Hildegard, like Arthur, was largely protected from the changes that Hitler’s rise to power brought. Born in Nuremberg in 1923, Hildegard was the middle child with an older brother and a younger sister. Another sister had died of Leukemia when Hildegard was two. Having grown up in the city where the infamous the Nazi rallies were held, Hildegard had the unique experience of being brought, by their non-jewish cook, to the first of those rallies after Hitler's rise to power in 1933. Hildegard was 10 years old.

“He drove by giving the Nazi salute and I was about a yard from the convertible he was standing in.  I didn’t really have a reaction to him. He wasn’t somebody I wanted to particularly get to know better …. But I went home and I thought if he could come for lunch or dinner sometime, he would find out what nice people we are because I knew he didn’t like Jews…” Hildegard recalls.

Up until that time, Hildegard’s best friend was a girl named, Gisela. They shared a bench at school and played at one another’s houses every day from age 6 to age 10. One day, Hildegard’s father told her she could no longer play with Gisela. He did not tell her why and this was a time when little girls did not question their father’s authority. But she later learned the reason for this break. Her father was trying to protect Gisela’s father, who was a clandestine Jew married to an Aryan. A close association with a Jewish family might cause his secret to be known and make it harder for him and his daughter. Each girl was going to a different school the next year so the separation became natural.

A new subject began to be taught: “Race Science”. Hildegard and the two other Jewish girls in the class had to leave the room for these lessons. Perhaps this was because all three Jewish girls had blonde hair and blue eyes and that might have caused a credibility problem for the teacher. Still nobody questioned the lessons about how Jews had dark hair and menacing brown eyes… At this time, Hildegard began to understand that her status was changing. Her teacher asked a question and Hildegard was the only student in the class who knew the answer. She raised her hand and the teacher said, “Does nobody know the answer?” Then, remembers Hildegard, it began to dawn on me that I was “nobody”.

Ironically, the first casualty of Hitler’s regime that Hildegard was aware of was the Aryan husband of her Aryan piano teacher. She recalls her piano teacher, Barbara, a young woman in her twenties, with three boisterous little boys, with great affection. Her husband was often at home because he was a student. One day, when she came for her lesson, Barbara’s husband was gone. She learned that the father of these three little boys was taken away to a concentration camp for saying, “My Jewish friends have more intelligence in their little finger than most of us have in our whole hand!” This was enough to send him to Dachau in 1935. He was never heard from again. The same year, Hildegard’s older brother left to stay with relatives in Italy because he was not allowed to attend university in Germany. A committed Zionist, he emigrated to Palestine a year later and spent the rest of his life living there on various kibbutzim.
Both of Hildegard’s parents were lawyers but as was often the case for married women in the first half of the twentieth century, her mother never practiced law.  Her father was a very successful lawyer and like so many German Jewish professionals, he was sure that Hitler would not last in the great free country of Germany – where Fritz Blum’s family had lived for generations. Dr. Blum was a World War I hero and as Hildegard put it, “he adored being German”. He felt he was needed to help other Jews sell their businesses and houses but had no intention of leaving Germany himself, until 1937 when he became a victim while trying to help others.

The family had just begun a ski vacation in Italy when Fritz received a phone call from a cousin in London: Two of his clients in Germany, the Saemann Brothers, had been arrested and accused of high treason. The cousin warned Fritz not to return to Nuremberg because he would probably be arrested, but Dr, Blum still believed that such things could not happen. So he and the family returned to Nuremberg and Fritz went to the police station to “clear up” the matter. 

There he expected to find Dr. Martin, the police chief, who had fought with him during World War I; in fact, Fritz had saved his life during combat duty. But when Fritz arrived, Dr. Martin was on vacation and his deputy promptly arrested Fritz. Fritz remained in custody for seven weeks, memorizing words from an English dictionary that his wife brought him. When Dr. Martin returned, he invited Fritz to spend Sunday afternoons with him at his home, but he could not set up a hearing for his release. John Bolten, a German Christian now living in the U.S., returned to Germany to help his former attorney.  He was unable to secure Dr. Blum’s release but promised to sponsor the Blum family in the U.S.   When Fritz was released, he finally realized that he had no future in Germany and began preparations to emigrate, but the process would take more than a year

Reading the testimonies of German Jews, one is always struck by how slow they were to comprehend that the homeland they were proud to be citizens of had not only created and enacted laws against them but had sanctioned lawlessness to further persecute them.

