Holocaust Museum Founder Who Thwarted Nazi March in Skokie Dies

When a group of neo-Nazis in Illinois infamously took over Chicago’s Marquette Park on the South Side in 1977, their original plan had been to march on Skokie. A village which, at the time, had some 7,000 Holocaust survivors that made up 10 percent of the entire population.

The heavily-Jewish suburb was obviously ticked when the announcement was made, and survivors such as Al Lachman met to strategize.

“He wanted to get my baseball bat so he could beat them up if they were going to march in the town,” Ronald, Lachman’s son, told the Sun-Times.

Faced with that opposition, the neo-Nazis marched in Marquette Park instead.

Lachman, who had spent World War II in Lodz, Poland and endured typhus, pneumonia and tuberculosis after being sent by cattle train to Auschwitz, wasn’t going to keep quiet about the Nazi turnout. He and others helped form a small Skokie Holocaust museum that eventually morphed into the Illinois Holocaust Museum on Woods Drive.

Lachman died Nov. 1 from a struggle with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, according to the Sun-Times.

“After the (Nazi) march, the survivors decided they needed to do something, and they needed to teach about the Holocaust,” Fritzie Fritzshall, the museum’s president, said. “Al Lachman was one of the people that was involved with that from the very beginning. . . . He was instrumental.”

Lachman and his wife, Judy, who passed away in 1997, arrived in the United States with their first son, Joseph in 1954.

“Their only possession was a baby buggy that arrived by plane. They lost everything else when a freighter sank with all of their belongings — including silverware they’d bought in hopes it could be trusted more than cash.”

He invested in real estate and worked with a manufacturing company, but his longest lasting impact will no doubt be for his work on the museum, having “personally co-signed the mortgage for the (original) building on Main Street,” son Joseph said.

more via the Chicago Sun-Times