Part of WWII German resistance, taught at therapeutic day school
Traute Lafrenz Page was part of a student resistance group in Nazi Germany called the White Rose during World War II, who later moved to the U.S. and for more than two decades ran the Esperanza Therapeutic Day School for physically and developmentally disabled children on the Chicago’s West Side.
“She had patience for so many people, and she had a really deep commitment to healing and a healing worldview,” said Christine Culbert, a former teacher at the Esperanza school.
Page, 103, died of natural causes on March 6 at her farm in Yonges Island, S.C., said her daughter, Renee Meyer. She was a longtime resident of Evanston before moving to South Carolina in the 1990s.
Born Traute Lafrenz in Hamburg, Germany, Page was a student in Munich when she became acquainted with others who opposed the Nazi regime, her daughter said. The founders of the group that came to be known as the White Rose — five students and one professor at the University of Munich — began producing and distributing leaflets and graffiti urging Germans to rise up in peaceful opposition to the Nazis.
“Out of their readings of great writers evolved the initial idea about putting together these pamphlets that were focused on not only rebuking the Nazis but also invoking great names in literature and philosophy, and also rebuking the German people for not standing up,” Page’s daughter said.
Before long, Page was distributing White Rose flyers. Two of the group’s leaders, siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, were arrested in 1943, convicted of high treason and executed. Page attended their funerals and soon was arrested herself on charges of association.
Page served a year in prison, and after her release was arrested again by the Gestapo and faced an April 1945 trial date. Her life was spared as an advancing U.S. Army liberated the prison where she was housed, just days before her trial was to begin and shortly before the war ended.
“She knew the date of that trial for a long time, maybe even a year before it came up,” Page’s daughter said. “So what carried through the time of imprisonment and these experiences was the idea that the human spirit needed protection.”
After the war, Page completed her medical studies and moved to the U.S., where she served a medical residency in San Francisco and met her future husband, Vernon Page. He was an ophthalmologist who ran a medical practice in Hayfork, California, where she was a general practice physician.
After the Korean War, when Page’s husband served in the Army overseas and she spent time studying in Germany, the Pages settled in Evanston.
During the rest of the 1950s and the early 1960s, Page was a homemaker and also spent a year learning how to care for developmentally delayed children at an institution in Switzerland. In 1962, she formed a summer school that was devoted to Waldorf education, a holistic method of teaching that is aimed at developing students’ imaginations and creativity.
In 1969, the Esperanza school opened on the Northwest Side. Its aim was to provide education for severely physically and developmentally disabled children, including those rejected by the public school system at that time.
Page began working as director of the Esperanza School in 1972, a year after it moved into a building at 520 N. Marshfield Ave. in the West Town neighborhood. In that role, she coached teachers, and also focused on providing physically challenged pupils with physical therapy.
“She loved that work,” her daughter said. “On one level she just liked working with children, and on Marshfield, they also worked to address a child’s spirit, even if that child was handicapped or debilitated.”
Naomi Studebaker, who teaches Waldorf education as a teacher at the Four Winds Waldorf School in Warrenville, worked for eight years with Page at the Esperanza school in the 1970s and ’80s.
“I would call her, in modern-day language, an early creative,” Studebaker said. “She wanted to increase the therapy that was there, she wanted to involve the arts in education, and she emphasized eurythmy, which is an art form that is very unique to itself and has a lot of healing power in it.”
Culbert recalled Page’s focus on providing all kinds of therapies to children, along with her desire to develop her staff.
“She had the deepest of compassion and wanted to see the dignity in each child,” she said. “And she wanted to bring out the best in you as a teacher.”
Page reluctantly retired from the Esperanza school in 1993, her daughter said, to care for her ailing husband. After stepping down the couple moved to South Carolina.
Page’s husband died in 1995. Page went on to enjoy playing the recorder with an early music group at the College of Charleston and speaking about the White Rose. The German government honored her with its Order of Merit in 2019.
In addition to her daughter, Page is survived by three sons, Michael, Thomas and Kim; seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.