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4-Leaving Baden
How did you feel leaving Baden?
Well, what happened is that my father received his visa from the American Embassy, and as soon as that came, my sister Nina ran to the lawyer, who went to the prison in Vienna, and said, here is an affidavit, here is the visa and they have an affidavit, and you have to release this man. They released him, because they were a police station, and they were used to systems like that. We got him out of the country within a day, and then he was gone. All the preparations had been made by my sister Nina of course, getting a ship ticket and all that. Then our plans were all set that as soon as he was out of the country, we would leave Baden, because we were a target. We had made arrangements to move to Vienna, and I think you know that. So, the way we left was like thieves in the night. We packed a few suitcases and left everything else behind, and left late at night. My mother, or Nina again probably, arranged for a taxi to pick us up. Taxi took us to the train station, and we went to Vienna, and straight to the address that we were going to be living at.
Did you leave anything behind that was important to you?
Nothing. I didn't have toys. I didn't have a teddy bear, or my favorite doll to take along. I didn't have anything like that. It was just wonderful that we could run. That was the most joyous thing, that we could get out of there. It was like we were on our way for our personal salvation.
What kind of job did your sister have when you were living in Vienna, or did she have a job?
Oh, because I said before she worked for us, or something like that? No, she didn't have a job. We didn't go to school anymore. After Kristallnacht, there was no more school. So her job was to run around to lawyers, to the embassy, to Gestapo people, getting papers, papers, papers by the dozens. They made it very difficult for you to leave. They didn't want to just let you go like that, you know, like I have a passport and I can go. You had to return to the bureau wherever you got a passport, time and time again. So she knew how to, she learned how to go to the American embassy, and stand in line for four hours until she could get to the official who had to put stamps on different papers. She learned how to not drink too much, so she wouldn't have to go to the bathroom, so she could just stand in line. She learned how to take some crackers with her, and slip a cracker in her mouth, to have energy to stand. She learned all of those things, survival techniques, and she was fearless. She was arrogant to begin with, and it helped her, and it helped us. She was very tall. She looked like she was twenty-four as a matter of fact. She was very developed, and she would go there and unflinchingly state her business. My mother wouldn't. If it had been up to my mother, we would have been shipped off to Poland, to Auschwitz. No question about it. I mean, we would have stayed behind.
When your mother and sister got sick, how did that affect your role in the family?
Oh, you mean, in Vienna, when we were celebrating? Yeah, lets see. Well, we were all sick. I was very sickly. I was prone to tonsillitis all the time, or colds, and of course we would pass it around. So Lisa and I, that’s my younger sister, who was sick with tonsillitis, couldn't eat. We didn't have an appetite. We didn't want to touch that chicken that was the celebration of the evening. We had a fever, and you know, all we could do was sleep and drink water. So, we didn't do anything, everybody was sick. And my sister and mother were deathly sick. It was probably salmonella.
Going back to the working, how did you get money for all of this?
Everything was figured out to the penny. Tickets were bought. The arrangements were that we were going to stay in Vienna for certain amount of time. Then, so tickets were bought in anticipation of all of that, giving enough time for all of these bureaucrats to let us get through. We were going to take a train from Vienna, through Germany, through Holland, and then we were going to make our way to England, and from England, take the Queen Mary to America. So every penny was figured out. We also knew that you couldn't take any money with you, and one suitcase per person. So my mother decided, that was a good decision, that in Vienna we would all get the best possible clothes. There was some family savings after all, and we blew it all. Everybody got new shoes, a hat, a suit, a dress I guess, coat, all of this, and that's it.
How did you get in touch with Mrs. Strauss? How did you make connections with her?
Well, that's an interesting question because one of the friends we had in Baden was a bachelor, and he was a friend of the family. He would always come around, and he always used to come around at lunchtime, which was the time that the main meal was served. He would just drop in. Of course, my parents would invite him to stay for dinner. So, I vaguely remember this, but I was told about it. When the bad times came, he had a mother who was Mrs. Strauss, who lived in Vienna. She had an apartment that had two bedrooms in it, and he arranged with her, that she would rent one of those rooms to us. So that's how that happened. I don't know what happened to the man. That's a question that popped into my own mind.
