Fritz Rothschild was born on April 15, 1905, in Freiburg to the vintner Julius Rothschild and his wife Bertha, born Kahn. After studying music in Stuttgart, he worked among other things as a freelance guest répétiteur at the opera. However, as a Jew, the Nazis’ rise to power left him without the possibility to work on German stages. Thus, in 1934, Rothschild began working as a secretary and musician in Stuttgart’s Jewish community before fleeing Europe in 1938. He boarded the Nieuw Amsterdam passenger ship in Rotterdam and arrived in New York on December 15, 1938. His family back in Germany fell victim to the holocaust: Rothschild’s mother had fled to Amsterdam, where she was deported to the Westerbork concentration camp in January of 1943 and then to the Sobibor extermination camp; his father had already died in 1931. His siblings Robert and Elisabeth Luise were also sent to the extermination camp, where they were murdered along with their spouses and children.
Rothschild stayed in the United States and in the decades that followed worked as a piano teacher and répétiteur as well as at a music publishing house and a piano factory. He settled in the New York borough of Queens together with his wife, Margot Rothschild, who was born in 1916 and had also emigrated to the United States. Fritz Rothschild died in July of 1981.
1905 Freiburg im Breisgau
1981 New York