Norbert Lipschuetz

Of Blessed Memory 1925 – 2015

Norbert Lipschuetz grew up in Berlin, where he was born in 1925. He sang in the boys’ choir at the synagogue where his was one of the last bar mitzvahs before Kristallnacht. In 1934, he was expelled from public school and had to attend a Jewish school, and in 1935, the Nazis stole his father’s carpet business. From 1941 to 1943, he was a slave laborer in a munitions plant. When the Nazis came to deport the workers to a concentration camp in 1943, they asked if anyone had a non-Jewish parent. Norbert lied and said yes. Temporarily released, he and his mother Margot went into hiding under the protection of a  non-Jewish Swede until the war ended in 1945. Norbert met his wife, Lilian – who had also survived the war in hiding – in 1947. They were married in 1948 and came to the United States in 1950, eventually settling in Kansas City.