Charlotte (Lotte) Archenhold, née Neustädter, was born on September 15, 1922 as the daughter of the merchant Jakob Neustädter and his wife Käthe, née Weinstein in Neumarkt/ Oberpfalz. She is distantly related to Gustav Neustädter, the last leader of the Jewish cultural community of Bad Kissingen.

Charlotte obviously was an ambitious swimmer. She joined the Poseidon Swimming Club of Neumarkt founded in 1929 but was surely expelled shortly after ‘Machtergreifung’ (seizure of power of the Nazis) because of the ‘Aryan Paragraph’ that was decreed for all sports- and gymnastics clubs in 1933. (See: Hans Georg Hirn, Jüdisches Leben in Neumarkt und Sulzbürg, Neumarkt 2011, p. 217). In the school year of 1933/34 Charlotte started her first year of Mädchenlyzeum (girls’ high school). One of her classmates remembers that Lotte Neustädter didn’t tell her classmates anything about her parents’ plan to move to Nuremberg with her and was suddenly gone one day. (See: Hans Georg Hirn, p. 218) [Author’s note: When she had to leave the school is not known, but it was surely earlier and not as late as their departure for Nuremberg in 1939!]

Little is known about her further life. She lived in Bad Kissingen for only a short time. From May 3 to August 31, 1938, she was registered in the Franconian spa town and worked as a trainee in the Israelite Childrens’ Hospital in Salinenstrasse. In the police register one finds Frankfort/Main as her former place of residence. According to information obtained from the city Archives of Neumarkt, Charlotte must have lived with her parents in Neumarkt in November 1938 because she was arrested together with them after the night of the pogrom and was imprisoned from November 9 to 12 in the prison of Neumarkt. Her parents moved to Nuremberg after getting free in 1929 and from there were deported to Riga-Jungfernhof and murdered.

Charlotte who had moved to Nuremberg with her parents in February 1939 succeeded in escaping from Germany. At the end of February 1939, she emigrated to Palestine. There she married Fritz Theodor Archenhold who was born in Kassel and lived in Kiriat Bialik, a settlement of German immigrants, northeast of Haifa. A letter to the citizen registration office of Neumarkt from May 1957 provides evidence for that. (Akte Entschädigungsverfahren, Nr. B 996/57, Stadtarchiv Neumarkt).

Charlotte Archenhold died in January 1998 at the age of 75. Her husband had already died in July 1979.