Born: Gloria Wolf
Düsseldorf, Germany
July 21, 1925
Died: September 19, 2015
Gloria Lachman was the only Jewish child in her elementary school in the suburb of Düsseldorf, Germany where she grew up. “I never felt any antisemitism. I must say that very frankly. The children all treated me alike. I was respected because of my father’s position and my mother was very loved,” she recalled. Gloria was eight years old when the Nazis came to power in Germany and her life began to change immediately. In April, her father, owner of an elegant and successful shoe store, was arrested in a mass roundup of Jews and communists. Although he was released, the harassment continued. Gloria recalled the anti-Jewish boycott of April 1, 1933 and its aftermath: “They had big signs, ‘This is a Jewish store, don’t go in.’ Our plate glass windows, five of them, were smashed so many times we couldn’t get insurance anymore.”
In 1935, Gloria and her parents moved to Düsseldorf where they hoped to seek safety among the crowds of a larger city. Gloria attended a Jewish school and joined the Zionist youth group Habonim. For the first time in her life, she was surrounded by fellow Jews. “I loved [Habonim],” she remembered. “We had evenings where we sang Jewish songs. We learned to dance the hora. We learned a lot about the history of the feeling to go to Palestine, to have our own home and not to be exposed to any country that would after hundreds and hundreds of years expel you.” The children also talked of their aspirations for the future. Like Gloria, they all assumed that they would eventually leave Germany.
Gloria’s father had managed to re-establish his shoe store in Düsseldorf and it flourished. Nonetheless, he was desperate to emigrate, preferably to the United States. Through Gloria’s aunt, the family contacted a wealthy American sponsor who supplied the financial guarantee that enabled them to secure immigration visas. In September 1938, Gloria’s family arrived in New York where they moved into a tiny, bedbug-infested apartment in Washington Heights.
By the late 1930s, Washington Heights was home to thousands of German Jewish refugees. “I felt we belonged there because there were people who came from where we came from. These were people to whom we could relate,” says Gloria. Nonetheless, adjustment was difficult. Gloria’s father struggled to find a job in Depression-era America, finally settling for an $8-a-week position as a shipping clerk. Her mother, who had been accustomed to supervising household servants, stretched their meager household budget, sometimes walking to a grocery store two miles from their apartment to save three cents on a loaf of bread.
As a teenager, Gloria began to frequent a social club that had been established by young refugees. It was here that she met her future husband, Norbert Lachman. They were married on June 1, 1947. The Lachmans had two daughters and a son.
Parents:
Otto Daniel Wolf, survived
Freda Scheuer Wolf, survived