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AHC interview with Edith Gerson
No full textDigital recordingMarch 11, 2014Edith Gerson, née Urbach was born 1924 in Vienna, Austria. In May 1939 she left on a Kindertransport. She lived in London and attended a rather conservative, religious school, although she had no prior religious background. For a short period she was interned on the Isle of Man, which she perceived as an interesting experience. Her first husband, whom she married in 1943, was a political refugee from Germany. When he returned to Germany after the war, the couple divorced, because Edith did not want to set foot on the European mainland ever again. In 1950 she immigrated to the U.S. with her second husband, returning regularly to England on visits. She studied at Pratt Institute and worked as an interior designer. After she retired, she settled in Midtown Manhattan.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Alfred Hellreich
No full textAugust 5, 2014Digital recordingAlfred Hellreich was born Aug. 23, 1934 in Vienna, Austria, the son of Anna (born 1907) and Hermann Hellreich (born 1901). His maternal grandfather had accumulated wealth after WW I in real estate. His father owned a jewelry business in Vienna. The Hellreich family lived in a grand apartment on the Ring boulevard, in the same building with the Hotel de France. Shortly after Anschluss in March 1939 the family left Vienna for Abazzia (today Opatija in Croatia), where they stayed until March 1939, when they took the "Ile de France" from Le Havre, France to New York, arriving on March 15th 1939. They settled in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where Alfred could finish his schooling. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, and graduated from SUNY Downstate Medical Center in 1959. He specialized in dermatology, settling in New York City.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Paul Biegel
No full textSeptember 8, 2014Digital recordingPaul Biegel was born on the 12th of April, 1930 in Vienna, where he attended elementary school until 1938. His father worked as a foreign correspondent for banking institutions, his mother sold Singer sewing machines. The couple married in 1929 in Vienna and lived in a small apartment in Nussdorferstrasse in the 9th district of Vienna. A few days after the German occupation, Paul’s father was arrested by the SS. He was released, but later deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he died. Paul Biegel's mother was consequently struggling. She had to support her family, raise Paul's younger brother who was born in 1938 and manage the complicated visa application process on her own. Paul Biegel was sent to an orphanage, where he stayed until 1939. The family was eventually issued a visa for the United States, which they obtained with the help of an aunt who lived in New York. They left for Trieste in 1939, stayed there until 1940, and then immigrated to the US with a stopover in Genoa. Paul Biegel, his mother and his younger brother stayed in their aunt's apartment in the Bronx for their first weeks in New York. Paul soon attended elementary school in the Bronx, then a junior high school outside New York as well as Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. He was granted US citizenship in 1945. He went on to study chemical engineering, but later switched to accounting and law. Paul Biegel worked throughout his years of study to support himself and his family, for example in his stepfather's shop or as an office boy. He served in the US Army and worked for private companies throughout his professional career. Biegel visited Austria several times. He and his brother put up a gravestone in the Jewish cemetery in Vienna at their father's burial place.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Edith Mindel
No full textAugust 12, 2014Digital recordingEdith Mindel was born on 2/28/37 in the third district of Vienna, Austria. She fled with her parents in 1939 to Shanghai, China, without any recollections about Vienna. Her parents worked as vegetables vendors in Shanghai and sent her to a British school. In 1949, communism was established in China and the Mindels were among the very last Jewish families to leave the country. After arriving in New York, the family moved to Williamsburg. Her classmates winded her up due to her British accent, and she never stopped feeling like an outsider in America. In her opinion "her family didn’t make it in the US." After graduating from high school, she started to do clerical work. Edith Mindel considered herself the last member of her tribe and did not pass on any Jewish culture to her adopted daughter, even though she sent her to Hebrew school. After her divorce she eventually settled in the Midwood section of, Brooklyn, NYC.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Ernest H. Spillar
No full textAugust 25, 2014Digital recordingErnest H. Spillar was born 1927 in Prague as Ernst Spitz; he grew up in a Czech- and German-speaking household. His parents were running a successful leather goods business. In 1938 the family had to flee their hometown after the Nazis confiscated their property. First emigrating to Switzerland, the family left for England in 1939, but returned the same year. Ernest's parents managed to establish another leather goods business in Switzerland, but despite their success decided to immigrate to the US in 1941. Ernest Spillar attended Forest Hills High School (NY) until 1944. He went on to study at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA until 1945, when he was drafted and after basic military training sent to occupied Japan. After being discharged in 1947, Ernest Spillar continued his studies at Lehigh and went on to study industrial design at the University of Michigan in 1949. After graduating in 1950, he came back to New York and started his professional career, but also took additional courses at Columbia University, eventually settling in Forest Hills, NY. Ernest Spillar visited Austria as well as the Czech Republic several times for business. Although he was not successful in reclaiming his parents property, he was granted some restitution.Austrian Heritage Collectio
A reminiscence.
