page 4 of 11

Play Movie

Please report errors to: info@tellingstories.org.

4-Living in Vienna with Mrs. Strauss

What was it like living in Vienna?

Living in the apartment with Mrs. Strauss was very difficult, for me especially, through my eyes. I didn't have a playmate. Usually I had very little to do with my oldest sister. I never knew where she was. So I found a dollhouse in Mrs. Strauss's apartment. I had never seen anything like it, because I wasn't brought up with toys, there were no toys in my family at all. I think it had something to with coming from a very religious family, that that was trivial things to pass your time with. So I was enchanted by this dollhouse. I only looked in through the windows and saw all these different rooms, because it had floors. And the dinning room table would be set with all these dishes. I couldn't believe that this was possible, you know. And so I would stare at it for hours. I was very shy.You would think that Mrs. Strauss would catch on and say, "Can I open the door of the house and you can play with the toys?" But she never did. When she saw that I became so attracted to it, it one day disappeared altogether. So she took on sort of an image to me as being a very mean old woman.

We spent most of our time in our room. And in this building, on the very first floor of the building, there was a free kitchen which was supported by some Jewish agency. Because Jews lost all of their property - they were thrown out of their houses, everything was confiscated - and this was becoming the Jewish ghetto of Vienna, and eventually it did. The building that I was in was to become a very major center point, I'll tell you about that in a minute. So we would spend all of our time in this one room. Lisa and I would play our games. The only time we went out was - we had this little stove and my mother would - a little burner - she would cook a little bit of food. There wasn't much food that you could get either. You could get rice and maybe noodles. Nothing very substantial.

I was starting to tell you that on the first floor of this building was a free kitchen. I used to love hanging my head out and watching them at the end. People would come who had no money at all, they could get beans and bread to eat, typically that was the diet, beans and maybe rice and bread. And I would smell those beans and I thought it was paradise, if only we could have it. I begged my mother, "Could we please eat down there." She was very proud of course, "Oh no, we have enough to take care of our family here." But that smell went with me, for the rest of my life I smelled those beans.

The other big memory of this apartment - I need to document that now because I will be coming back to it as an adult - was the weekly bath, which was torture for me, absolute torment. To go into the bathroom there was this big old yellow bathtub with lions legs at the bottom. And for some strange reason I seemed to be the last one in that one tub of water. I don't really recall, or maybe it wasn't so, but it seemed to me that I - oh I know what. I had, I think, flee bites all over my body. They thought that I should go last and not contaminate them or something. So I used to dread going into the water. It would be murky and brown and cold and there was this transom and I could imagine getting out of this place. It wasn't fun staying in this apartment, but we managed to do that.

The family had - my mother had some jewelry that she took with her. And there was a rumor going around that there was - one of the people in the neighborhood had contacts with people outside of the area - that they could sell their jewelry. And so he took our jewelry my mother gave him and of course he disappeared. There was no such thing as getting any money back. So we were really left to the last penny. As I said when we got out of Italy - or, I don't know if I mentioned to you, we had to - if you remember we went on the ship and then I had to - we got off and we stayed a whole month. And then when we got on ship again, the shipping line made the Jews pay another passage. I don't know if I mentioned that before. No one else, you know "why should we pay double passage." So, of course we didn't have the money. My mother had to telegraph and then my father sent it.

Who was Mrs. Strauss?

Mrs. Strauss was the mother of a friend of the family from Baden.

We were very Kosher - we came from this religious family. So when we were for instance in Italy, in that hotel, we couldn't eat any of the food there. So we ate just plain cooked spaghetti. There were three things offered every day: spaghetti, macaroni or pastachuta. All of them were just about the same thing. So we could get that, and bread and fruit.

I was going to tell you, going back to Vienna, that building that we lived in later on became the center where Jews were gathered and shipped out to concentration camps - just a few months later after we left.

How did you come about living with Mrs. Strauss?

This was all planned while my father was still in jail. We knew that - we were hoping that - they would release him, waiting desperately for the visa to come. We made plans that we would have to get out of Baden as quickly as he did because we were open targets. So they arranged with this friend of the family that we would move into her apartment and live in this one room. She, I thought, was very mean to us, I was very afraid of her. I kept thinking that she must be mean and must be very jealous. After all she was staying to an unknown future. I always had this terror that she would do something to us or report us for something.

What was it like having this terror at such a young age?

It was a heightened state of being afraid all the time. Going out. Getting sick. Who would take care of us? In fact, a week before we were to sail, my mother went out into the black market and bought a chicken, a kosher chicken. And the chicken was contaminated. I didn't eat it because I was always sick. I had sore throats all the time, tonsillitis. Lisa was sick with tonsillitis too, so she and I didn't eat anything. But my mother and sister got violently sick. Probably salmonella, violently sick.

You know, the terror, "Are they going to get well enough, are they going to die. And how are we going to get on the ship? And what if they can't move when its time to go?" Because they were lying down all the time. They had been throwing up constantly and there was no doctor and all of that. But we made it, so there was always something, some anticipation, some, appointment to make, and what if you couldn't make it. If you lost that opportunity you may have to stay forever, and then what's going to happen to you.

Do you remember, as a nine year old, wanting to leave?

Wanting to leave? Desperately. It was dangerous. My best friend's mother threw a bucket of garbage on my head. Who could you trust? You knew - I knew what was happening to Jews. There was a neighbor of ours, from Baden, who received a box of ashes from Dachau, saying it was her husband. And of course they didn't do that normally, because why would they even bother? Why would they even bother? But it was a sadistic idea of somebody. So I knew about that. I knew that people were committing suicide. I knew of this woman who was found floating down this creek, that was very small and sweet and lovely for children to play near my house, but outside of the compound this creek was almost like a river. So, life was dangerous.

