Lotte Weiss

Lotte (Charlotte) Weiss, nee Frankl, was born in Bratislava (Czechoslovakia) in 1923. She and her family moved into a ghetto in 1941 and in March 1942 Lotte was collected in a roundup of Jewish girls and transported to Auschwitz. After four weeks of hard labour she ended up in hospital with meningitis. On the way from the hospital to the gas chambers a nurse intervened and Lotte was able to survive the selection. She was sent back to hospital but ran and hid in different barracks until she found her two sisters. Her sisters became sick and were sent to the gas chambers.

Lotte attempted suicide but she was stopped by a kapo and then put to work sorting clothes to be sent to Germany. When Auschwitz was evacuated in January 1945 she was marched from camp to camp passing through Flossenburg concentration camp in Germany and arriving in Theresienstadt in April 1945. Soon after Lotte arrived, the camp was liberated by the Russian Army.

After she was liberated, Lotte returned to Prague on trucks and then by open wagons back to Bratislava. She stayed with her aunt and married a year later. Leaving Czechoslovakia in 1948, Lotte lived in New Zealand until 1986 when she came to Australia.