No full textdigitizedIrene Adelman was born 1924 in Frankfurt/Main, daughter of Leo Badmann and Charlotte née Roos. Her grandfather, Louis Badmann owned a general store in Öttingen, Bavaria, where her father Leo Badmann was born in 1884. He was educated in a convent before going to Paris to become a banker. Shortly after WW I he was appointed director of Dresdner Bank in Frankfurt.Irene’s mother, Charlotte Roos was born 1900 in Chemnitz and eventually moved to Frankfurt. They got married in 1922. In 1932, the Badmann family moved to Amsterdam to join Charlotte’s brother, Jules Roos.In 1940, Irene and her paternal grandmother Recha escaped on a boat to Liverpool on the day of the Netherlands’ German occupation. Her parents and her two brothers did not survive the Holocaust. At first, Irene stayed in the town of Wigan, where Jewish organizations had secured shelter for Jewish refugees. She then moved to the house of Dr. Gretl Samuel, a relative in Manchester, where she worked as a seamstress and went to classes at the Manchester School of Fine Arts.Around 1943, Irene joined the women's branch of the British Army, ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service) until her honorable discharge in 1947. She then joined her uncle Jules Roos in Montreal, Canada, where she worked as a dressmaker and a designer. In 1951 she married the textile merchant Jack Adelman
AHC interview with Ruth Hecht.
No full textMay 22, 2014Ruth Hecht, née Pollak was born in 1931 in Brigittenau, Vienna’s 20th District, where the family lived on Wallensteinstrasse. Ruth's father, Oskar Gellmann, worked for his uncle in a burlap bag business. Ruth went to the Chajes-Gymnasium high school from 1937 to 1938. After ‘Anschluss’ Ruth's aunt and her family lived with them in their small apartment. When officials were looking for Oskar Gellmann, he and his brother escaped to Switzerland, leaving the family behind. Ruth and her mother tried to go to Belgium, but they were stopped in Cologne. In a second attempt, Ruth made it in a "Kindertransport" to Brussels, where Jenny Fink from the organization "Protection des enfants" referred her to the family of Lotte and Benno Sender in Antwerp. In the meantime, Oskar Gellmann was held in Aargau in a Swiss camp for refugees, but he could obtain a visa for his wife - still back in Vienna – to go to England as a domestic servant: three family members were dispersed into three different countries. Ruth went to elementary school in Antwerp for one and a half years. When the Germans marched into Belgium in May 1940, Benno Sender was interned, and the rest of them fled to Ostend where Ruth was injured by a bomb splinter on May 31, 1940. Her upper lip, right cheek and right eye had to be restored in several operations. In September Ruth was hiding in a monastery, before she joined her father in Switzerland, where she lived with two families until the war was over. Ruth finished secondary school in 1947, before she became a pharmacist's assistant. In 1949, at the age of 18, Ruth, together with her father and his new partner, Rosie, moved to Israel, where Ruth became a baby-nurse at Hadassah Hospital in Ramat Gan. Eventually, they all immigrated to the US, arriving in New York on Ruth's 21st birthday, and she started working as a nurse at Beth Israel Hospital. She got married in 1957 and moved to Plainview, NY in 1963.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with George Wolf
No full textDigital recordingMarch 7, 2014George (Georg) Wolf was born on Nov. 16th, 1927 in Brno, Czechoslovakia. The family was well-to-do, two uncles owned a bicycle factory, another one owned a café, and the father owned a textile business. After the German grip tightened with the annexation of Austria, the Munich Agreement and the pogrom in November 38, the family applied for visas. In March 1939 his father obtained one of the very few exit visas the Gestapo allowed, and he left immediately. George Wolf and his mother took the train from Brno to Milan and went on to France. Without knowing it, they escaped the trap that Vichy France later became for its Jews, by finding refuge in Switzerland. After finishing his education, George Wolf started to work for the American Consulate in Zurich. In the summer of 1946 he worked as a transcriber at the Nurnberg War Crimes Trials. In December 1946 he came to the U.S. to rebuild his life. After serving in the U.S. Army as part of the Cold War intelligence project he became a U.S. citizen in 1952. He became a fashion designer, consultant and eventually a manufacturer of apparel. When his business failed in 2005, he became the marketing director of a small Jewish charity, The Blue Card, providing financial assistance to needy Holocaust survivors.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Erna Pfeffer
No full textDigital recordingMay 6, 2014Erna Pfeffer née Huelsenrath was born in Graz, Austria, where her parents had moved after World War One from Poland. When Erna was six years old, they moved to Vienna where they lived in the 2nd District (Leopoldstadt) on Obere Augartenstrasse. Her father was a controller for the Austrian railroads. Her grandparents had a farm in Poland where they would go in the summer. The day of the "Anschluss", neighbors knocked on their door telling them that they would now become their servants. Not long after the Nazis annexed Austria, they had to move to another apartment together with two more families in Rembrandtstrasse 18. During those months from "Anschluss" to "Reichskristallnacht", Erna “existed in fear". As soon as the family assembled all necessary papers they left Vienna in August, 1939. They took the train to France and then the boat to England. From Liverpool, they took the ship "Mauretania" to the U.S. where they arrived on September 16th, 1939. Erna's oldest brother accommodated them in a house in Brooklyn: he had arrived before "Reichskristallnacht" and had stayed with an uncle. Erna's father started to work as a presser and her mother as a doll maker. Erna received proper education (in four years she went through public school, junior high school and high school) and subsequently became a bookkeeper. Evetually she settled in Monsey, New York.Austrian Heritage Collectio
The Nickelsburg family : A historical sketch.
No full textThis is an illustrated history of a German Jewish family from Nikolsburg in Moravia, reaching back to ca. 1675, and following its genealogy through a number of German cities, such as Teterow, Schwerin, Gnoien, and Ribnitz in Mecklenburg; as well as Berlin and Koblenz, to the U.S. and Brazil.digitize