Uruguayan identity card Lothar Prager

Uruguayan identity card for Lothar Prager, issued in 1939 after Lothar escaped from Germany to Montevideo, Uruguay. Lothar Prager was born in 1902 to Wilhelm and Wanda Prager in Rybnik, Germany (now Poland). He was the youngest of three siblings; his brother Rudolph (Rudi)) was born 1897, and sister Marie born 1899.

The Prager family moved to Breslau in the early 1920s. The middle-class family operated a successful textiles and dyes factory. Lothar Prager worked as a travelling salesmen for the business from 1921 until 1937, when antisemitic legislation prevented his business license from being renewed.

Antisemitic legislation also severed Lothar’s relationship with his Aryan fiancé Grete Brix. The couple worked together for years in the Prager family business; Lothar as a travelling salesman and Grete the model accompanying him on the trips. In September 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were passed, which prohibited marriage between Jews and Germans. By December 1935, their relationship of ten years was over.

In 1938, as antisemitism worsened, Lothar tried to convince his parents to prepare for emigration as he and his brother Rudi were doing, by trying to secure visas to any country that would take them. His parents, already in their late sixties, initially decided that life for German Jews had been difficult before and they thought in time it would pass – they didn’t want to leave their home and factory. By the time they changed their minds it was too late.

Wilhelm and Wanda Prager were deported to Theresienstadt (Terezin) in 1942 where they perished around six months later. Marie Kohn (nee Prager) and her husband Erich were deported to Sobibor and murdered in May 1943.

Lothar’s brother Rudi Prager immigrated in 1939 to Santiago, Chile while Lothar received a visa for Paraguay. As Paraguay was an inland country the ship docked in Montevideo, Uruguay, in September 1938, where he decided to make his new home. Here he met and married Holocaust survivor Dina Weizer in 1948.