Obituary for Felicitas Erzebet Klein Connell

Felicitas Erzebet Klein Connell, 69, of Mount Vernon, died Sunday, December 7, 2008, at University Hospitals, Iowa City, of complications arising from progressive disseminated histoplasmosis. A Memorial Service will be held at 2:00 pm Saturday December 13, 2008 at the United Methodist Church, 304 First Street West, Mt. Vernon, IA 52314. She was born March 17, 1939, in Vrbas, Serbia, the second daughter of Gyula Klein and Flora Dorth Klein. Of German descent, she and her family were imprisoned by Tito''s communist partisans in a concentration camp from November 1944 to early 1947, when they escaped on foot to Austria, where she and her sister then attended a convent school. This experience affected her for the rest of her life. The family immigrated to Chicago in 1951. She graduated from Hyde Park High School and studied at the University of Illinois/Chicago and at the medical faculty of the Free University of Berlin. She married Charles R. Connell in Berlin, Germany, on December 28, 1962. They lived in Chicago until 1968, and then came to Mount Vernon and Cornell College, where her husband is a professor of German. Over the last 15 years, she divided her time between Mount Vernon and Hyde Park, Chicago, tending to the apartment building purchased by her parents 50 years ago and to her children and grandchildren, who all lived there at various times. She loved her tea, chocolate, and caring for her family. She was a model for her children as a mother, cook, and gardener, and on how to save and stretch every penny. She was greatly beloved by her family, and will be deeply missed. She is survived by her husband, her daughters Deirdre (Jim Sowerby) and Allegra (Michael Frank), her son Alexander (Kimberly Scott Connell), and five grandsons (Keiran, Charles, Henry, James, and Nathan). She was preceded in death by her parents and her older sister Sybille Renate Klein Caramanos.