Irmgard Rosenzweig Wessel

(November 12, 1925 - )

Eureka College alumnus (Class of 1947)

"I would like the world to know there are small pockets of people who can make a difference." With these words, Irmgard Rosenzweig Wessel expressed thanks to those who protected her, nurtured her, and permitted her to realize her potential and achieve her dreams. She knew from personal experience that those who did not have the benefit of receiving such kindness from benefactors generally suffered a fate that was incomprehensible.

As a fourteen-year-old Jewish child growing up amid the horrors of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime in Germany, Irmgard Rosenzweig could have become just another statistic. She could have been one among six million who remain a mathematical abstraction that is too huge to fathom. Had she remained in Europe, her opportunities would have been limited, her freedom constrained, and her voice silenced. Her potential to lead and to serve might never have been realized.

Born in Kassel, Germany, during the interwar years of the Weimar Republic, Irmgard could remember a world that once seemed normal, but it was a faded memory. As war clouds gathered on the European horizon, Irmgard’s parents sent her to England where they she believed she would be safe. Irmgard Rosenzweig was among 186 Jewish émigrés who were permitted to come to the United States as refugees in 1940 to settle at the Scattergood Hostel in West Branch, Iowa. The hostel had been established in July 1939 by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and local groups of Quakers in Iowa who recognized the necessity of protecting German refugees in the aftermath of the November 1938 Nazi Kristallnacht (“night of the breaking glass”) that initiated a sustained campaign of anti-Semitism against the nation’s Jewish population. By coincidence, the hostel was established in West Branch, the home of former president Herbert C. Hoover who in an earlier part of his career had kept the people of Europe fed during the years of the First World War. West Branch and its Quaker community would once again find a way to sustain life amid the horror of world war.

Irmgard’s parents were able to leave on the last boat of émigrés that the Nazis permitted to leave Italy in August 1940. The family was eventually reunited in Iowa.

During this phase of her childhood, Irmgard wrote “I am very happy [to be] at Scattergood. A good fortune brought me in early years to this country of freedom and I am grateful that after this way through the hostel I can try to do my best to become a good American.” She kept her word.

The Wessels moved to Eureka, Illinois, in 1941. Two years later, Irmgard was permitted to enroll at Eureka College to earn a degree while in America. She would eventually graduate summa cum laude as a member of the Class of 1947. Recognizing through her experience and through then-contemporary history that she had much for which to be thankful, Irmgard decided to pursue a career in social work so that she could give back to those who were suffering. She earned a master’s degree in social work from Smith College in 1952 and then began a long and distinguished career. During her professional career, Irmgard worked at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, the Yale Medical Center in New Haven, Connecticut, and the Milford Family Counseling Service in Milford, Connecticut.

She met and married Dr. Morris A. Wessel, a pediatrician, in 1952 and the Wessels raised a family of four children.

Throughout her career, Irmgard Rosenzweig Wessel has maintained a very special connection with Eureka College. She has provided a tremendous array of books to Eureka College’s Melick Library to establish a special collection of Holocaust studies. It represents just one other way that she has given back to the “small pockets of people” that made a difference in her life.

Irmgard Rosenzweig Wessel is currently planning a visit to Eureka College on April 21-22, 2007 (the weekend of the Eureka Lilac Festival). She will speak between services at the Eureka Christian Church on Sunday, April 22, on the role that members of the local congregation played in getting her family to the community of Eureka.