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PROPOSED RESOLUTION
HONORING THE LIFE AND CONTRIBUTIONS OF FRITZIE FRITZSHALL
WHEREAS, Holocaust survivor, visionary, and long-time President of the Illinois Holocaust Museum Board, Fritzie Fritzshall, died on June 19, 2021; and
WHEREAS, Fritzie was born in Czechoslovakia prior to World War II. When the Nazis occupied her hometown of Klucharky, they deported Fritzie, her mother, and two brothers to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. At the time, Fritzie was a young teenager. "There is no way to describe what it was like to be in the rail car hungry, cold, without food, without water, watching pregnant women begging for water, watching different people dying in front of you from lack of food, air, and water," Fritzie said. "My own grandfather died in this car going to Auschwitz." Her mother, two younger brothers, and other family members were murdered. To survive, she pretended to be older than she was. Fritzie endured a torturous year in Auschwitz and a related Nazi labor camp, where she worked doing slave labor in a factory. In 1945, she was liberated by the Soviet Army after escaping into a nearby forest during a death march; and
WHEREAS, in 1946, Fritzie came to Skokie, Illinois, and reunited with her father, who worked for Vienna Beef. He had come to America before the Holocaust to provide his family with money from abroad. Fritzie married a U.S. veteran of World War II who had been a prisoner of war in the Pacific, and made a life for herself in Chicagoland as a hairdresser, becoming an avid Cubs fan in the process; and
WHEREAS, Fritzie's call to activism began in the late 1970s when neo-Nazis threatened to march through the streets of Skokie. The terror and outrage of seeing swastikas in their community galvanized a group of survivors to establish the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois in 1981 to fight bigotry with education. The Foundation was a small but passionate operation housed in a modest storefront on Skokie's Main Street. I...
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