Buller, Beatrice Rosenthal (1920-2008)

Mennonite Weekly Review obituary: 2008 Oct 27 p. 9

Birth date: 1920

text of obituary:

BEATRICE R. BULLER

Beatrice Rosenthal Buller died Oct. 12, 2008, in a Dallas, Texas, hospital. As in the 1930s, she again had become a refugee, this time not to escape the fury of the Nazis but that of Hurricane Ike, which threatened her home in Beaumont.

She was born in 1920 in Duisburg, Germany, a child of a middle class Jewish family. Her father was a prominent lawyer in that city. The anti-Jewish policies of the Nazis forced the Rosenthal family to leave Germany in the early 1930s and to settle in Antwerp, Belgium. When the Germans invaded that country in May 1940, the Rosenthal family fled to unoccupied France, where they were able to find safe hiding places. She settled in Lyon, where she found employment at the Mennonite Central Committee office. There she met MCC worker Henry Buller, whom she would marry on Nov. 11, 1942, on the same day the Germans occupied the rest of France. They had hoped she would be baptized by Fritz Gerber, pastor of the Mennonite church in Langnau, Switzerland, but baptism would have to wait until they settled in the United States. Subsequently, she, Henry, other relief workers, American diplomats and journalists were interned for more than one year in Baden-Baden, Germany.

Soon after their release in February 1944, Henry returned to war-stricken Europe. She would join him in France after the war to resume MCC relief work. Upon their return home, she graduated from and taught foreign languages at Bethel College in North Newton, Kan. Having no children of their own, they adopted Rene, a French orphan. Tragically, Rene was killed in Vietnam on March 27, 1969, where he served as a medic with the U.S. Army.

For many years they lived in Beaumont, where Henry taught at Lamar University. He preceded her in death in 1993. She kept busy, in spite of some major health problems, teaching and doing local volunteer work. She will be missed by many friends in Beaumont and many Mennonites, who very much appreciated her for her kind and lively spirit.