Susi Margulies Rossman was a young teenager riding a bus in Belgium during the German occupation when Nazi soldiers boarded and began demanding identity papers. She was alone and frightened.
A woman sitting across the aisle suddenly reached over, grabbed her hand and began shouting at the soldiers, insisting they were frightening her daughter. She raised her voice again and again until the soldiers backed away and moved on.
“My mother got off at the very next stop,” her son, Michael Rossman, recalled. “She never forgot that moment.”
It was one of many times in which chance, courage and the kindness of strangers determined whether Susi lived or died. Those experiences shaped her values and the way she treated other people into adulthood.
Susi Margulies Rossman, a Holocaust survivor and matriarch of a five-generation family, died on Nov. 21 in Baltimore. She was 96.
Susi was born in Germany in 1929. Even as a young child, she experienced antisemitic harassment. She was chased by other children, taunted at school and made to feel unsafe in public spaces.
On Kristallnacht in 1938, when she was 9, Susi and her family hid in an attic while Nazi mobs destroyed Jewish homes and businesses. After that night, Susi, her mother and her grandmother fled Germany. At one point, her grandmother pulled her off a train before the German-Belgian border and walked miles on foot to avoid guards, then reboarded on the other side.
The family eventually reached Brussels, where Susi believed they might be safe. That hope ended on May 10, 1940 — Susi’s birthday — when she woke in a hospital in Brussels to the sound of German dive bombers attacking the city.
As the Germans advanced, the family fled again, this time to France. In Paris, Susi was torn from her father’s arms when French police arrested him. Michel Margulies was sent first to the internment camp at Le Vernet and later deported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered.
After France fell, Susi and her mother returned to Brussels, where conditions grew increasingly dangerous as the Gestapo took over police stations. Susi’s mother survived by cleaning offices and working illegally at a gambling hall. During one raid, a supervisor quietly let Susi slip out a back door before soldiers began checking papers.
By 1942, it became too dangerous for Susi to remain with her mother. With the help of a Catholic neighbor and the Belgian underground, she was hidden in a convent school run by the Sisters of Mercy outside Louvain.
The underground maintained five separate record books to protect hidden children. Susi’s Jewish name appeared in one volume, a false Christian name in another, a number in a third, an institution in a fourth and the address only in the final book.
Susi stayed there until Belgium was liberated in 1944.
“She lived with the knowledge that if she were discovered, she wouldn’t survive,” Michael Rossman said. “She understood that even as a child.”
She later recalled cheering as Allied planes flew overhead — and fearing during the Battle of the Bulge that the Germans might return.
In 2013, she returned to Europe with family members and, after days of searching, found the convent school where she had been hidden. By chance, an elderly couple recognized the address — obscured by translation — and led them to the site.
“She recognized it immediately,” Michael Rossman said. “Everything came back.”
After the war, Susi immigrated to the United States with her mother and grandparents, joining relatives who had already settled here. The transition was difficult financially, her daughter Carol Szaks recalled, but the family rebuilt their lives.
Susi married Mark Rossman and became Susi Rossman, raising her children in Baltimore.
“She never forgot what it meant to be different,” Szaks said.
When her daughter came home from elementary school describing a Black classmate who sat alone, Susi Rossman insisted she bring the girl home and befriend her.
“Anybody who feels different needs a friend,” Szaks recalled her mother saying.
Rossman was also fiercely protective of Jewish identity. When her daughter was required to participate in Christian prayer and Bible readings at a Baltimore public school, Rossman confronted the principal and insisted her child be excused.
“I didn’t come from Nazi Germany to have my daughter read the New Testament in public school,” Szaks said her mother told him.
After raising her children, Rossman returned to school, earning an associate degree in accounting. She worked as a bookkeeper and junior accountant in the insurance industry.
“She was extremely good at math,” Michael Rossman said. “She was very sharp — very capable.”
Reading and learning were lifelong passions. Rossman was an avid reader of history, Jewish studies and current events. Carol Szaks recalled that a Jewish studies professor who led weeklong educational trips for older adults through the Jewish Federation often stayed with the family and spent hours discussing history and Jewish texts with her mother. He told Szaks that if Rossman had taken his class, she would have earned the first “A” he had ever given.
“She always had a book in her hand,” Szaks said.
In midlife, Rossman began speaking publicly about her Holocaust experiences, visiting public schools, Catholic schools and churches. She also recorded extensive testimony for the USC Shoah Foundation.
During a later visit to Germany organized for Holocaust survivors, Rossman spoke to elementary school students. One child asked if she hated Germans.
“She said, ‘How could I hate a child?’” Szaks recalled. “You had nothing to do with it.”
Her greatest devotion was to her family. She was a grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother, with 32 descendants spanning five generations.
“She never forgot what she went through,” Michael Rossman said. “It’s why family mattered so much to her, and why she always told us it was the most important thing we had.”
Ellen Braunstein is a freelance writer.
