31 research outputs found
AHC interview with BW.
No full textFebruary 24, 2015BW was born 1929 in Poland. He attended primary school in the morning and Hebrew school in the afternoon. His family was orthodox and lived in a small town in Galicia, three hours away from Krakow. When the war broke out in September 1939, the family left their town and went to Soviet-occupied Poland. In June 1940 the family was deported to Siberia, where they had to chop wood in a labor camp. After their release, they settled for two tears in a formerly German area along the Volga River, before returning to Poland in 1946 and eventually ending up in a DP camp in Bavaria, Germany. They immigrated to the United States, arriving in New York City in July 1949.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with HW.
No full textFebruary 24, 2015HW was born 1929 in Antwerp, Belgium, the first child of Maurice and Gisella M. They lived in an uncle’s apartment building; her father was a Hebrew teacher, her mother was a housewife. In 1935, HW's father was offered a teaching position in Linz, Austria. 2 years later, HW's brother was born. The family spoke German at home. At the time of the Anschluss, their synagogue in Linz was destroyed, and Maurice M. was arrested for two weeks. Three months later, he obtained a passport to go to England, hoping to bring his family along later. This turned out to be impossible: HW was sent back to Belgium in 1939, while her mother and her brother were deported to Theresienstadt and later perished in Auschwitz.When the Nazis invaded Belgium, an aunt and an uncle brought HW to France, where she stayed at a catholic convent. With the help of OSE, Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants, she was brought to Switzerland, where she first lived in a children's home in Basel and later with a family in Zurich, until she immigrated to the US in March 1947 and reunited with her father. She attended public high school in Pennsylvania, and then moved to Washington Heights in Manhattan, NY, where she worked as a French and German translator. She got married in 1955 and had three children.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Walter Alina
No full textMay 14, 2015Digital recordingWalter Alina was born 7/3/1931, the only child of the dentist Hans Allina and Mathilde Allina, née Cerner. The family lived at Vereinsgasse 24 in Vienna. Walter attended primary school until 1938. Shortly after the annexation of Austria, Hans Allina managed to obtain visas for Finland. The family flew to Helsinki, where the Jewish Community provided them with an apartment. After the Russian invasion of Finland, they immigrated to America after a stopover in Oslo, Norway. An aunt, who lived in the United States, had organized affidavits.The family first stayed in the Washington Heights section of New York City. Hans Allina worked as a dental mechanic; his wife found employment in a factory where her job was to crack eggs. Walter's father later opened his own dental laboratory in New Jersey. Subsequently Walter Alina and his parents moved to Newark, NJ. Walter Alina studied at Seton Hall College and graduated with a bachelor's degree in chemistry and business in 1954. He then started a successful career, working amongst others for the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and for Paramount Plating Co. 1979-2002 he served as vice-president of Operation for the General Magnaplate Corporation. He published more than 40 technical papers, developed a mathematical equation to determine density and was responsible for some major advances in aerospace technology. Walter Alina also held patents in 16 countries; developed a process for manufacturing transistors while employed at RCA; and was responsible for the listing of the world's most slippery solid in the Guinness Book of World Records: Hi-T-Lube. He was awarded the Frank. E. Lane Industrial Achievement Award in 1972.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 Liana F. Kaufmann.
No full textFebruary 26, 2015Liana Kaufmann, née Feith, was born 1921 in Vienna, Austria, the daughter of the textile merchant Hugo Feith, and his wife, née Schachter. She lived with her parents and her younger sister in Wieden, the 4th district of Vienna, Heumuehlgasse 4. Her father had volunteered in World War I and got married after he had returned from the war. The Feith family had a maid and a governess, who thought the sisters French. Liana attended Volksschule (primary school) in Pressgasse and later on went to Luther Maedchenreformgymnasium in the first district: this was a private high school with approximately 200 students. There were approximately five Jewish students in each class.Some months after the Anschluss, Hugo Feith obtained an affidavit from distant relatives in Philadelphia, the Wollmann family. In June 1938, Hugo Feith was imprisoned and scheduled to be deported to Dachau; he was released, after he was put under American protection by the US Ambassador Reinhard, who had been alarmed by the two Feith sisters. The Feith family sold their apartment way below the actual market value and succeeded to leave for France on July 12, 1938. They boarded "Ile de France" heading for New York City. For the first two years, the Feith family lived at their relatives’ place in Philadelphia, where the Wollmann family owned a neck-tie factory and provided jobs for Liana’s parents.After she graduated from high school, the whole family moved to New York City. Hugo Feith tried to establish his own textile business, but failed several times. Liana worked in several clerical positions; at one of her jobs she met her future husband, Murray Lipton, a student at the medical school at the University of Michigan. The couple moved there in 1942, and they had one daughter. In 1943, her husband was drafted and started working at the Manhattan Project for the American army, researching the atomic bomb. After the war, Murray Lipton moved his wife and daughter to Louisville, Kentucky, where he taught at the University. Liana earned a Bachelor's degree in both German and French from the University of Louisville and started teaching. In 1963, she divorced her husband; Murray Lipton later contributed research to the vaccine against polio and died in 1987. Liana earned a Master’s degree at Columbia University and became the Head of the German Department at Finch College in 1966. After the college went bankrupt in 1975, she continued her studies in Munich and Paris. In 1976, she married her second husband, Mike Kaufmann, who died in the late seventies.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Kurt Weiss.
