In Germany, at the age of 100, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, a witness to the Holocaust, Trude Simonsohn, has died. This was announced on Thursday, January 6, by the chairman of the Jewish community of Frankfurt am Main, Salomon Korn.
According to Korn, Simonson “contributed to a more humane society” through her “relentless drive to share experiences with schoolchildren in the first place.”
As an eyewitness to history, she gave future generations the opportunity to “get closer to the unthinkable” and fostered the development of sensitivity and a sense of responsibility among young people, said Claudia Roth, German State Minister for Culture and Media, in connection with Trude Simonzon’s death.
Resistance member and prisoner of Auschwitz
Trude Zimonzon bore the surname Gutman at birth. She was born in 1921 in what was then Czechoslovakia, which was annexed by Nazi Germany. Her father was arrested in 1939 and died in the Dachau concentration camp.
In 1942, Trude Zimonzon, who had participated in the underground movement Resistance to the National Socialists, was taken into custody with her mother in retaliation against the civilian population following the successful assassination of the high-ranking Nazi Reinhard Heydrich by Czech underground workers. Zimonzon ended up in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where she met her future husband Berthold. Then they were transferred to Auschwitz, where her mother died, and Truda and Berthold were lucky to survive.
After the end of the war and liberation from the camp, the couple emigrated to Switzerland, where Trude Zimonzon became a nurse and social worker, helping Jewish children who lost their relatives during the Holocaust. In 1950 Trude and Berthold Zimonzon returned to Germany. In the 1970s, she began speaking publicly with stories of what she witnessed. In 1989-2001 she headed the Jewish community of Frankfurt am Main.
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