Traute Lafrenz Page (May 3, 1919 – March 6, 2023)
On March 6, 2023, physician Traute Lafrenz Page crossed the threshold into the spiritual world at her home in South Carolina at the age of 103.
Traute Page was born in Hamburg on May 3, 1919. Through her teacher, the reform educator Erna Stahl, she became acquainted with anthroposophy in a circle of young people. As a young medical student in Munich during World War II, she developed a close friendship with Hans and Sophie Scholl. Together with others from the Hamburg circle around Erna Stahl and students and professors from Munich, she became involved in the resistance group “The White Rose”, which protested against the Nazi regime with leaflet campaigns. A few weeks after the arrest and execution of Hans and Sophie Scholl, she too was arrested in March 1943, together with the student Alexander Schmorell and the professor Kurt Huber, but was not executed. At the end of the war she was freed from prison, then emigrated to the USA and completed her medical studies in Berkeley. She worked as an anthroposophic physician. In 1972, she founded a curative education school in Chicago, Esperanza School, which she directed until 1994. In this way she also made an important contribution to the development of anthroposophical curative education in the USA. In the 1990s she was General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in the USA. For a long time she spoke little about her experiences in the “White Rose”. On her hundredth birthday, she received the Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. More about the life of Traute Lafrenz Page can be found in the following sources, among others: