Historic chandelier in NC governor's mansion: Holocaust survivor recalls daring escape, gift to North Carolina

The chandelier in the dining room of the governor’s mansion is like a wedding cake made of light — tiers of glittering gold and white crystal, orbs and teardrops and bunches of grapes.

Made in the 1880s in Austria, the Horowitz chandelier may have been one of the very first electrified chandeliers in the world, created in collaboration with Thomas Edison himself. Karoline Horowitz, a Jewish holocaust refugee who settled with her family in Murphy, North Carolina, gave the chandelier to the state in the 1960s.

“For many years, we knew some things about the remarkable history,” Gov. Roy Cooper said. “But in recent months, we came across correspondence from the woman who donated the chandelier, Ms. Karoline Horowitz, and her letters unlocked a whole new world of information.”

In a video from 1988, Horowitz explained how she, her husband and son fled the Nazis, leaving the chandelier behind in Germany, along with almost all their other possessions and family heirlooms.

“It’s one thing to learn about history in a book and learn about it that way,” she said in the video. “It’s another thing to live through it. We lived through it. We were in the very thick of it.”

In 1942, after fleeing to Czechoslovakia and then Holland, they finally escaped from the Nazis in France.

Their son, Bob Horowitz, was just 4 years old at the time. He’s 86 now, but he still remembers their daring night-time escape, aided by members of the French resistance and three French soldiers who had escaped a German prison camp. They walked for hours through the night.

“The men took turns carrying me on their shoulders,” Bob Horowitz said. “It was through fields and woods and so on."

He was about 4-and-a-half years old. "And I remember so distinctly being on the shoulders of those men,” he said.

In the video, Karoline Horowitz recalled how they were nearly caught at the border of occupied France by German guards who heard them make a noise.

“We were so close to them that the flashlight with which they searched the area shone over us,” she said. “We were in a small trench just between the guards and the light.”

Somehow, the Horowitz chandelier survived the war in Germany without being seized by the Nazis. After the war, it was disassembled and shipped to the family, but they never hung it in their North Carolina home. Bob Horowitz recalled his mother deciding instead to donate it to the state as a way to say thank you.

“North Carolina has treated us well,” Bob Horowitz said. “We came as refugees and made it our home and we’re part of the community.”

Cooper said Hanukkah — the festival of lights, which started Thursday and ends with nightfall on Friday — is a perfect time to celebrate that.