Lotte Palfi Andor

It must be unspeakably difficult to forgive for the survivors of a genocide. Even to forgive those who were not themselves personally responsible. If you managed to escape, leaving behind who knew how many people you loved who were now gone, would you ever want to set foot in that place again? Even if you weren’t holding onto the anger, how much pain would you be holding? Would it be surprising if you never wanted to set foot there again, even if it meant divorcing your husband of nearly fifty years who wished to die there? It’s a reasonable choice even if it must have been painful.

Lotte Mosbacher was born in Berlin in 1903. She worked on the stage. She married Victor Palfi, I don’t know when, who worked as a film editor. In 1934, the pair went to France, then Spain, then the US. They had a hard time finding work and eventually divorced. She was cast in the small role of “the woman who sells her diamonds” in Casablanca. Her character has no name, and she has no credit. It is possibly on the set that she met Wolfgang Zilzer, who went by the stage name Paul Andor. They would marry the next year and remain so until 1991, shortly before each of them died.

She divorced him because he had Parkinson’s and wanted to die in Germany, where he grew up and spend a fair chunk of his early adult years. She never wanted to go to Germany again. He was dying and he knew it, and her choice was not to follow him. I don’t know what she was feeling when she made the choice. I’m not her, and she doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page for me to use to learn more about her. But there are several possibilities, and they’re all understandable.

She never had a strong Hollywood career, and she left the screen entirely in 1952. She made two episodes of The Naked City a decade later, and then she stopped working. I don’t know why; maybe it just wasn’t worth it to her. But in 1976, she was in Marathon Man, cast as the woman who recognizes the evil doctor from the concentration camp. Once again her character has no name; once again she is in a small part. Once again, she is memorable.

Naturally, she also played a Nazi, because that’s the life of a German refugee in Hollywood of the 1940s. She played Karin Göring in a film called The Hitler Gang, Hermann Göring’s first wife, who died of tuberculosis. She was in a couple of propaganda pieces I haven’t seen, which may or may not include playing more. Either that or victims; playing victims happened, too. That sort of thing will reinforced whatever feelings are already in your head, I’d imagine.