Karla Raveh (1927–2017)

Karla Raveh, née Frenkel, was born to a Jewish family in Lemgo, Germany. Her parents were Herta (Rosenberg) and Walter Frenkel, a businessman, and she had three siblings, Helga, Ludwig, and Uriel. At age 15 in 1942, during World War II, she was deported with her family to the Nazi concentration camp at Terezin (Theresienstadt). In 1944, the family was sent to the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. From there, Karla was moved to Bergen-Belsen, then to a munitions factory at Salzwedel, Germany. She was liberated by Allied forces in April 1945, a month shy of her 18th birthday. Of the 12 members of her family, only Karla and her maternal grandmother Helene Rosenberg survived the Holocaust. After the war, Karla returned to Lemgo, where she met her future husband Shmuel Rubin (later Raveh), also the sole survivor of a large family. They married and emigrated to Israel in 1949. In the mid-1980s, after 40 years of silence, Mrs. Raveh wrote her memoirs at the request of Hanne Pohlmann, a teacher in Lemgo. She gave the manuscript to Pohlmann, who arranged to have it published as Überleben: Der Leidensweg der jüdischen Familie Frenkel aus Lemgo (English translation: Survival: The Ordeal of the Jewish Frenkel Family of Lemgo) in 1987. After that, Mrs. Raveh spent summers in Lemgo for 30 years, meeting with old acquaintances and speaking to schoolchildren about her experiences. She was the subject of an Israel-German short film entitled Between Home and Homeland made by Lilach Naishtat-Bornstein and Hans-Peter Lübke (2012),