Hanne Hirsch Liebmann (1924–2026) grew up in Karlsruhe, Germany. She was raised by her mother, Ella, who was widowed in 1925. In January 1933, when Hanne was 8 years old, the Nazis came to power in Germany. Nazis targeted the family's photo studio during the April 1933 anti-Jewish boycott. In November 1938, Hanne experienced the violence and terror of Kristallnacht. Then, in October 1940, the Nazi regime deported Hanne and her family to France, where they were imprisoned in the Gurs internment camp. In Gurs, Hanne met Max Liebmann, who had also been deported from Germany. In September 1941, the Children's Aid Society (OSE) rescued Hanne and placed her in a children's home in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. In 1943, Hanne obtained false papers and crossed into Switzerland. There, she reunited with Max. They married and had a daughter. In 1948, the family immigrated to the United States. Hanne's mother was deported from France to Auschwitz in 1942. She did not survive the Holocaust.
A social worker from the OSE [Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants] came to see my mother and explained that there was a village...uh...Le Chambon...who was looking to help young people, to take them out of the camp and would she agree to let me go. And my mother asked me whether I would want to go, and I said, "Of course." And she never said "but I will miss you. I don't want to go...you to go" or anything like that. She let me go. She loved me enough to let me go. Because there were parents who did not. You're looking at me. Yes. There were parents who did not let their children go. As incredible as it sounds, they held on. My mother let me go, and...uh...together with six other young people, teenagers, we set off beginning of September 1941 to go to Le Chambon. And Le Chambon was, of course, heaven. We were free. We lived in a home, primitive as it was, it still was a house. Uh...the food, of course was much better. In fact, in the beginning we couldn't eat all the bread that we got. Not that it was such tremendous amount of bread, but it was more than we could eat. And so we would toast it very, very hard and make little packages and send it back to camp because our constant worry was what was going on in camp. So we would make, all of us, little packages and send them.
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