By:, Jim Pfeifer and Phillip Spivey
The home at 1818 North Harrison in the Heights area of Little Rock is a well-preserved example of Craftsman architecture with wide roof overhangs supported by thick wood brackets and a deeply shaded porch with rusticated sandstone columns. Its first of many occupants, was postal employee B.F. Barnes in 1919. By 1949, a quiet family of German descent had moved into the home. Dr. Henry Griffenhagen was a radiologist, educated in what became East Germany, and his wife Herta Keifer, was the daughter of an industrialist from Worms, Germany. In the early 1940s, Henry had a practice on Park Avenue in New York and he and his wife had often enjoyed concerts at Carnegie Hall and other cultural offerings in Manhattan. Following World War 2, the Veterans Administration was in need of physicians to care for returning soldiers, and recruited Henry to take a position at their Little Rock facility. The couple, with daughter Carol, left Manhattan and moved into the Harrison Street bungalow.
“It was an adjustment from New York City,” Carol Griffenhagen Dallos admits seventy years later, "but we made good friends and I still stay in touch with my former classmates in my 1956 class at Central High. We joined Temple B’nai Israel and I was close to Susan Pfeifer and several other students in religious school. My mother enjoyed volunteer work for the community concert program and the Temple Sisterhood.”
Dr. Henry Griffenhagen was a quiet man who dutifully went to work each day at the old Veterans’ Hospital on Roosevelt Road. What few knew was that Henry was a Holocaust survivor. He had been arrested twice by the Nazi’s solely due to his being Jewish, and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, the infamous brutal work camp where tens of thousands were murdered. After bribing Nazi leaders for his release, Henry’s parents searched out a family in New York who arranged for visas for his family of nine. After great efforts too involved to describe here, they escaped Hitler’s grip and came to America in 1938.
The Griffenhagens eventually returned to New York, where Carol, a clinical social worker with three children and five grandchildren, remains. Her grandfather was a leader in the rebuilding of the synagogue at Worms.
Buchenwald was liberated by US forces in 1945, and General Eisenhower personally visited the site. Our army filmed the emaciated survivors of Buchenwald to document Nazi crimes against humanity.
In addition to being an accomplished architect and local historian, Jim Pfeifer has been organizing, filing, and working with the archives at Temple B'nai Israel in Little Rock for over 20 years. Together with Phillip Spivey, University of Central Arkansas professor and current chair of the Temple archives, they uncover interesting stories about Jews in Arkansas. Each month, Jim will share one of these stories with us. This month, Jim is sharing a version of a story that will be appearing in the February edition of Heights Living magazine.