Geck, Fanny

The architect and author Abraham Arthur Lehmann (1877-1948) was born in Moenchen-Gladbach, Germany. He married Anna Franziska Machold (died 1932), and together they had three children, Ruth Karl (1910-1989), Lisa Stuckmann (1913-1993), and Richard Lehmann (1915-2011). For most of his career, Lehmann was an independent architect in Mannheim. He also wrote theater reviews for the Mannheim paper Volksstimme and other newspapers in south-western Germany.

In August 1939, Lehmann happened to be visiting his son Richard, who had left Germany for Milan, Italy in 1938. When the war started, Lehmann decided to stay in Italy. From 1941 to 1944, both Richard and Arthur were interned at a camp in Ferramonti, Italy. After liberation, Arthur Lehmann was part of a group of 1,000 non-Italian refugees who were granted refuge at Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter near Oswego, NY. In 1946, he settled in Niagara Falls, NY, where he died on February 3, 1948.

Fanny Geck was the daughter of Isidor Baer, cantor and teacher of the Jewish community of Offenburg, Germany and the widow of Oskar Geck, a socialist member of the German Reichstag and the editor of a socialist paper in Mannheim. Geck and Lehmann were already friends in Mannheim in the 1920s.