Nora Ballon, née Hausmann was born in Bad Kissingen on January 13, 1920 as the second child of Max Hausmann and his wife Hertha, née Hamburger. She had an older sister, Anny, who was born in 1907. Her parents owned a butcher’s shop in Obere Marktstraße 10. Her mother’s ancestors belonged to the long-established family of Hamburger, who had been butchers for many generations.

Nora Ballon’s further life could only be followed up in patches. It’s possible that the then 15-year-old girl moved to Frankfort with her parents and grandmother in 1935. On any account, she managed to flee to the United States via Cherbourg in 1938. She could first stay with her uncle Bert (Albert) Hamburger in New York, but moved on to Chicago shortly afterwards, where, according to the US Census of 1940, she lived with her older sister Anny and her family in a shared apartment. In September 1942, she married Frankfort-born Leo Blumenthal who served as a soldier at that time and was stationed in Fort Knox/ Kentucky. On her further life there is only little information. Later, she was married to Leo Dale and had two children with him. After his death, she married Gerald B. Ballon.

In the 1990s Nora Ballon revisited Bad Kissingen, the town of her birth, and was received by Mayor Christian Zoll. 

Her sister Anny survived, too, she could emigrate to the United States in 1939; Nora’s father Max died in Frankfort in December 1935. Her mother Hertha managed as late as in 1941 to emigrate from Barcelona to New York on board the ship “Villa de Madrid”.