Lothar Prager, Aged 15

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 middle-class family operated a textiles and dyes factory. In the early 1920s the family moved to Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland).

In the early 1930s Lothar and his Aryan girlfriend Grete Brix, were working together. He was a travelling salesman for their family clothing factory and Grete the model accompanying him on the trips. By early 1935 Lothar and Grete decided to move in together before getting married.

In 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were passed, which prohibited marriage between Jews and Germans. Grete was finding it difficult as more and more couples of mixed relationships were denounced, often paraded on the streets and humiliated. In December 1935 she wrote a farewell letter to Lothar, thanking him for his kindness over the years and wishing him well in the days ahead.

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. He disembarked and decided to make Montevideo his new home. Here he met and married Holocaust survivor Dina Weizer in 1948.