Issa Seelig

Issa Seelig was born on August 8, 1932 in Kaunas (also called Kovno), Lithuania. She lived with her parents in a house in the center of the city where Issa’s father manufactured ammunition brushes. Seelig remembered how her “very religious and very kosher” grandmother cooked meals for the poor every week. The family washed laundry by hand and kept a basement full of preserved vegetables for the “long and cold” winters. Issa recalled going to school in horse and sleigh over the snow-covered ground.

When she was about four years old, Issa and her family moved to the city of Tauragė (also called Tauroggen) where her younger brother was born. The Soviet Union occupied Lithuania in October 1939. Seven-year-old Issa remembered that “as a child it was very exciting” to see “marching bands and soldiers” in the streets. However, the house where Seelig and her family lived was soon sequestered for use as barracks for Russian soldiers. Soviet authorities nationalized private businesses and her father’s brush manufacturing operation became government property. Still, Issa and her family collected clothes to help recently arrived Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi invasion of Poland.

After about two years of Soviet occupation, in June 1941 Lithuania was invaded by Nazi Germany. Issa and her parents returned to Kaunas where they found themselves crowded into a dirty and disease-ridden ghetto. Issa and her younger brother suffered from whooping cough and chronic hunger. Seelig remembered how Nazis recruited local Lithuanian collaborators to execute mass shootings outside the city. The ghetto shrunk as more and more of its members were systematically murdered. Eventually Issa’s grandmother and younger brother were among those taken away to be killed.

In 1944, the ghetto was dissolved and Issa and her parents were forced onto a sealed cattle car. After a journey of multiple days with no food or water, Issa’s father was separated from the group and sent to the concentration camp at Dachau. Meanwhile, Seelig and her mother struggled to survive at the Stutthof concentration camp and other labor camps. Issa remembered terrible starvation and infestations of lice. In 1945, they were liberated by Soviet forces.

After the war, Issa and her mother learned that Issa’s father had died in Dachau. The surviving mother-daughter pair made their temporary home in Germany, first in the Feldafing displaced persons camp then with a relative in Munich. They moved to London in 1949. Seelig, who turned 17 that year, attended classes to learn English and studied dress design. In 1952, Issa and her mother moved to South Africa where Issa met her future husband Edgar Seelig. The couple married and raised three children.

After the death of her husband in 1979, Issa moved to Texas to be closer to her children. She was a second cousin of Survivor Edith Hamer.

Parents:
Leon Koch, d. Dachau, 1944
Regina Schereschesky Koch, survived

Siblings:
Alexander Koch, unknown
Simon Koch, d. Kaunas (Kovno) ghetto