Lily Grosser

Lily Emilie Grosser (2 June 1894 – 20 September 1968) was a German-born French activist. A medal winner for her activism in Germany during World War I, Grosser and her family fled to France in 1933, where she was granted citizenship in 1937. After the war she became secretary of the French Committee for Exchange with the New Germany and was instrumental in building political and cultural Franco-German relations.

Life Lily Emilie Rosenthal, daughter of Alfred Rosenthal, was born into a Jewish middle-class household in Frankfurt. Until she was 18, she was allowed to leave the house on Mendelssohn Street in Frankfurt's Westend only in the company of a governess. Like many young women at the time, she supported the German soldiers during World War I from her homeland through active relief measures, and for this she received the German Cross of Merit for War Aid. The conflict was hard on her family; her fiancé Max Koch from Kronberg im Taunus died in 1918 and her father Alfred died in 1919.

On 16 March 1921 she married the Jewish university professor and pediatrician in Frankfurt. (Paul had earned a post doctoral degree, called habilitation, in 1919 as the first pediatrician at Frankfurt University.)

Beginning in 1940, the family endured a series of escapes and separations.

On 10 June 1940, after the German troops invaded Paris, Lily Grosser's children Margarethe and Alfred fled alone to the unoccupied part of France. Her son Alfred recalled that the two siblings bicycled their way to freedom. Lily remained with her mother who died after a long illness on 29 July 1940 at the age of 81.