Charlotte Opfermann was born in 1925 in the German town of Wiesbaden where her father worked as an attorney. Able to trace his family’s lineage in Germany to at least the 1700s, Opfermann’s father was among the men who fought for the country during World War I. He returned home a decorated lieutenant of the German Air Force and Charlotte remembered him as an active member of the local synagogue and Social Democratic party.
Opfermann and her older brother grew up in an atmosphere of rising antisemitism and observed the “constant street battles” between Nazis and other political parties. Anti-Jewish violence intensified after Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in January 1933. During the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, Opfermann was dismissed from school and witnessed the synagogue in flames. Her father’s law office and the family’s upstairs apartment were “ransacked and destroyed.” Meanwhile, Charlotte’s father was arrested and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Opfermann’s father was released from the camp and returned to Wiesbaden as the only allowed Jewish attorney in the region. He used his position to help other Jewish families prepare paperwork and train in the professional skills needed to leave the country. Although the Opfermanns attempted to apply for immigration to the U.S. themselves, they later discovered they had been scammed and given false documents.
One year after Kristallnacht, Nazis broke into the Opfermanns’ home and Charlotte’s father and brother were beaten and hospitalized. In September 1941, she and her family were required to wear the yellow Star of David. The next October, Opfermann, her parents and brother were sent to an assembly point in the nearby city of Frankfurt before being deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in June 1943.
At Theresienstadt, everyone over the age of 10 was assigned to hard manual labor. Charlotte remembered “constant death from lack of sanitation” and starvation. Although she suffered from diphtheria and hepatitis, Opfermann participated in the Yad Tomechet (Helping Hand) resistance organization to help others in the camp. Charlotte also wrote a play, “Die Schwarze Hand” (The Black Hand), which was performed at the camp to provide hope to the interned children.
Opfermann recalled the efforts of the Nazis to temporarily clean up and present Theresienstadt as a model camp when the Red Cross arrived for an inspection in June 1944. Only a few months later, Charlotte’s father and brother were deported to the Auschwitz killing center. Her father was murdered and her brother ultimately died at Mauthausen only a few weeks before the camp was liberated.
Soviet troops liberated Opfermann and her mother at Theresienstadt in May 1945. Charlotte recovered from scarlet fever in a hospital in Prague before she and her mother returned to Wiesbaden. While working for the American military government, Charlotte first met her future husband William (Bill) Opfermann, a former German soldier who had been interned as a prisoner of war in France.
Charlotte immigrated to the United States in 1945 aboard the second ship of post-World War II German immigrants. She lived in Chicago where she worked as a buyer for Sears department stores. Opfermann married Bill in 1951 and the couple lived in Switzerland, France, Germany and England before settling in Toledo, Ohio. They had two daughters, but separated in 1976 and later divorced.
In 1987, Charlotte moved to Houston, Texas to be near one of her daughters. Opfermann taught English at San Jacinto College and presented numerous papers and lectures at Holocaust symposia. She also lectured in Holocaust Studies at the American University in West Virginia, Purdue University in Indiana and the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Poland. Charlotte wrote and contributed to multiple publications before her death in 2004 at the age of 79.