The last sign of life

In May 1942, Wilhelm Prager sent this message via the Red Cross to his son Lothar in Montevideo, Uruguay. “We hope you are healthy. Most cordial birthday wishes. We just manage. We are now living in a small room of a 'Jews House'. Erich works out of town. Miezel is healthy. Cordial greetings. Parents”

Wilhelm and Wanda Prager, with their children Lothar, Rudolph and Marie, moved to Breslau from Rybnik, Germany (now Poland), 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.

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.

This is the last correspondence Lothar received from his parents. 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. He disembarked and decided to make Montevideo his new home. Here he met and married Holocaust survivor Dina Weizer in 1948.