Brigitte Friedmann Altman, a Holocaust survivor who married a highly decorated WWII navigator and bombardier and made Fort Worth her home in 1952, an elegant grandmother who spoke seven languages, and a translator on call for foreign visitors, died Nov. 12 after a brief illness. She was 101.
Following a private burial Nov. 17, a memorial service will be held at 11:30 a.m. at Beth-El Congregation, 4900 Briarhaven Road. Rabbi Brian Zimmerman and Rabbi Emeritus Ralph Mecklenburger will officiate, with Robertson Mueller Harper handling arrangements.
With her remarkable linguistic skills, Mrs. Altman was a veritable diplomat communicating with Russian musicians at the Cliburn Piano Competition and Italian tenors at the opera. From the Fort Worth Symphony to Sister Cities International, her presence kept events running smoothly. If she overheard strangers with European accents in the audience or at a medical office, she introduced herself in their native tongue and became a friend for life.
Another of her skills was baking challah, the braided Jewish egg bread served weekly at Shabbat dinners. In her kitchen, she shared her techniques with younger women who watched her knead the dough and braid each loaf. Despite those beautiful loaves of bread, Brigitte was “not a cook,” according to her daughter Leslie Magee. For her husband and four children, she routinely made meals with frozen, canned or boxed foods.
Born Aug. 15, 1924, to a wealthy family in the Baltic seaport of Memel, now Klaipeda, Lithuania, Brigitte had cooks, housekeepers and chauffeurs to tend her needs. Recalling her childhood, she wrote that life was “carefree” until 1941, when “Hitler’s armies” herded 40,000 Jews “into an unfathomable nightmare,” a squalid ghetto with walls, barbed wire, and no running water in the capital city of Kovno.
Her mother had suffered a stroke. When the Nazis began a death roundup, separating healthy workers into one group and sickly people into a crowd to be killed, Brigitte dabbed rouge on her mother’s cheeks and helped her stand so she would pass inspection. She did, until she died of pneumonia in 1942.
In the ghetto, every Jew wore a yellow Star of David. “All articles of gold, silver and precious stones had to be handed over,” Brigitte wrote. But her mother’s gold watch, secretly sewn into the hem of a woolen coat, remains a family heirloom.
One afternoon during a work detail outside the Kovno ghetto walls, Brigitte escaped. With help from her father and from a Catholic family who provided her with a forged baptismal certificate, Brigitte evaded capture. She remained a farm worker until liberation in 1944. With other Jewish teens she joined Brichah, a rescue operation that helped Holocaust survivors trek through the snow, across the Alps into Italy. There, Brigitte was reunited with her father, who had been imprisoned at Dachau. In Italy, she completed high school and started medical school, with the dream of becoming a physician and living in Palestine.
Her father preferred emigrating to Texas, where he had relatives. In Dallas, father and daughter moved in with a family of cousins, who adored their “glamorous” cousin Brigitte who looked and sounded like a “movie star.”
Brigitte spoke English in a refined manner, with perfect diction and no trace of a foreign accent or Texas twang. She had an ear for languages as well as an ear for music. She entertained friends playing the piano and accordion. “If you could hum it, she could play it,” said her son Louis.
In Dallas, Brigitte encountered gender discrimination and antisemitism. She enrolled at Baylor Medical School, but during the first two days of classes, an instructor chastised her for “taking a man’s place.” She withdrew from school and found a job in a medical laboratory, where she felt the sting of antisemitism.
She met her future husband, Air Force officer Fredric “Ric” Altman, in 1952, after attending a meeting of a Jewish women’s group in Dallas. A member whose husband was stationed at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth arranged an introduction to Ric, an Arkansas native, whom Brigitte once described as an officer who flew “the B-17s, the Flying Fortresses that kept this country free.” Six weeks later, the couple married. Ric died in 2002.
Brigitte chose not to discuss her Holocaust experiences until April of 1978 when NBC aired a television miniseries, “The Holocaust.” The five-day drama, starring Meryl Streep, was a cultural watershed. Brigitte’s photo and recollections were on the front page of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. She attended a nationwide survivors’ reunion in Washington, D.C. There she reconnected with a teenage boyfriend, William Mishell, who was writing a book, “Kaddish for Kovno: Life and Death in a Lithuanian Ghetto.” The book, published in 1988, received strong reviews.
After Steven Spielberg’s movie “Schindler’s List” was released in 1993, he established the Shoah Visual History Foundation, now headquartered at the University of Southern California. Brigitte was interviewed in 1997, and the video of her in-depth oral history is on the internet. A decade earlier, in 1989, the Oral History Program at the University of North Texas had interviewed her and placed the transcript in the campus library in Denton. Now it is digitized and online.
“Brigitte, we all knew, was a Holocaust survivor,” said her longtime rabbi, Ralph Mecklenburger. “She and her husband of 50 years, Ric Altman, raised a big family and Brigitte made for them and for herself a wonderful life in Fort Worth. She did not forget. But she refused to let bitterness destroy her life.”
Survivors include four children: Louis (Elizabeth) Altman of Rolling Hills, California; Dean (Karen) Altman of Cooper City, Florida; Michael Altman, M.D., of Houston; and Leslie (Alan) Magee of Fort Worth. Five grandchildren: Daniel, Miche, Rebecca and Sarah Altman and Lauren Magee. Nephew Louis (Leigh) Schultz of Dallas; cousin Riki (Michael) Zide of Dallas; and dear friends and longtime caregivers Svetlana and Nikolai; geriatrician Dr. Janice Knebl; and nurse practitioner Kate Taylor.
The family requests that donations in Brigitte Altman’s memory be made to Beth-El Congregation, Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, or the Jewish Federations in Fort Worth and Dallas.
Hollace Ava Weiner is a Fort Worth historian and archivist.
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Great Job Hollace Weiner & the Team @ Fort Worth Report for sharing this story.
