Charlotte Knobloch

Charlotte Knobloch is a well-known leader and representative of the Jewish community in Germany, Europe and around the world. A slew of titles attest to her deep involvement in Jewish life and heritage: President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany (2006-2010), Vice-President of the European Jewish Congress (2003-2011) and of the World Jewish Congress (2005-2013), and President of the Jewish Community of Munich and Upper Bavaria (since 1985).

Yet beneath these prestigious roles, Charlotte carried the weight of uncertainty for many years.

When the war ended, twelve-year-old Charlotte was reluctant to return to Munich from the farm in Franconia where she had gone into hiding. She would have preferred to stay with the only friends she had during the final three years of the war: the farm animals, and her beloved cat — a black-and-white stray kitten who had come to Charlotte’s window soon after her father had left her at the farm, and who never left her side again. This kitten was her only companion with whom she could speak openly.

Returning to Munich meant leaving them, and facing an extremely difficult situation. Charlotte remembered clearly both the hatred shown to her family and her neighbours’ complacency during the Nazi persecution, and was loathe to meet them again. During her years in hiding, she had also picked up a Franconian dialect, and it was distressing enough that her own father often couldn’t understand her – let alone when others in Munich couldn’t either. But Charlotte’s father was determined: he had regained his licence to practice law and wanted to go back to help rebuild the Jewish community. She had no choice but to follow.

A few years later, in 1951, Charlotte married Samuel Knobloch, and, both eager to leave Germany, they made plans to resettle in the United States. Samuel’s family had all been killed: his mother and five of his siblings had been murdered in the Kraków ghetto, and his father shot before his very eyes at the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp. They began training with the ORT (Organisation-Reconstruction-Training), an organisation that trained prospective Jewish immigrants as skilled workers for Israel. Charlotte trained as a dressmaker, Samuel as a mirror maker. The pair also began to learn English, in the hope of being able to move to the US.

Every few days, they checked the lists of people approved for emigration at the Resettlement Centre, anticipating when they would be named. As they prepared to leave, however, Charlotte became pregnant with their first child, followed by their second and third. Rather than trying to uproot themselves with young children, they stayed in Germany.

Her father committed himself to the Jewish community in Munich, helping survivors piece together their shattered lives after losing loved ones in a catastrophe they had barely escaped themselves.

In time, Charlotte too became active in international Jewish organisations operating in Europe and worldwide, putting her energy and determination into preserving the heritage of Jewish communities, supporting their social and cultural development, giving Jewish people a voice in international forums and fighting against antisemitism. When Jewish immigrants from the former USSR arrived in Munich in the 1990s, she played an active role in their integration.

On 9 November 2006, in her capacity as President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Charlotte inaugurated the new Ohel Jakob Synagogue. This was the very same synagogue she had seen engulfed in flames 68 years earlier on Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), a six-year-old girl fleeing through Munich with her father, on the run.

As she looked at the synagogue, she finally said to herself:

I have unpacked my bags.

Childhood in Munich

Charlotte was born in 1932 to Margarethe and Siegfried ‘Fritz’ Neuland. Fritz Neuland was a lawyer and Bavarian senator; Margarethe was born a Christian and converted to Judaism when she married Fritz.

Amid the growing pressure from the Nuremberg Race Laws that, among other measures, targeted mixed marriages, her mother Margarethe left the family in 1936. Charlotte had no contact with her after that. She still grapples with her mother’s decision. ‘Perhaps it was fear and weakness, which are always poor advisors,’ she said in an interview years later. ‘I’d rather not speculate on this and make accusations against my mother (...) but there is no question that it was incomprehensible to me at the time – and remains so today.’ After her parents divorced, Charlotte was raised by her grandmother Albertine Neuland.

The rising antisemitism in 1930s Germany encroached upon Charlotte’s life through simple cruelties. Her piano teacher turned up at her home one day, distraught, to tell the family that the Gestapo had informed her if she continued to teach a Jewish child she would receive the same treatment as the Jews. She couldn’t play with her friends any more – their caretaker told her that the children were not allowed to play with a Jewish child. Charlotte was devastated. She ran home to her grandmother, who explained to her for the first time that she was Jewish: ‘I didn’t know that word. For me it wasn’t a concept. I think I had believed we were all the same and that there were no differences. That was the first time I realised that we were different, that people could perceive us as different’.

