Holocaust survivor Charlotte Knoblauch has been fighting anti-Semitism and for Judaism for decades. Today the native of Munich is celebrating her 90th birthday. She was shocked by the AfD result in Lower Saxony. She speaks of an “alarm signal for the whole country”.
She is the last Holocaust survivor in a public office in Germany: the former President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Charlotte Knobloch, is also at the age of 90, which she has now reached, at the head of the Jewish community in Munich and Upper Bavaria and is still one of the most important voices of Judaism in Germany. As such, she is outraged by today’s right-wing extremism – at the same time, she approaches her home country of Germany with optimism and patriotism.
Knobloch’s words after the state elections in Lower Saxony and the significant gains made by the right-wing populist AfD were clear. “To put it bluntly, I’m shocked at how many votes can be won in elections with fear and agitation alone,” she said, lamenting the “alarm signal for the whole country.” In view of the high number of right-wing extremist acts in Germany, Knobloch has always remained active as a reminder. The impetus for her steadfast action probably lies in her own history. “Everyone who survived has a story that you just can’t believe,” she said in an ARD interview about her survival in the Holocaust.
Knobloch was born Charlotte Neuland on October 29, 1932. Adolf Hitler took power just three months after her birth, and National Socialism soon destroyed the happiness of the family. Her father, the lawyer Siegfried “Fritz” Neuland, was banned from working. Charlotte’s mother, who had converted to Judaism, broke with the family under pressure from the Nazis – Charlotte grew up with her grandmother. Charlotte experienced the pogroms of November 9, 1938 in Munich up close, as she said in a moving speech to the Bundestag last year. “Holding my father’s hand, I am wandering through the streets. Noise. Screams. Smoke is pouring out of the windows of the Ohel Jakob Synagogue.” Charlotte sees how two SA henchmen drag “Grandpa Rothschild” out of his house. “Blood is running down his face. I mustn’t stop. Don’t stumble. Don’t cry. Just don’t stand out.”
When Charlotte was nine years old, her beloved grandmother was taken to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where she died. Knobloch survives the Nazi period – her father manages to hide her as an alleged illegitimate child with a deeply Catholic farmer’s wife in Franconia. After the Second World War she returned to Munich. Her father also stays there. From day one he said that Germany had a future, Knobloch just told the “Stern”. “He loved his homeland, still.” Fritz Neuland later became president of the Jewish community in Munich. It is thanks to his daughter, who has been at the helm since 1985, that an impressive Jewish center with a synagogue was inaugurated on central Munich’s Jakobsplatz in 2006 – her life’s work. In the year of the inauguration, Knobloch also became President of the Central Council of Jews. She held this post for four years until 2010.
However, these were difficult years for Knobloch, who was accused by some of making the Central Council less important. Critics also accused her of failure to integrate the many Jews who had immigrated from Eastern Europe. Knobloch was always unchallenged in Munich. She actually wanted to leave Germany permanently after the Second World War, like many other Holocaust survivors. But with her husband Samuel she started a family with three children and stayed. Like her father, she also developed a love for her homeland, which she expressed in one sentence in her Bundestag speech: “I stand before you – as a proud German.” And while one of her predecessors at the head of the Central Council, Ignatz Bubis, had himself buried in Israel, Knobloch wants to remain in Munich after death. “I am and will remain in Munich – for all time. This is my home, I belong here.”