Fleeing Austria to Italy, England and America

Why did you choose to go to Italy?

Because we had to get out of the country right away. And we could not. The ship sailing from London was a big trip because you had to take a train that goes through Germany to Holland, then get over to England and there take the ship.

There was no other way. And the thing is, had the event with the red dress not taken place and we would have stuck to our original plan - which was to leave at the end of September - we would never had gotten out. World War II had already started. How could we go to Germany? Impossible. So the red dress actually saved our lives.

I want to go back to the ship ride. What did you see? Did the people on the ship know that you were Jewish?

Here again, I was a little kid, and they were more interested in adults.When you're a kid you don't always look Jewish. But by the time you get older, you look Jewish more and more. I got a group of friends, that was the first time, and we went exploring all over the ship. You wouldn't believe it - it was like a piece of surrealism when I look back at it. This ship had three classes. It had an upper class and we used to sneak into it, and at night the dinning hall was sumptuous. Every one was wearing evening gowns. And they would dance to a band. You know, and here we had just left this other scene behind us. We used to look and watch these people engorge themselves with these enormous feasts, and laugh and be jolly. And then there would be this small, small group of Jews. You could tell them because they had such sad faces. And there were all these other rejoicing people who were going home to America. And they were Nazis.

Did you see any acts of anti-Semitism on the boat?

Oh, just hearing the expressions like, "the filthy Jews," and that sort of thing. We were warned by - as I mentioned before - by our mother that as soon as we saw any kind of a group gathering, not to get near them, to always look all around you, wherever you were, so that it looked safe. Never to be cornered alone with somebody. So all these instructions were given, which we learned immediately.

So the boat was heading towards New York?

It was heading for New York, and it was a moment of great triumph, and feeling of being delivered into safety when we saw the Statue of Liberty.

What was going through your mind when you saw it?

I was with my mother and my sister and everybody was crying and you know.

Did you think that you still might not be safe yet?

No, no. Then I knew I was safe, just the sight of that - because there was so much talk that we were going to get into the harbor of New York and your going to see the Statue of Liberty. We heard it again and again. Just the site of it made me me feel that we were relieved, delivered.

Arriving in New York

What happened when you landed in New York?

We were told by one of the officials to go to a certain place were all the Jews were gathered. There were no more than about thirty of them. Then an organization came on board called HIAS, which stands for Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. That was an organization founded to help refugees get placed, to help them get connected with relatives they had in the country. So they came on board and welcomed us and assured us that we were safe now. They invited us - they told us that they were going to take us to their shelter in downtown New York, we would have lunch, and then they would send us off on a train and connect us with our families.

The lunch was the most amazing thing in the world. We came into the shelter with many, many long tables and a lot of refugees all sitting around, nobody had their head up, they were all down with their heads in their plates. We were served - I think it was just around the high holiday time - so we were served roasted brisket and roasted potatoes and bread and honey cake for desert. I was ashamed of myself - I wanted to ask for more and more and more, you know, we hadn't eaten meat for a year. It was quite a feast to remember. Then we were connected with our father.

Was your father in New York?

No. He was in Boston. So we had to take a train to Boston. It was very interesting, I don't remember what happened that night but I can remember waking up very early in the morning. We were all dressed very well by the way. Our family was extremely poor in Baden and in Vienna. We had nothing. We knew we couldn't take any money out of the country, so whatever we had, my mother had beautiful dresses made for us and new shoes. She just spent everything, everything on an outfit for each one of us. Normally I would never be wearing clothes like that. So the next morning in Boston I got up and put on my beautiful clothes. I thought I would go down - I was in an upstairs bedroom and I thought I would go down and explore the rooms and see what it was like and all that.

So I went down stairs and as I was coming down the steps I heard the voices of my father and my cousin, my second cousin and they were fighting. They were arguing very loudly, very loudly. And I was in the kitchen by this time. I didn't know what to do. I saw this big tablecloth on the table and I crouched underneath it. And they came in and they sat down at this table. And they were yelling. It seems that my cousin was a socialist or he was a communist, I forget. My father yelled at him, "What are you talking about? All the things that Stalin did for the Jews." And banging on the table and the cousin saying, "Why of course, look he liberated them, there are no more pogroms in Russia, right?" So my father's yelling back, "No more pogroms, but what about - he took away their religions and closed all the synagogues." And there was this big fight going on. I'm underneath there and holding my breath. A fine liberation. And at that point my father just stormed out. That was my introduction to the city and a new way of life.

Was that the first time you saw your father?

In a year, yes.

What was your feeling when you first met up with your father?

It was like a great miracle - that we would ever see each other again and the recollection of the fact that he got the visa and that he was able to get out of prison, that they actually let somebody out to go to the United States. Had it happened a week later it wouldn't have happened, they wouldn't have allowed it to happen because things changed very rapidly in those days, very rapidly. So it was quite an amazing reunion and still a tremendous amount of worry because we didn't know about what was to happen later on, the Holocaust that was going to happen where millions of Jews were going to be wiped out. We didn't know that. But we knew it was dangerous, that Jews were dying and they were going to camps and that sort of thing. It was - happy to be together but there was no happiness, there was tremendous angst, terror all the time. My family was constantly pinned to the radio to hear what was going on.