Sarasota, FL – Liese Lee Berkowitz, a refugee from Nazi Germany who devoted her career to settling refugees in America, died at age 99 on May 22 in Sarasota, FL, her home of four decades.
Born in Hamburg, as a child she survived her father’s internment in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, a harrowing escape from the Nazis, the London Blitz, and a German submarine attack in the icy Atlantic off the coast of Nova Scotia. In the U.S., her family lived in Cincinnati, where she attended high school and college. Lee became a social worker in Chicago and rose to executive roles for Jewish Child & Family Services there and key volunteer roles for Jewish Family and Children’s Service of the Suncoast in Sarasota.
Lee’s life was marked by moral and physical courage, empathy, a wry wit, gentle warmth – and, by her own telling, trauma borne of her childhood experiences. Her longevity, innate leadership, and storytelling skills cast her as the matriarch of a large extended family that stretched from Israel to Europe to Latin America and Australia, with U.S. branches from California to New Hampshire.
Survivors include her daughters, Dr. Catherine Wheeler of Longboat Key, FL, and Martha’s Vineyard, MA, and Susan Sisk of Asheville, NC, and four grandchildren. Her husband and brothers pre-deceased her.
Her remains will be cremated. Friends and family will celebrate Lee’s remarkable near-century of life at a gathering in Sarasota in November.
Liese Lee Haag was born in 1927, the youngest child of Max and Helen Haag. Max, awarded the Iron Cross for his service in the Great War, owned a prominent department store in Hamburg where, according to family legend, Jello first was sold in the port city. A chauffeur drove Lee and her older brothers Heinz (later Harold) and Fritz (later Fred) to school each day. When the family escaped Hamburg by ship a month after Kristallnacht, on Christmas Eve 1938, the driver shielded Max from arrest by the Gestapo and had a hollow chocolate Santa delivered to their table in the dining room. Inside was cash to help the Haags – who’d otherwise traded their wealth to the Nazis for their freedom – find their footing in London.
Lee recalled being unafraid when the family sought shelter from German bombing raids in the Underground. Amid the Blitz, the Haags secured passage to America – where Helen’s sister had settled in Cincinnati – on a rusty Greek merchant freighter, the Meropi, and boarded as the only passengers for a frigid north Atlantic crossing in February, 1942.
During the passage, 14-year-old Lee became betrothed to the chief engineer, Antonio. Asked years later why her father had given his blessings to this union, she replied, “Well, he didn’t have much choice! We were totally dependent in a wartime situation.” Her heirlooms included a glossy photo of the dashing Greek suitor and a note expressing his delight at having shared the voyage with the Haags.
But when a German submarine patrolling the Nova Scotia coastline surfaced to strafe the Meropi, Antonio and the captain commandeered a lifeboat, only to capsize in the underloaded vessel and perish at sea. A Canadian Coast Guard corvette, HMCS Sherbourne, rescued the Haags, who upon reaching land were immediately detained as undocumented aliens and possible enemy spies. Released after two weeks (with the intervention of Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio), their story was reported in the North American press. Strangers greeted them with home-baked cookies and milk as their train passed through Montreal on the way to New York City. Arriving at Grand Central Terminal, their minds spinning, an aunt and uncle whisked Lee and her family to Radio City Music Hall to watch the Rockettes perform.
Heinz and Fritz made a pact to ensure their little sister’s education. By selling drapes door-to-door for Sears, Roebuck & Co., they paid for her undergraduate education at the University of Cincinnati. In Lee’s summer break in 1944, she served in the Women’s Land Army, whose “farmerettes” worked in the fields to replace men who’d gone to war. Neither brother completed high school, but both became successful businessmen in the Chicago area.
After the war, Lee went to New York City, naively thinking she could show up at the Columbia School of Social Work and enroll on the spot. Instead, she took a series of jobs – including as a matron in a women’s prison – before returning to the Midwest to earn a masters degree in social work at the University of Chicago. She soon joined the staff of Jewish Family & Child Services in Chicago.
Jewish children in Chicago knew her from her work at Camp Chi, an overnight summer camp in Lake Delton, Wisc., and she conducted family therapy, as well. But her vocation was the resettlement of refugees, including Jews escaping the Soviet Union, Iran, and Egypt, along with Vietnamese who came to the U.S. after the fall of Saigon. She soaked up each family’s story as she connected them with social services, housing, job opportunities, and other assistance. Long after her retirement, taxi and Uber rides with immigrant drivers turned into interviews as she inquired into the circumstances that brought them to America.
At a family reunion in 2015, a cousin asked Lee what prompted her to become a social worker. “I think it was that my family had some issues,” she replied, “and I think I always had some kind of a role of protecting somebody, or at least I thought I had to protect somebody.” At a previous reunion, the Haags discovered that their ranks included social workers in Jewish agencies on five continents.
As a single woman in Chicago and Evanston, IL, Lee was “Tante Liese” to her Haag nieces in Skokie, Judy (now Sandler, of Deerfield, IL), Karen (of Tampa, FL), and Pam (now Haag Schachter, of Concord, NH). When a close friend died, she became mother to Catherine and Susan.
She kept the cat box in the shower, had three cigarettes in various stages of being smoked at once, perilously drove a Chevy Corvair, loved playing Scrabble, and soaked herself in perfume on the theory that the scent would wear off on the train before she got to work. She perpetually chased the latest diet – an infatuation she shared with her brother Heinz.
In her 50’s, Lee married Sidney Berkowitz, whose first wife had passed away and who had retired as executive director of JCFS in Chicago, where Lee had risen to become his deputy. In Sarasota, Sid helped establish JFCS of the Suncoast, and Lee served multiple periods as the agency’s interim executive.
They lived together at Pelican Cove in Vamo, where Lee remained after Sidney’s death in 2000. A year-round resident, she reveled in her community’s natural beauty and her friends’ company. She was active in fundraising for residents who needed help paying homeowners’ association fees and staff members who worked tirelessly to clear damage and restore order after hurricanes.
Her cousin Don Oppenheim, an author, will publish a children’s book later this year imagining letters that members of his family, including Lee, wrote to an elderly relative trapped in Hamburg as Germany’s Jews were perishing in Hitler’s death camps. At age 95, he said last week, Lee “brilliantly” edited her fictional teen-age epistle and revised the book’s introduction in a way that changed “the tone of the entire project.”
“I will never forget her contributions,” he said.
Donations in Liese Lee Berkowitz’s memory can be made to JCFS Chicago, directed to HIAS Immigration & Citizenship services.
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