Ilse (Machauf) Voss

Ilse (Machauf) Voss, a Holocaust refugee who thrived until shortly before her 102nd birthday, died in Ithaca on January 4, 2023, of injuries from a fall.

Born into a middle-class Jewish shopkeeper’s family in Vienna on March 16, 1921, Ilse Machauf was 17 when the Nazis invaded Austria. After her family was thrown out of its home, they lived for a short time in an apartment attached to the local synagogue. On November 9, 1938, the “Kristallnacht” when synagogues across Germany and Austria were burned, her family escaped the already-burning building.

Machauf and her mother Olga found work in England as a nanny and a cook, allowing them to escape Austria in the spring of 1939. But her father Ignatz and her younger brother Kurt were caught in Vienna by the outbreak of war in September 1939. They were deported to the Jewish ghetto in Lodz, Poland, and killed by the Nazis in 1942.

After a short time working for a family in the English countryside, Machauf and her mother moved to London. Though she had hoped to become a Montessori teacher, Machauf found work as a seamstress, commuting on the “underground,” and sometimes sleeping deep in the stations when air raids during “the Blitz” forced her and her mother from their apartment.

On New Year’s Eve 1940, she met a German Jewish refugee, Fred Voss, who was passing through London for a few months with his family en-route to the United States. They fell in love and corresponded with more than 2000 letters throughout World War II, including the years when Voss returned to Europe in the American army.

Voss’s family sponsored immigration to the United States for Machauf and her mother, who left England on one of the first ships available after the end of hostilities. Not surprisingly, it was full of returning American soldiers, and Ilse Machauf later recalled dancing her way across the Atlantic. She married Fred Voss in May 1946, and they began married life living in an apartment with his parents and her mother. They were married for 73 years until Fred Voss’s death in 2019 at age 99.

Fred Voss worked in the textile industry, first in New York City and, after 1967, as one of the managers of a textile mill in Milton, Pennsylvania. The family, by now including a son and a daughter, lived in nearby Lewisburg. Ilse Voss’s mother lived with them until her death in 1980. In New York, Ilse Voss had continued to work as a seamstress, specializing in fitting original designs to the models who would show them. During the time in Lewisburg, she worked as a store clerk and sold wedding invitations and other stationery from catalogs.

After her husband’s first retirement, at age 65, he began working as a travel agent. For the next 17 years, the couple traveled extensively, including trips to Europe, Israel, the Caribbean, and Asia. Ilse Voss accompanied her husband on the annual tours to Alaska and Hawaii that he hosted for a travel agency.

Beginning in the 1980s, Fred Voss spoke about the Holocaust extensively at schools, churches, and universities. Though Ilse Voss rarely spoke publicly, she always attended her husband’s talks and answered questions from students curious about her experiences. When her husband published a memoir (seavoss.com/miracles) in the mid-2000s, ostensibly about his experiences in the Holocaust, readers said it was actually their love story.

In 2002, the Vosses moved to Ithaca, NY, to be closer to their daughter. They were active, living fully independently in an apartment complex mostly populated by students. The couple continued to be engaged in Holocaust education, and in 2015, Ilse Voss recorded a video (iaujc.org/ilse-voss) describing her experiences. Ilse Voss remained living independently in the apartment after her husband’s death, and accompanied her daughter at Holocaust memorial events.

Ilse Voss is survived by her son Clifford (Maj-Lis), daughter Claudia (Bruce), five grandsons, and two great-grandsons.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, ushmm.org.

Funeral arrangements have been entrusted to Bangs Funeral Home, Ithaca, NY.  Online condolences may be made to Ilse’s family at www.bangsfuneralhome.com.