How did your daily routine change when you started living with Mrs. Strauss?
It was a very strange situation. I told you I never grew up with toys, or dolls, or anything. I think I had that in the previous interview, so you knew about the dollhouse. But we never went out. If we went out, it was to accompany my mother because she was going to buy a bread. But you couldn't go to the park. You couldn't go to anything that was any recreational areas, or restaurants. We wouldn't do that anyway, but when you think about how much we do everyday in our lives, the places we go and our friends that we meet, and telephone conversations, there was none of that. We just were prisoners in our own home in Baden and here, especially my sister Lisa and myself, because we were so young, but Nina of course went out a great deal.
Did you see a lot of other Jewish people over there, in that building?
They did, yeah. It became the Jewish ghetto when we left. I don't know if I mentioned that in the previous interview, the building we lived in, had a soup kitchen on the ground floor, which was supported by a Jewish organization. So people who didn't have food, could come and eat there. Because it became like a center for Jews, it became the gathering place for Jews to line up, to be shipped out to Poland later on, that same building. I, by chance, happened to find this out because, a friend of mine who wrote a book about her life, in Germany and then living in Vienna, knew about this building, and talked about how this was the center for being rounded up for shipment to Auschwitz.
When you were living with Mrs. Strauss, you talked about the dollhouse and also how you had to stay inside all the time, so what other types of things did you do, to keep yourself occupied?
I would always stand by the window, and had my hand on this red velvet drape and look outside because I wanted desperately to eat the food that they were eating. I didn't know what it was, but it smelled very good. We lived just a floor above the kitchen, and I guess there were other centers in the city where they had kitchens. This was probably not the only one, or maybe they brought the food to nursing homes, or who knows. But after that particular lunch time, they would roll out these huge barrels like, to me they looked like the kind of garbage cans we have now, and they were filled with beans, cooked beans, because the staple diet in that soup kitchen was bread, beans and rice. So, when they rolled the beans out, that fragrance, oh it was just amazing. It smelled so good I wish I had it, and everyday I would smell the same thing. It was like smelling a piece of chocolate, you know, that you wish you could eat. That's what occupied me, looking out the window. Lisa and I would sit by the window, watch people walking by. Of course, that wasn't so cool either because Gestapo people could walk by, and they could see you looking out. They could, just for the fun of it, just for the fun of it, run upstairs and rush into the house and maybe bang us up, slap us around. So my mother was sure that we wouldn't do that very often.
Did this bring you closer to your younger sister?
I was close with her all the time, because she to me was this baby sister. I sort of liked being with her, because I had no other contacts. I didn't have friends, and Nina didn't have anything to do with me, and my mother's job was just to feed us. She and I developed a relationship right away. She would do funny things, you know like little babies would do. That was the relationship. I would find joy in just seeing her. I would find something in it.
Were you closer with Nina or your mother?
I wasn't close to my sister at all, not at all. To my mother yes.
You mentioned that Mrs. Strauss was mean to you. Do you have any idea why that was?
I think it was jealousy because we were going to leave. We were going to America and she had no prospects like that. It must have been that.
Was it hard to trust her?
I didn't. I was very fearful of her, because my intuition was very strong that she was envious of us. Of course, when she took the dollhouse away from me, I knew. I, in my mind, I made up this whole story that she gave it to a Nazi rather than let the Jewish little girl play with it. I concocted a whole thing in my fantasy, that who knows she could even be a collaborator. I sort of regarded her as an enemy.
Did your family have any close encounters with the Gestapo?
You mean while living there? No, I don't remember that it ever happened, that they ever stopped us for anything. You know well the story of my sister Nina going to the Kurpark and that could have been an encounter with the Gestapo, but it never came to that of course.
Did you ever hear what happened to Mrs. Strauss?
No, because I think my parents lost touch with the friend of the family, her son. I think by the time we arrived in the United States there was no correspondence at all anymore. Everything was shut down.
