Brass Shabbat lamp and drip tray acquired by a German Jewish woman

Louise Suessmann (nee Schwarzenberger, 1907-2000) was born in Mosbach, Germany, to Bernhard (1869-1943), a merchant, and Meta (nee Katzenberger, 1870-1943) Schwarzenberger. Louise had three siblings: Maria (later Oppenheimer, 1898-1997), Käthe (later Fröhlich, 1899-1997), and Kurt (1902-1960).

When Hitler took control of the German government in January 1933, the German administration began issuing anti-Semitic decrees and regulations. In 1935, the German authorities passed the Nuremberg Laws, which excluded people of Jewish ancestry from German citizenship and led to ordinances stripping them of their political rights, barring them from many professions, and forbidding marriage between Jews and non-Jews. That same year, Maria immigrated to the United States with her husband Ludwig Oppenheimer, and son Joseph. They settled in St. Louis, Missouri, and opened a candy store. Kurt followed in 1936, with his wife Charlotte, also settled in St. Louis, and found work as a clerk for a shoe manufacturer. In 1939, Käthe, her husband, and their three children immigrated to St. Louis via the Netherlands, and they eventually settled in Israel.

On November 9 and 10, 1938, German officials instigated pogroms of violence and destruction against Jews and their property, known as Kristallnacht. During the pogroms, 30,000 Jewish men were also incarcerated in German concentration camps and held unless they promised to leave Germany. These events spurred many Jews to emigrate from Germany, which Louise did in 1939. She joined her siblings in St. Louis, and found work as a hospital attendant.

In late 1940, Louise married Emanuel Suessmann (1910-1978), a storekeeper and gardener from Leipzig, Germany. In the aftermath of the Kristallnacht pogrom, Emanuel had been imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany. He was released in December 1938, and six months later immigrated to Great Britain. He went to Kitchener (also known as Richborough Transit Camp), a refugee camp, organized and funded by the Central British Fund for German Jewry. After a year in the camp, Emanuel immigrated to the United States in June 1940. On September 10, 1942, Louise’s parents, Bernhard and Meta, were deported from Nuremberg, Germany, to Theresienstadt ghetto-labor camp in German-occupied Czechoslovakia, where they both died in 1943. In April 1943, Emanuel was drafted by the U.S. Army, and beginning in September 1944 served in Germany with the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division, known as the Ritchie Boys. He was discharged in October 1945, and returned to their home in St. Louis, and they had one son, Michael (b. 1946).