Lucille Eichengreen - Biography

Lucille Eichengreen (born as Cecelia Landau 1 February 1925 in Hamburg, Germany) is a survivor of the Łódź Ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz, Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen. She moved to the United States in 1946, married, had two sons and worked as an insurance agent. One of her sons is the economist Barry Eichengreen. In 1994, she published From Ashes to Life: My Memories of the Holocaust. She frequently lectures on the Holocaust at libraries, schools and universities in the United States and Germany.

Youth and Deportation

Lucille Eichengreen, was the oldest of two daughters of Polish-originated wine merchant Benjamin Landau and his wife Sala (Sara), née Baumwollspinner. She describes her childhood as being "very nice, very comfortable" before Hitler came to power in 1933. After that, the Jews became exposed to growing reprisals by the Nazis as well as insults and assaults by the local population. During the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, her father was arrested and deported to Poland as an enemy alien. After coming back to Hamburg in spring of 1939, Landau was arrested by the Gestapo on 1 September 1939 during the attack on Poland as a foreign enemy. He was first brought to police jail in Fuhlsbüttel, then to Oranienburg and Dachau concentration camp, where he was murdered on 31 December 1940. The family learned of his death only in February 1941 when the Gestapo brought his ashes, "in a cigar box with a rubber band", to their apartment. Of this event, Lucille Eichengreen recalls:

Two Gestapo came to the house and threw them on the kitchen table.[...]They only said 'Ashes, Benjamin Landau!' And walked out. They didn't talk.

On 25 October 1941, Lucille Eichengreen, then 16 years old, was deported to the Łódź Ghetto with her mother and her little sister Karin. Lucille cound find work and survived under inhumane conditions while her mother starved to death on 13 July 1942. Her little sister Karin, who she took take care of while in the ghetto, was separated from her at age twelve, and then deported to Chełmno extermination camp, where she was murdered. She herself was working as a secretary for the journalist and writer Oskar Singer. In 1943, she was hit on the left ear during an interrogation by the Nazi police caused by a denunciation, resulting in permanent deafness on that ear. In August 1943, she was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp, where she was deemed fit to work during the selection process.

External links

• Excerpts from Ashes to Life
• Short bio