Marie Jalowicz-Simon

Family

Marie Jalowicz was born on April fourth in nineteen twenty-two, in Berlin, Germany. Marie was a teenager when the Nazi's began taking her remaining family away. She died in Berlin at the age of seventy six on September sixteenth, nineteen-ninety eight. Her mother died after a long battle with cancer in nineteen thirty-eight. Her father died in the earlier part of nineteen forty-one, leaving her without family for the majority of the holocaust. She is survived by her only son, Hermann Simon.

The Holocaust

Marie evaded Nazi capture through a long string of forgeries, impersonations, luck, and help from a wide array of people from every walk of life. She used her wit and charm to seduce people in positions that could help her and moved around constantly. She took the words of a friend of hers to heart, “In absurd times, everything is absurd. You can save yourselves only by absurd means, since the Nazis are out to murder us all.” On more than one occasion she tried to flee Germany, narrowly evading apprehension and escaping back to her homeland each time. She didn't speak about her experiences for fifty years, and just before her death in nineteen ninety-eight she recorded seventy seven cassette tapes worth of audio with her son, Hermann, chronicling her experience during the Nazi reign.