No full textMay 19, 2015Kurt Weiss was born 2/7/1930 in Krems an der Donau, Austria. His grandfather was Joseph Popper, an adjutant to the Kaiser. The family owned a liquor manufacturing plant and nine liquor stores all over Austria, one of them in Vienna’s 16th district, Ottakring. Kurt Weiss grew up in a wealthy family, where maids and governesses took care of the household and his education. At the age of four, Kurt and his family moved from Krems to Ottakring in Vienna. After the Anschluss, his parents had to scrub streets in Vienna, and after Kristallnacht SS-troops were looking for Kurt’s father, who had hidden on a farm in the 22nd district in the outskirts of Vienna. His family joined him there for three months, before they acquired emigration papers and left for Zurich by train. They stayed there for several months, before going on to le Havre and embarking on the “President Roosevelt” for New York. A randomly chosen pickle dealer, picked from a Manhattan phonebook, had provided affidavits for the US.They arrived on August 12th, 1939. Their first shelter was provided by HIAS. Kurt Weiss worked for a blind man’s fruit stand, whilst his father painted fire escapes. The Weiss family settled in the Bronx. After attending DeWitt High School, Kurt Weiss enrolled at City College; in 1953 he earned his Bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering. He was drafted from 1953 to 1956 and then embarked on his career in the chemical industry, working for a corporation in Ludwigshafen, Germany that produced Styrofoam. Kurt Weiss retired in 1989 to Monroe, New Jersey.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Dorothea Scher.
No full textDecember 2, 2014Dorothea Scher, née Hauptmann, was born on 7/14/1933 in Vienna, Austria to Kurt Hauptmann and Anne Hofmann. Kurt Hauptmann was an attorney, who had lost his license due to "dishonest behavior". Dorothea's mother however, descended from a rich upper-class family, whose father came up for all expenses: Alfred Hofmann was the CEO of the prestigious production community "Wiener Werkstaette", and in 1955 he donated thousands of fabric patterns and drawings to MAK, the Museum for applied arts in Vienna. http://www.mak.at/sammlung/mak-sammlung/wiener-werkstaette-archiv. Dorothea’s parents married in 1927 and divorced in 1937, two years before they fled Germany. Dorothea Scher was six years old when she left with her maternal grandparents and her mother to Trieste. From the Adriatic coast, they set sail on the "Vulcania" to New York, where the family decided never to speak German again, which was possible due to the fact, that all family members had acquired good English skills in Vienna. In 1945 Dorothea and her mother Anne Hofmann moved to their own apartment in New York’s Washington Heights. Dorothea’s father had come to New York in 1941 and took care of his daughter only on Sundays. He had his own shoe business, which failed and went bankrupt in the 1960s. In 1951, Dorothea graduated from High school in Washington Heights. After two years of College, she had to quit, since her father was not able to finance the studies of his daughter anymore. Subsequently, she started to work at "Life Magazine" in the PR-department. In 1955 she married "her high school love" and got her first of two daughters in 1957. in 1963 she started to work as a photographer's assistant and decided to commence a carrier as a freelancing photographer's agent/representative. She retired in 2000.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Erika Bernich.
No full textMay 7, 2015Erika Bernich, née Handler was born 1934 in Vienna, Austria. The Handler family lived in the 13th district of Vienna, Hietzing. Erika’s grandfather, Koloman Handler, owned a factory that produced loose-leaf ring metals in Atzgersdorf, close to Vienna; he employed about 300 workers. The company was seized by the Nazis, but restored to the Handler family after the war and ultimately sold in 1997. Erika’s father, Karl Handler wanted to become a cellist, but eventually worked for his father’s business. Erika’s mother, Erna Unger, hailed from a German family; her maternal grandparents immigrated to the United States in the 1930s.After the “Anschluss”, Erika’s father moved to England with the help of business connections. Erika, her sister Eva (later Weintraub) and their mother followed in December 1938. The Handler sisters attended a private school in Croydon, England. During the blitzkrieg, they were sent to Wales for two years with their class and teachers. In 1944, the Handlers left England for Buenos Aires, Argentina, where Erika’s parents divorced. Her father founded an art gallery and worked for Christie’s in Buenos Aires; he remarried, and after the war he went back to Austria with Erika’s sister Eva. Erika’s mother Erna married Rudolf Rosenthal in Buenos Aires. Together with Erika, they immigrated to the US in 1947; Erna’s sister, Marga Leschinksy, lived in New York City and provided affidavits. The family moved to the Upper West Side and Erika attended Hunter High School and subsequently City College, where she graduated in 1956; she obtained her PhD in chemistry in 1967. When her father passed away, she opened the factory’s US office and imported loose-leaf ring metals from Vienna.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Susanne Mary Soo.
No full textApril 14, 2015Susanne Mary Soo, née Finsterbusch was born on 12/17/1932 as the child of Edmund Finsterbusch, a Viennese physician, and Flora Finsterbusch, née Bollag. When Susanne was approximately two years old, her parents were divorced, and she lived with her mother and her maternal grandparents - Paula and Jakob Bollag - in Gonzagergasse 5 in Vienna. Susanne had two half siblings from her mother's first marriage named Robert and Liselotte Bloch.After some incidences following the Anschluss in 1938, Susanne, her mother and her half siblings took a train to Switzerland. The family first lived in the village of Wildhaus in the canton of St. Gallen until moving to Zurich in April of 1939. Susanne was baptized, as her mother feared a German invasion of Switzerland. She attended primary school and then high school. Her half brother worked as an engineer in Switzerland and later emigrated to Venezuela; her sister got married in Switzerland. After Flora Finsterbusch's death on 9/9/1945, Susanne lived in Buttes in the French part of Switzerland. At age 16, she went to England for a year, lived with a family and attended school; throughout that time, she was financially supported by her half sister Liselotte. After returning to Zurich, Susanne attended a "Kaufmannsschule" (business school) and worked as a secretary from 1949 to 1956. She then immigrated to the US and took a job as a trilingual secretary until meeting her husband Edward Soo.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
