Illinois Holocaust Museum President Fritzie Fritzshall Dies At 91

SKOKIE, IL — Fritzie Fritzshall, a survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp who dedicated her life to fighting hate and ensuring the horrors of the Holocaust would not be forgotten or repeated, died Saturday at the age of 91.

Fritzshall's death was announced by the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie, where she had been president since shortly after it opened in 2009.

For the past four decades, the Buffalo Grove resident has been a voice for survivors and an advocate against antisemitism, prejudice and hatred.

After becoming involved in activism in the late 1970s to oppose neo-Nazis from marching in Skokie, Fritzshall later co-founded the Holocaust Memorial Foundation, helped make Illinois the first state to require teaching of the history of the Holocaust in public schools and presided over the establishment of one of the world's largest Holocaust museums.

“To know Fritzie and to understand Fritzie's life journey is to know a true humanitarian, a true hero in so many ways, a person of immense compassion, filled with humility and desire for a better world,” said Jordan Lamm, chair of the museum's board.

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A native of the former Czechoslovakia, now part of Ukraine, Nazi occupation forces loaded Fritzshall, her mother and two brothers on a train car to be taken to Auschwitz, where her mother and siblings were murdered.

"It was a cattle car, as you know. No windows and no seats. No toilet. When we got onto the trains, none of us knew we were being taken to a concentration camp. None of us knew anything about Auschwitz. At least, I don't think we knew. We honestly thought we were going to be relocated. Until the door closed, and we heard the lock go on from the outside" Fritzshall said, recalling the harrowing two-and-a-half-day train ride in a 1990 oral history interview for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

"The crying. The stink. The fear. It's strange, fear gives out a certain smell and that mixed with open bucket — it's a smell I don't believe one can ever forget. It's not to be described," she said. "I believe if I live to be 100, that smell will stay with me. And I will always hear the crying of babies, and in particular, the young mother trying to breastfeed an infant and not having any milk."

Fritzshall, born Frieda Weiss, was 13 at the time. But after a stranger on the train told her to claim to be older, she told the guards she was 15 — a lie she credited with saving her life.

After a year in Auschwitz and a year of slave labor in a separate Nazi labor camp, Fritzshall escaped into the forest in 1945 during a death march. She was liberated by the Soviet Army.

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In 1946, Fritzshall came to Skokie to join her father, who had left Europe before the Holocaust and taken a job at Vienna Beef, according to the museum.

For years, she repressed her memories of her experiences during the war, Fritzshall said in the oral history.

"I couldn't handle them. So I had taken all of my memories and put them in a little box, and put them on the very bottom of my brain. Closed the box never to be taken out, never to be examined. This is how I lived for many years. This is how I handled my past," she said. "We did not discuss the Holocaust in my home. It was taboo. I would not associate with survivors. I would not join any organizations."

Fritzshall would go on to marry the late Norman Fritzshall, an American World War II veteran, and work as a hairdresser in the area.

"I remember coming to this wonderful free country that I'm in and thinking antisemitism was left behind me," Fritzshall said in an interview last month. "Well, obviously it wasn't. It's followed me, and I am concerned with what is happening here today."

Fritzshall traces her activism back to the late 1970s, when the National Socialist Party of America threatened to march through Skokie, where about one in 10 residents was a survivor of the Holocaust.

"I remember in Skokie the community came together, and because of the community coming together, the neo-Nazis never came into Skokie," Fritzshall said last month. "To me, that particular time, and since, shows what can happen if people come together — if the community comes together. We're not so different from each other. If we get to know each other, we might even like each other, because we're so different, but so many of us are alike in so many different ways."

The Nazis ended up marching in Chicago instead, and Fritzshall and a small group of other recently mobilized survivors established the Holocaust Memorial Foundation in 1981 and opened a 5,000-square-foot museum in a storefront on Main Street in 1984.

In 1990, Fritzshall was among the survivors who successfully lobbied former Gov. Jim Thompson to sign the nation's first Holocaust education mandate, requiring that public school students in the state be taught the history of Nazi atrocities.

Efforts by Fritzshall and other survivors eventually led to the opening of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in 2009. The 65,000-square-foot Stanley Tigerman-designed museum is today the second-largest Holocaust museum in the United States and the third-largest in the world, according to museum officials.

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Gov. J.B. Pritzker chaired the fundraising campaign to build the museum, raising about $40 million of the $45 million needed, and went on to serve as its board chairman. In a statement following her death, Pritzker said Fritzshall would be forever remembered.

“Fritzie wanted us to know that there are good people everywhere. Even in the most difficult, threatening, and horrific circumstances, goodness might be present. She spent much of her life teaching children and adults that we all need to be like the stranger who saved her life on the train that day at Auschwitz. ‘One person can make a difference’ she always said.” Pritzker said.

“Fritzie was that person who made a difference for many. She embodied the decency and kindness she implored from others. She was strong and faithful and caring. A fundamentally good person is gone today. I miss her already, and I will never forget her.”

More than 285,000 people every year visit the museum, where attendees can now ask questions and interact with a hologram version of Fritzshall and other survivors in the "Survivor Stories Experience," which opened in 2017 after she answered thousands of questions about her experience over the course of five days of recording.

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This year, the museum premiers another virtual reality experience, "A Promise Kept," that takes visitors along with Fritzshall on a 2019 trip to Auschwitz with Cardinal Blase Cupich as she tells the story of her experience.

The visit was the subject of the 2019 WLS-TV series "Return to Auschwitz: A Survivor's Story."

Cupich offered condolences to Fritzshall's family in a statement Saturday in response to news of her death.

"Today the world lost a clarion voice against bigotry and hatred, and I lost a good friend," Cupich said. "By bravely sharing her story, Fritzie inspired us and now it is up to us to make sure her work lives on and the world never forgets the Holocaust."

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Susan Abrams, the chief executive officer of the museum, said Fritzshall was an inspiration.

“Fritzie was the heart and soul of our Museum,” Abrams said. “She played an important role in the Museum transforming from regional player to global leader, sharing her story of survival and its lessons through cutting edge technology including interactive holograms and virtual reality film. I regularly watched in awe as Fritzie mesmerized audiences with her story and its lessons. All who were touched by her will never forget.”

A funeral service is set for Wednesday at Weinstein & Piser Funeral Home, 111 Skokie Blvd., in Wilmette. The museum is accepting memorial contributions in her honor to the Fritzie Fritzshall Education Fund to support the institution's mission to "remember the past, transform the future."

Speaking last month, Fritzshall expressed concern about a recent uptick in antisemitism.

"My fear is of what is happening today with young people in the schools and the universities — all of this hatred that's going on," she said.

"If we want this country to be a stronger country, if we want to leave a good country for our children and our grandchildren, we need to stand up. We need to speak out against hatred. All hatred: antisemitism and all hatred, it needs to stop and needs to stop with us, and needs to stop with all of us."