent on a Kindertransport to the UK in April 1939. Her mother, however, failed in her attempts to leave. In May 1942, the Gestapo deported her to the Izbica ghetto in German-occupied Poland, where she was murdered. Like many Jewish children sent on Kindertransports, the thirteen-year old Margot struggled considerably to adapt to the challenges of living in a foreign country with scarce resources. Many of the young refugees had difficult experiences and faced exploitation by the families that took them in. In April 1944, Margot managed to emigrate to the U.S. and lived with maternal family members, who sponsored her, in New York City. In 1948, she left for California to get married to an American, who had become her pen friend during her time in the UK. She returned to the East Coast in 2009 to be with her son and his family in North Carolina. Margot Lobree has been a vital part of the NC Council on the Holocaust’s speaker program for several years.

For more information about the talk or the symposium, please contact the Center at 828.262.2311 or holocaust@appstate.edu.