"One in 6,000,000"

Hilde Geisen was born in May 1924 in Cologne, Germany, the only daughter of Robert and Frieda (née Esser) Geisenheimer. Robert was a veteran on World War I. The family was assimilated and Hilde attended public school, even joining in Christian celebrations with her classmates. In 1934, Robert was forbidden to work and in 1935, Hilde was forced to attend Jewish school. The family owned an apartment building, which was confiscated by the Nazi government, which forced the Geisenheimers to pay rent on their small room. After Kristallnacht, Hilde went to Mainz to live with her maternal aunt, Meta, and Meta's Christian husband Cony Schulz. In March 1941, she returned to Cologne to live with her parents, and Robert began to try to get visa paperwork for Hilde to travel to relatives in the United States. In October 1941, Hilde received a visa to Cuba. She was present when her parents were arrested on October 27, 1941, and was only able to remove herself from the list due to her pending immigration. Robert and Frieda were deported to the Łódź ghetto, and both perished in the Holocaust. After the United States entered the war, Hilde was no longer able to immigrate and took a job in Cologne working with the elderly at the Jewish hospital. In July 1942, she was deported along with the hospital's patients to Theresienstadt. She first worked doing physical labor, but was then assigned to clean buildings. After the typhus epidemic in the spring of 1945, Hilde worked as part of a bucket brigade to throw the ashes of epidemic victims into the nearby river. She was liberated from Theresienstadt on May 8, 1945 and traveled to the Deggendorf displaced persons camp. In August 1947, she immigrated to the United States to join relatives, settling in Eugene, Oregon, where she had a career as a buyer for her relatives' department store. She never married or had children. Hilde Geisen lives in Eugene, Oregon.