Local woman escaped Nazi Germany

It’s been nearly 80 years since a Long Beach woman escaped Nazi Germany, but some painful memories from her childhood remain fresh in her mind. Now, decades later, she’s on a mission to take another overseas trip to Jerusalem. Her mission is to apologize and make amends with the Jewish people there on behalf of her native land. With a little help from a local non-profit, she may realize this life-long dream.
Eighty-nine year-old Sibylle Heidrich looks at old family photos, just six-years-old when Hitler rose to power. “I remember one day my father came in and showed my mother ‘look!” He became a party member. He said, ‘I feel like I have blood on my hands.’”
Her father, the highest ranking civil servant in the area, was not quiet about his refusal to become a part of the Nazi Party. He knew it was time to escape and sent Sibylle on her way to a British occupation zone in West Germany.
Before May 10th, 1945, Soviet troops filtered in to her hometown and took her father to a Soviet concentration camp, who had stayed behind to help others. “Jews and Christians alike came out of hiding and said, “No, no, no. He saved our lives,” said Sibylle.
Now Sibylle has made it her life-long mission to take a trip to Jerusalem to apologize on behalf of her native country Germany for her homeland’s role in the killing of millions of Jews. “People ask me why I want to go and I think I just want to apologize to the Jews for what Germany did to them. Thousands and thousands were killed in a horrible way.”
Sibylle needs help getting to Jerusalem for this mission. That’s where the local non-profit group Fatherless and Widows steps in, helping Sibylle raise money for the trip. Charles Wambolt with Fatherless and Widows said, “This is an opportunity, a once in a lifetime opportunity, for when she turns 90, also Jerusalem, they’re celebrating their 50th anniversary for since the Jewish people got Jerusalem back after almost 2,000 years.”
If you’d like to help out, visit youcaring.com and search Sibylle’s Hope, as she hopes in some small way to make amends for atrocious crimes committed decades ago that have also scarred her from childhood, from her neighbors and playmates, who just one day vanished, to their nearby synagogue that burned to the ground. “Horrible,” said Sibylle, “It was a big fire, but I did not know anything bad or different about Jews. They were Germans. They were my neighbor family.”
And like her father, “They were all killed in concentration camps. They never came back.”