Ernest Michel papers

Ernest Michel (1923-2016) was born Ernst Wolfgang Michel on 1 July 1923, in Mannheim, Germany in 1923, the son of Otto (1879-1942?) and Frieda (née Wolf, 1884-1942?). The family also included one daughter, Charlotte (Lotte). Otto Michel owned a cigar factory in Mannheim, but following the Nazi rise to power in Germany in 1933, that business was eventually taken away from him. As Nazi regulations targeting Jews in Germany increased, Ernst was no longer able to attend school, and instead, briefly attended a Jewish school, studied calligraphy, and worked in a Jewish-owned cardboard factory near Mannheim. During this period, Ernst happened upon an American tourist one day in Mannheim, who was lost and needed directions. After Ernst helped him, the man suggested that he write to his son, Robert Lindsay, in Wilmington, Delaware, and that the two could be pen-pals. Ernst took him up on that offer, and began corresponding with Lindsay. As conditions in Mannheim for Jewish families like the Michels deteriorated, the Michels decided that they needed to send their children out of the country. Lotte was sent to France, and from there to Palestine, and the Michels turned to the Lindsay family for help in bringing Ernst to the United States. Although the family agreed to sponsor him, Ernst was unable to immigrate, due to the three-year wait for a visa from the American Consulate. Shortly after the outbreak of World War II, he was seized by the Gestapo and conscripted into a forced labor brigade, working in various locations throughout Germany, and was sent to Auschwitz in early 1943. Unknown to him, his own parents had been arrested in 1940 and deported to concentration camps in France, from which they were deported to Auschwitz and killed there in 1942. Ernst remained there, working in the Buna synthetic rubber plant, among other places, before he was evacuated on a forced march in January 1945, from which he and two other prisoners escaped, while passing through Saxony, where they worked as farm laborers until the end of the war. Ernst returned to Mannheim in the summer of 1945, where American military personnel he had met helped him find a job as a journalist coverning the Nuremberg trials, and also eventually helped him immigrate to the United States in 1946. He lived initially in Chicago and in Port Huron, Michigan, where he worked for a local paper, before joining the United Jewish Appeal, for whom he worked for several decades, serving as executive vice-president of that organization from 1970 to 1989. He was one of the principal planners of the 1981 World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, which took place in Jerusalem and was the first, large-scale reunion of Holocaust survivors. Ernest Michel died in New York on 7 May 2016, at the age of 92.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Amy Goldberg

Gift of Amy Goldberg, the wife of Ernest Michel, 2017.