 The Blum family went to sleep on the night of November 9th, 1938, unaware of any potential danger. Hildegard woke up in the middle of the night when the ceiling light fixture’s three glass globes shattered on the floor of her bedroom.  She heard men’s voices in the apartment and then heard her mother ask, “Are you human beings or animals?” The response she heard was, “Shut up lady! If you don’t keep quiet, we’ll hang you from the top of this door and your husband from the top of that door!”

 The thugs yanked all the books out of the bookcases, slashed the leather armchairs, yanked the portraits off the wall and broke everything that was breakable. They pierced Hildegard’s cello case, believing they destroyed the expensive instrument within, but the cello was downtown being repaired and so not only survived the attack but is currently owned and played by one of Hildegard’s granddaughters. They left the damage in the case as a reminder of  Kristallnacht.

While the apartment was being destroyed, 15-year old Hildegard ran to another room and called the police. The voice on the other end of the phone asked, “Are you Jews?” When Hildegard answered the question, the police explained that in that case, they could not come. Then she knew this was an orchestrated break-in. After the thugs went upstairs to destroy Hildegard’s grandmother’s apartment, it was suddenly very quiet. Hildegard went to her little sister’s bedroom, gathering her and her bedding to settle for the remainder of the night on the couch at the foot of her parents’ bed.

At around 5 AM, Hildegard said, “What will the Americans do in the morning when they wake up and read about what happened to us? Will they drink their orange juice and go to work as if nothing happened?” Hildegard’s father answered, “The Chinese have been fighting for a long time and it didn’t seem to bother us much…” And then she understood how we regard anything that happens out of our immediate experience as happening in the rest of the world and not to us.

The next day, they learned more: The Nazi’s had cut the throat and burned a 75-year old neighbor, Nathan Langstadt, the owner of a large department store. Many other Jews were killed that night and most Jewish men were imprisoned. Since Hildegard’s father had not been captured—perhaps due to his friendship with Dr. Martin—other families came to stay with the Blums. The next evening an Aryan friend invited Fritz to his home for protection.  While there, he received a phone call from Dr. Martin telling him it was safe to go home. 

But this was hardly the case: Later that night three men walked into the Blum home and told Fritz to pack a suitcase with lots of handkerchiefs. Then they asked for his car keys, drove him away, and beat him mercilessly with wooden clubs until he lost consciousness. When he revived he overheard their discussion: “What shall we do with him, now? Should we dump him in the pond? Should we shoot him and leave him here by the side of the road?”

They decided to drop him at the police station where he would be imprisoned with the other Jewish men of Nuremberg. But they did not enter the station because they were not part of the orchestrated violence: They had been hired by a man who had lost a legal case to Dr. Blum and who thought the night of terror would be a perfect cover for revenge.  Fritz was ushered into a hall packed with over 100 Jewish men.

Though Dr. Blum was well known in both the Jewish and non-Jewish community in Nuremberg, nobody recognized him with his bleeding head and eyes swollen shut. He had to introduce himself to the crowd. The group of men was scheduled to be deported to Dachau the next day, but Dr. Martin called a physician friend and got him to write  a report saying that Dr. Blum was in no condition to be transported. He was then moved to a solitary cell where he was provided with medical help. He was kept there until he could prove he had the affidavit  necessary to leave Germany.

While Dr. Blum was in jail, Elizabeth went to Berlin to get the affidavit and Hildegard and Ursula stayed with another family. Hildegard was given money to buy warm clothes for herself and Ursula, in case Elizabeth could not get all the paperwork in time and the whole family was deported to “a camp”.

In spite of what they had already experienced, Hildegard thought “camp” was a lovely warm place to enjoy “growing old” with her family. She assumed there must be winter “camps”, too. So along with the long underwear and warm clothing, she purchased a pair of figure skates to use at “camp”!

Though they had the affidavit of support from Mr. Bolten in Lawrence, Massachusetts, they were not granted visas to enter the United States right away. So the family went to Palestine and stayed with Hildegard’s brother for ten months. There, Hildegard attended an English-speaking school and learned the language before coming to the United States. When their visas arrived, the Blum family sailed for Boston where Hildegard’s father began working for his former client in a textile factory.

He helped develop Mr. Bolten’s export business. With her new English proficiency, Hildegard tested out of 11th grade and spent six months as a high school senior. She graduated and began at Boston University at the age 16 ½. She received her Master’s degree in physical education and dance from Wellesley College at age 21.