Wilma Iggers is born as the first daughter of the Jewish landowner Abeles in 1921 in a small village in Bohemia in the former Czechoslovakia. In 1933 she changes from the German school in Bischofteinitz, today’s Horsovsky Tyn, to the Czech grammar school in Domazlice. Wilma Abeles flees with a large group of relatives shortly after the Munich Agreement and a few days before the German Wehrmacht invades Bohemia and enters Czechoslovakia. From there they emigrate to Hamilton in Canada. Wilma Abeles studies German and Romance languages and literature at a small college in the province of Ontario.
Georg Iggersheimer was born in Hamburg in 1926 as the son of a Jewish merchant. In April 1933, shortly after the beginning of the Hitler dictatorship, he is enrolled at the Knauerstrasse Boys’ School. Very early on he developed a strong interest in Jewish culture and religion. Because of conflicts with his parents, he spends about a year in a Jewish children’s home in Esslingen in 1937/1938. In October 1938, a few weeks before the Pogroms of November 1938 the Iggersheimer family emigrated via England to Richmond to the USA. There, Georg, like his parents and his sister, took the surname Iggers and initially attended high school. But at the age of fifteen, he already goes to the university there. He is confronted with the discrimination of the black population and, together with black fellow students, forms a student group that opposes racial segregation.
Wilma Abeles and Georg Iggers met at the University of Chicago after the Second World War, where they studied German and history respectively and later received their doctorates. In 1949, they married and had three children in the following years: Jeremy, Daniel and Jonathan. One year later they decide to take a teaching position at a small black college in Little Rock in the state of Arkansas. Over the next few years, they conduct research on the situation in black high schools, which is presented in court as an important reason for enrolling the first black student in a white high school in 1957 (The Little Rock Nine). After further years of involvement as some of the few white members of the black civil rights movement, they returned to Germany with their children for the first time in 1961 for a longer period of time, where they did scientific work in Göttingen. From 1965, Wilma and Georg Iggers found professorships in German Studies and History in Buffalo, New York. One year later, Wilma Iggers returned to Czechoslovakia to her hometown, today’s Horšovský Týn, in search of the remains of her own childhood. She establishes contacts with many people who are interested in the fate of the Jewish minority.
As internationally recognized scientists they build bridges from the 1970s onwards, not only to the Federal Republic and the former GDR, but also to Asia. Thus, they belong to the first US-Americans who spend a longer stay abroad in the People’s Republic of China in 1984.
After the reunification in 1990, Wilma and Georg Iggers accept German citizenship and spend half a year in Göttingen and half a year in Buffalo, New York. They are engaged as scientists and scholars in Germany, the Czech Republic, Europe, and all over the world — and are recognized for it. In numerous lectures and discussions with young people, especially in Germany, but also in the Czech Republic and the USA. Wilma and Georg talk about their childhood and adolescence as well as about their escape from Nazi Germany or from the invading Hitler Wehrmacht in Czechoslovakia. As contemporary witnesses, they make the history of the Holocaust tangible for today’s generations. In this way they make an important contribution to a better understanding of people of different cultures and religions. Their extraordinary lives reflect a century in which attempts were made to destroy a culture out of ideological delusion. At an advanced age they experienced the appreciation for their life’s work as bridge builders between black and white, between East and West, between Germans and Czechs as well as between Jews and Christians. Wilma Iggers receives the Masaryk Prize from the hands of the Czech Foreign Minister in Prague in 2004. Georg Iggers receives the Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class from the German Consul General in New York in October 2007 in Buffalo, New York.
Georg Iggers dies on November 26, 2017 at the age of 90 in Amherst, N.Y. in the USA.
Wilma Iggers dies on March 24 at the advanced age of 103, also in Amherst, N.Y.