A Holocaust Survivor Who Became a Freedom School Teacher: Marione Ingram’s Journey from Hamburg to Mississippi

Abstract

Marione Ingram was born in 1935 in Hamburg, Nazi Germany. In late July 1943, two days before the date of Ingram’s family’s deportation, the Hamburg air raid, one of the biggest air raids during World War II, began. Ingram and her mother narrowly survived it and spent the rest of the war in hiding. In 1952, Ingram immigrated to the United States to follow after her mother. Upon learning about the discrimination against African Americans, Ingram became involved in the civil rights movement to protest racial bigotry and prejudice. She worked for the March on Washington in 1963 and as a Freedom School teacher in Mississippi in 1964. Through her involvement in the civil rights movement, Ingram transformed herself from a “victim” of the Holocaust into a “combatant in a campaign against racial injustice.” This study aims to demonstrate an example of how a Holocaust experience could turn into power to bring peace and equality to the world through the analysis of Ingram’s autobiographies, The Hands of War (2013) and The Hands of Peace (2015), which Miyuki Kita translated to Japanese.