Hope and a ‘German spirit’: 104-year-old Highland Parker and Holocaust survivor reflects on a life well lived

Inga Lieb may be old, but she doesn’t like old-fashioned things.

Her house embodies contemporary-style architecture. Her jewelry leans avant garde. She plays Rummikub every week with her “young friends” who range in age from 50 to 79, and she starts each morning with the latest edition of the Chicago Tribune.

Later this month, the Jewish Holocaust survivor and longtime Highland Park resident will turn 104 years old, surrounded by friends, her children and her many grandchildren. 

“It’s a blessing, God’s blessing,” Lieb said. “He wants me to live because I went through a lot. I was only a child when we had to leave and I left everything. You know, that stays with you.”

Born in 1921, Lieb recalled hearing Shirley Temple movies playing in the theater near her family’s apartment in Landau, a small city in southern Germany. 

Lieb was 19 years old when she fled to America during World War II. That was after the Nazis abducted her father and sent him to Dachau, a concentration camp, where he was killed.

Seasick on the journey over with her mother, Lieb remembers eating just one apple a day for 10 straight days, as the ship skirted the underwater mines protecting New York City. Once they landed in Halifax, the two moved to Chicago, where Lieb’s brother and relatives already lived. 

“It was sad, because I lost my dad for nothing. He was a good dad, and it was a hard life to start all over again. I had to work, my mom had to work to support us,” Lieb said. “It was not easy to start life over.”

Looking for a job, Lieb leaned on her sewing skills. But the machines in the factories had something she had never seen before: foot pedals.

Rejected on her first application, she used the experience of the job interview to learn how to use the new sewing machines and work.

It wasn’t long before she met a man named Curtis in 1943 while playing tennis near the lakefront. Three weeks later, the two were riding a train together downtown to a fancy night club when he got down on one knee and proposed. “Swell,” she answered. But she refused to kiss him.

“How can you kiss on the train?” she recalled, laughing. 

A lifelong romance ensued. Curtis, who had doctorates in both law and philosophy from the University of Vienna, wrote Lieb love poems and letters for nearly every birthday and Valentine’s Day. He even filled a box with love poems for her to read when he died.

That happened in 2005. 

“Let’s enjoy our life, we are still whole. Still smiling hello to the totem pole (where we met). The days of wine and roses are ours to keep. Let’s keep on smiling, no reason to weep. You are my belle, my Lucille Ball, you are still the prettiest of them all,” one poem Curtis wrote in 1992 reads.

The couple had twins and moved to Highland Park in 1959, where they commissioned an architect to design them a unique, modern-style home that welcomed lots of light. It strayed from the era’s cookie-cutter, manicured aesthetic. 

“It holds its head in the clouds,” reads an article about the Liebs’ home in a 1961 issue of Better Homes & Gardens. “This house sparkles atop our list of everything a house should be. It has style and personality, a well zoned floor plan with good circulation, and it’s well suited to size.”

In any case, Lieb stayed busy, going into the wholesale jewelry business at a time when few women had businesses or even flew as passengers in commercial planes.

On work trips alone to New York City in the early 1970s, she can recall barricading her hotel room doors with a chair for safety.

To what does Lieb attribute her longevity? It may be the Costco hot dogs she loves, or the cod liver oil her mother spoon fed her as a child. Or more likely, it’s her active lifestyle and what her son Jeff Lieb refers to as her tough, “German spirit.” 

Lieb wakes up every morning around 9 a.m. to get dressed, call her son and read the paper. She makes sure she’s included whenever the family plans parties. She goes to the grocery store to buy her own food and only stopped driving at age 98 when the car insurance rates got too expensive. 

“You’re my only patient who at your age has all these faculties intact,” Maria Vel, Lieb’s caretaker, said.

Vel recounted she’s worked with other centenarians before, but none who still walk mostly on their own and even beat her in math when it comes to playing games like Rummikub.  

“We’re just grateful that she’s able to be herself,” Jeff Lieb said. “You know, anything can happen. Being at this age and still being young at heart — I mean, she doesn’t talk like an old lady and present herself as old. That’s what she was always against.”

As Lieb approaches her 104th birthday, emotion still rises in her voice when she recalls fleeing to America 85 years ago. But even after a long life well lived, Lieb shows little sign of losing her love of the “new.”

Her advice for both the young and young at heart is to remain resilient.

“Don’t give up,” Lieb said. “The future is ahead of you.”

“Things get better,” she continued. “It’s not always going down; things do get better. You may not think it does, but it will. And you’ve got to have hope. Keep going.”

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