Gallery Talk with Monique Rothschild

Join us for a gallery talk with Holocaust survivor Monique Rothschild on December 14. Monique shares the story of her family’s daring escape from Nazi-held Europe. Monique’s parents, Ernest and Hilda, fled antisemitism in Germany in 1933. They met and fell in love in Paris. In 1939, Ernest was sent to the first of half a dozen work camps for enemy aliens. Monique was born in 1940 in Bellac near the last labor camp where Ernest was imprisoned.  Following a month of separation, Hilda was able to make the perilous trip across the Pyrenees Mountains into Spain, carrying Monique, to make departure on a ship for which she already had tickets for passage. Thanks to an unexpected travel delay of several weeks and assistance from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), Ernest was able to reunite with Hilda and Monique in Seville. They reunited just in time to board one of the last ships, the SS Navemar, taking refugees to the United States and arrived just months before America entered WWII. The ship’s unimaginable conditions would later be described as a floating concentration camp. The family arrived in America in 1941, and rebuilt their lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.