Lisa Fittko (1909–2005)
Author of Escape through the Pyrenees
About the Author
Image credit: Life in Legacy; phtographer unidentified
Works by Lisa Fittko
Testimony 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Fittko, Lisa
- Legal name
- Fittko, Elizabeth Eckstein
- Other names
- FITTKO, Lisa
ECKSTEIN, Elizabeth
EKSTEIN, Elizabeth
Eckstein. Erzsébet - Birthdate
- 1909
- Date of death
- 2005-03-12
- Gender
- female
- Nationality
- Hungary
USA - Birthplace
- Uzhgorod, Ukraine (Ungvár, Austro-Hungarian Empire)
- Place of death
- Chicago, Illinois, USA
- Places of residence
- Vienna, Austria
Berlin, Germany
Prague, Czechoslovakia
Basel, Switzerland
Paris, France
Amsterdam, Netherlands (show all 9)
Marseille, France
Havana, Cuba
Budapest, Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Empire - Occupations
- secretary
Holocaust rescuer
memoirist - Relationships
- Fry, Varian (colleague)
Arendt, Hannah (friend) - Organizations
- Emergency Rescue Committee
- Awards and honors
- Distinguished Medal of Merit, Germany (1986)
- Short biography
- Lisa Fittko was born Elizabeth Eckstein to a prominent, artistic Jewish family in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She grew up in Budapest and Vienna before World War I. Afterwards, her family moved to Berlin, where Lisa became active in anti-fascist politics. For seven years, she worked for underground Resistance movements in Berlin, Prague, Zurich, Amsterdam, Paris, and Marseille. Following Nazi Germany's invasion of France in 1940, she and her husband, Hans Fittko, joined Varian Fry and a small group of volunteers for the Emergency Rescue Committee in Marseille. The group is credited with saving about 2,000 people from the Nazis, many of them artists and intellectuals, including André Breton, Marc Chagall, and Max Ernst. Ms. Fittko also helped her friend, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, get out of a prison in France. The Fittkos guided Jews and other refugees over the Pyrenees Mountains to Spain and Portugal. After seven months, the couple escaped to Cuba, and from there emigrated to the USA, settling in Chicago. There Ms. Fittko worked as a secretary and helped support relatives who had survived the Holocaust. She finally gained recognition in the USA through a documentary film, "Lisa Fittko: But We Said We Will Not Surrender" (1998) and her two memoirs, Escape Through the Pyrenees (1985, English translation 1991), and Solidarity and Treason: Resistance and Exile, 1933-1940 (English translation, 1993).
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Statistics
- Works
- 8
- Members
- 67
- Popularity
- #256,179
- Rating
- 3.8
- Reviews
- 3
- ISBNs
- 14
- Languages
- 4
- Favorited
- 1