Her father also suffered. In 1933, the German government issued a mandate that ordered the disbarment of non-‘Aryan’ lawyers by 30 September 1933. Initially, he was exempted as a veteran of the First World War. However, in 1938, the Fifth Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Act was passed, and he lost his licence to practice law. He was only permitted to work as a legal advisor, and only for Jewish clients. He also had to change his name from Fritz to Siegfried, and add the middle name ‘Israel’ to indicate that he was Jewish. Her grandmother had to add the middle name ‘Sara’ for the same reason.

My grandmother moved in with us. She wanted to ensure that I could have a reasonably normal life. We would play, sing and laugh. She taught me the fundamentals of our faith. But no efforts could obscure the fact that life was becoming ever more difficult for us Jews: edicts, prohibitions and vilification were making our daily lives unbearable.

Speech at the German Bundestag, 27 January 2021

Charlotte spent Kristallnacht – the Night of Broken Glass – on the burning streets, clutching her father’s hand. Realising (correctly) that he would be targeted because of his prominence, Fritz hurried with his daughter to find refuge. ‘Why aren’t the fire fighters coming?’ she remembers thinking amid the fire and smoke.

Deportations of Jewish people from Munich began in 1941, and intensified in spring and summer of 1942.

At home, other people from the community came to get legal advice from her father, who was no longer allowed to have an office. Charlotte listened to their desperate voices as they worried about what they could do for their deported and displaced relatives, and for themselves. Though her grandmother had wanted to give her as normal a life as possible, there was no way to shield Charlotte from the worsening situation for them in Munich.

The Nazi administration issued lists targeting children, the elderly and the disabled for deportation to Theresienstadt, a ghetto-labour camp built in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Either one elderly person or a child from Charlotte’s family had to be deported. Soon Albertine left, telling Charlotte that she was going to a health spa for treatment, but with everything Charlotte had learned, she knew that she would never see her again. She was absolutely heartbroken.

I ask my grandmother if we can travel together tomorrow, if she can also go where I am being taken. My grandmother shakes her head … She tells me she also has to leave soon: “It’ll only be a short trip” … I say nothing. Because I know that my grandmother has just lied to me for the first time. Tears begin to well up in my eyes. I cling to my grandmother. I know that, in this moment, love, affection and security have been banished from my life. I’m not even ten years old. My childhood is over.

By now, it had become far too dangerous to continue living in Munich. Fritz brought Charlotte to a hiding place: the home of farmers in Franconia, where Charlotte would pose as ‘Lotte Hummel’, daughter of a Catholic woman, Kreszentia Hummel, for the next three years. Kreszentia had been the maid of Charlotte’s uncle Willi, who had been a paediatrician in Nuremberg. Though now safe, Charlotte, having just said goodbye to her grandmother forever, was distraught at parting ways with her father, believing that it was the last time she would ever see him.

Kreszentia took in young Charlotte, but without any explanation as to how she came to be in her care, she was deeply worried for her safety, and the feasibility of keeping her on the farm. An excuse to keep her appeared unexpectedly. With all the men gone to war, women had taken over the farm work in the countryside, and a strong network had sprung up between them. Gossip quickly spread about Kreszentia’s ‘Bankert’ – an illegitimate child. When confronted with this rumour, Kreszentia realised she had been given an excellent excuse to keep Charlotte with her, and admitted to being her mother. The neighbours leaped on the opportunity to disparage Kreszentia’s pious reputation, ultimately saving Charlotte with their penchant for gossip. The parish priest was let in on Kreszentia and Charlotte’s secret, and gave her some basic instructions to blend into church masses.

For years, I lived in hiding, under a false name and a false identity. If I had been myself, it would have meant my certain death.

Speech at the European Parliament, 30 January 2019

Miraculously, Charlotte and her father were reunited at the end of the war. He had survived years as a forced labourer. ‘At the end of May 1945, I was on a cart behind Alte, the alpha cow, heading towards the farmyard, when a car stopped. It was no lighthearted reunion’, she said. ‘Even today I can only guess what ordeals they had inflicted on him. Acid had almost entirely robbed him of his sight. But he was alive and so was I!’

Charlotte Knobloch’s message to Europe

The freedom and democracy we enjoy today are only as strong as democrats’ commitment to them, as well as the readiness of the majority to defend them from a hate-filled minority … The EU will only be able to remain “united in diversity” if it’s aware of its values and, of course, defends them.