BRIGITTE FRIEDMANN ALTMAN

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 Wednesday after a brief illness. She was 101.

A service at the grave will be held at 10:00 a.m. Monday, November 17. A memorial service will follow at 11:30 a.m. at Beth-El Congregation, 4900 Briarhaven Road. Rabbi Brian Zimmerman and Rabbi Emeritus Ralph Mecklenburger will officiate. Her family will receive friends following the service.

With her remarkable linguistic skills, Mrs. Altman was a veritable diplomat communicating with Russian musicians at the Cliburn and Italian tenors at the opera. From the symphony to Sister Cities International, her presence often kept events running smoothly. If she overheard strangers with European accents at a medical office or the post 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 for Shabbat dinner. In her kitchen, she was well-known for her bread and shared her recipe and techniques with younger women who watched her knead dough and braid each loaf.

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,” Mrs. Altman 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 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 1945. 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 Israel.

Her father preferred emigrating to Dallas where he had relatives. In Dallas, father and daughter moved in with a family of cousins. They 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, when she attended a meeting of a Jewish women’s group in Dallas. A member whose husband was stationed at Carswell AF Base in Fort Worth, arranged an introduction to Ric, a native of Helena, AR, whom Brigitte once described as someone 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 show starring Meryl Streep was a cultural watershed. Brigitte’s photo and recollections were on the front page of the Star-Telegram. She attended a nationwide survivors’ reunion in Washington, D.C. There she reconnected with a teenage boyfriend, William Michell, 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, the Shoah Foundation at USC interviewed Brigitte. The transcript of her in-depth oral history is available online or through the Shoah Foundation. Several years later, historians at the University of North Texas in Denton interviewed Brigitte and placed the transcript in the campus library.

“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.”

Surviving Mrs. Altman are four children: Louis (Elizabeth) Altman of Rolling Hills, CA; Dean (Karen) Altman of Cooper City, FL; Michael Altman, MD, of Houston, and Leslie (Alan) Magee of Fort Worth. Five grandchildren: Daniel, Miche, Rebecca, and Sarah Altman and Lauren Magee. She is also survived by nephew Louis (Leigh) Schultz of Dallas; Cousin Riki (Michael) Zide of Dallas; dear friends and longtime caregivers Svetlana and Nikolai who looked after her, chauffeured her to appointments, managed her medicines, and played the music she loved; nationally-recognized geriatrician Dr. Janice Knebl; and nurse practitioner Kate Taylor.

The family suggests 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.

Mrs. Altman’s family entrusted her care and services to E. C. “Trey” Harper III and Harper & Lucas, formerly Robertson Mueller Harper.