Lucille Eichengreen

Lucille Eichengreen (born as Cecelia Landau on 1 February 1925 in Hamburg, Germany) is a survivor of the Łódź Ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz, Neuengamme, and Bergen-Belsen. She moved to the United States in 1946, married, had two sons and worked as an insurance agent. In 1994, she published From Ashes to Life: My Memories of the Holocaust. She frequently lectures on the Holocaust at libraries, schools and universities in the United States and Germany.

Lucille Eichengreen was the oldest of two daughters of Polish-originated wine merchant Benjamin Landau and his wife Sala (Sara), née Baumwollspinner. She describes her childhood as being "very nice, very comfortable" before Hitler came to power in 1933. After that, the Jews became exposed to growing reprisals by the Nazis as well as insults and assaults by the local population. After coming back to Hamburg in spring of 1939, Landau was arrested by the Gestapo on 1 September 1939 during the attack on Poland, as a "foreign enemy". He was first brought to police jail in Fuhlsbüttel, then to Oranienburg, and finally Dachau concentration camp, where he was murdered on 31 December 1940. The family learned of his death only in February 1941 when the Gestapo brought his ashes, "in a cigar box with a rubber band", to their apartment. Of this event, Lucille Eichengreen recalls:

Two Gestapo came to the house and threw them on the kitchen table.[...]They only said 'Ashes, Benjamin Landau!' And walked out. They didn't talk.

On 25 October 1941, Lucille Eichengreen, then 16 years old, was deported to the Łódź Ghetto with her mother and her little sister Karin. In the ghetto, her mother starved to death, dying 13 July 1942. Lucille found work and could survive, living under inhumane conditions. Her little sister Karin, whom she took care of while in the ghetto, was separated from her at age eleven in September 1942, deported to Chełmno extermination camp and murdered. She herself was working as a secretary for the journalist and writer Oskar Singer. In 1943, she was hit on the left ear during an interrogation by the Nazi police after a denunciation, resulting in permanent deafness on that ear. In August 1943, she was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp, where she was deemed fit to work during the selection process. A few weeks later, she went through another selection process, concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele sending her to the satellite camp Dessauer Ufer of KZ Neuengamme, where she was forced to heavy labour, working in construction and removing detritus from bomb damages. Later, she was assigned to the physically less straining task in an office, though she was still exposed to mistreatment from supervisors. In March 1945, she was deported to the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen.

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