The daughter of a shoe store owner, Max, and a homemaker, Elsa, Hilda Brück was born in 1925 to the only Jewish family in an apartment building in the Munich suburb of Schwabing. The Brück’s belonged to a synagogue, but did not attend services every week. She referred to her family as “liberal” Jews.  Some of Hilda’s fondest memories of childhood were the family outings to the mountains, and playing with her brothers.

Hilda was eight years old when Hitler came to power, and antisemitism was on the rise. Hilda’s walk to school was now punctuated with placards of hideous caricatures of Jews. “Jews Forbidden” signs began to appear in store windows. Anti-Jewish rants flooded the radio. Food became scarce, and family friends were arrested or disappeared. Hilda later recalled that her neighbors would often echo the increasingly hostile public rhetoric against Jews, only to add that they, “didn’t mean you – it’s just the rest of them.”

It was in high school that Hilda first remembered her own personal encounter with antisemitism. The other students stopped speaking to her. “It’s hard for people to understand how difficult this isolation was,” Hilda recalled. But some pushed back. Hilda related the story of her brother’s teacher, who called up all the blue-eyed, blonde-haired children to the front of the class. Several of them were Jewish ─ which he knew would debunk the Nazi Aryan stereotype.

As conditions deteriorated, the Brück family applied for a visa to the US sometime around 1934 or 1935. Hilda’s paternal grandparents believed this “phase” would pass; they never applied for a visa… a move that cost them their life.

On November 9, 1938, the day before the events of Kristallnacht, one of Hilda’s classmates told her “under her breath” that Hilda’s father and brother must leave the house. Hilda snuck out of school to telephone her father. It was winter, with no place to go, so they walked the streets but returned later that evening.

In the middle of the night came the “dreaded knock.” The family was all too aware of people being arrested at night and taken away. Even a family friend who was a Lutheran minister had been taken because of his anti-Nazi views. Hilda’s father and brother, Eugen, were taken away by two gestapo agents and sent to Dachau, a concentration camp outside of Munich.

There was massive destruction in downtown Munich that night. All of the Jewish-owned stores were demolished, including Max’s shoe store.

Eugen wrote to his mother from Dachau, “We are all right, we have all that we need, good food and warm clothes.” The brave face in these letters was stripped away when Eugen and Max were released three weeks later. Frostbitten and half-starved, they were reunited with their family.  Their release was conditioned on leaving Germany, so Eugen and his father fled to Luxembourg, where Max’s sister lived at the time.

After Kristallnacht, Hilda and her mother were evicted from their apartment, but not before they had time to pack up a few things and ship them to Luxembourg. Many things were left behind, including her mother’s prized grand piano. They were settled by the authorities in a Judenhaus (Jew House) along with her mother’s parents. Hilda was not allowed to return to school; she was assigned to work in a Jewish orphanage, without pay. She later had to report to a youth work detail that traveled by train to the country each day to gather flax from dawn to dusk.  Elsa was not required to work. She would spend her days standing in lines to barter for a bit of bread from one of the few shops that would sell to Jews. She would come home exhausted, with “her hands frozen from holding her little shopping bag – and she was a pianist,” Nathan said.

In April 1941, the family’s US visas came through, but there was no American Consulate in Luxembourg so Max and Eugen’s visas were sent to Holland. Weeks later, in May 1940, the Germans invaded Luxembourg. Hilda’s aunt and uncle joined the French underground while Max and Eugen fled to France. Without official papers, Max and Eugen were labeled “Fifth Columnists” or “Communists” and placed in a camp.  After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, all communication was lost.  Max and Eugen were deported to Auschwitz; Max died in the cattle car on the way, and Eugen died in the camp sometime later.

Meanwhile, Hilda and Elsa received their US visas, some of the last to be issued.  They travelled to Barcelona, Spain in a locked passenger train, and finally onto the SS Ciudad de Sevilla bound for New York City in the August of 1941. Hilde was 16. Elsa was 51. They carried $10 between the two of them.

Hilda’s maternal grandfather died on the way to a concentration camp; no one knew what happened to her maternal grandmother.

In New York, Hilda and Elsa quickly took domestic jobs. Elsa lived with a family whose house she cleaned, and Hilda with another family whose autistic son she cared for. Once they had saved enough money, Elsa got an apartment and worked as a seamstress. In only three years, Hilda finished high school.

In 1948, Hilda married the son of her co-sponsors, Harvey Ceigler from Nashville. She was also reunited with the crate of family belongings from Luxembourg. Her aunt and uncle had returned to Luxembourg and found it unopened in an open shed. Hilda felt blessed to have their china, her grandfather’s art collection, etc., that her mother had packed.  It was put in the second bedroom of their small two-bedroom apartment, calling it the “German catch-all.”  There it stayed until their first child was born and they had a house of their own.

Hilda and Harvey had two children, but sadly, Harvey died from complications of multiple sclerosis less than a decade later, leaving Hilda a widow and single mother at age 30. She took over the family’s Nashville and Madison businesses, Ceigler’s Department Store. Her mother, Elsa, lived with her and helped with the kids.

In 1961, Hilda married Howard Harris and became a stepmother to three sons. Howard, an aeronautical engineer, took a job in Huntsville in 1964, and moved their combined five children and Hilda’s mother, Elsa. In 1973, Howard got a job in Warm Springs, GA, and the family moved again. During their years in Alabama and Georgia, Hilda worked in retail sales and banking, and finished out her career as an insurance claims processor for the Georgia Warm Springs Institute. Howard passed away in 1984.

In 1992, Hilda married an old Huntsville friend, Ernest Nathan. Hilda and Ernest were very active in Congregation B’nai Sholom. Hilda became a highly regarded speaker on the Holocaust, and a large Holocaust plaque in memory of her family was dedicated at the synagogue.

In 2009, Hilda became a widow again.  She continued to live independently until 2017, when she moved to the Atlanta area’s Cohen Home to be near her son Michael Ceigler. Her many children visited and/or phoned her daily.

Hilda would often recall that it was the suffering her father and brother had endured that would wake her at night. Prisoners in the concentration camps had their identification number tattooed on their forearms. Hilda had avoided that fate, but her grief was just as indelible: “When I take a warm shower or have a little coffee or do something that is a little bit comfortable, I think of my family and what they went through,” she said.

Her message to teachers was simple: “Tell [students] that this really happened. This really, really happened.” As impossible as it might seem today, “prejudice can do . . . terrible things.”