Lotta onttonen biography definition us history

For older Canadians, Lotta Hitschmanova needs no introduction. Each year, until the early s, her distinctive voice would be heard on the radio and television urging people to give generously to the Unitarian Service Committee of Canada USC located at 56 Sparks Street, Ottawa. She had established the Committee in to help the poor and suffering, especially children, in war ravaged Europe.

Later, the USC shifted its attention to developing countries. Overseas, she became the face of Canadian humanitarian efforts, always present where the need was greatest. Born into a loving family on 28 November , her father was Max Hitschmann, a prosperous industrialist, and her mother Else, a prominent socialite. Lotta received a first class education, studying at the University of Prague and the Sorbonne in Paris.

In addition to a PhD in philosophy, she received diplomas in five languages, English, French, German, Spanish and her native Czech, as well as one for journalism. Somehow, she also found time to earn a Red Cross nursing certificate.

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In the late s, she became a journalist for Czech and other eastern European newspapers, earning a reputation for being an outspoken opponent of Nazi Germany. Her comfortable life was shattered when the Nazis marched into Czechoslovakia following the Munich Agreement between the major European powers and Adolf Hitler. She was forced to flee for her life, leaving all she knew behind.

She was never to see her parents again; they were to die in a German concentration camp. Her sister and brother-in-law fled to Palestine; years later they joined Lotta in Canada. Almost penniless, Lotta first went to Paris and then to Brussels, where she resumed her journalism career before having to flee once more when Germany invaded Belgium in Escaping to the south of France, she settled down to a precarious life in Vichy-controlled Marseilles, working for an aid agency as an interpreter.