My name is Lisa Grabell, my maiden name is Hershan. I was born on July 29, 1937. My parents, Rudi and Stella Hershan, married in 1933, the same year Hitler became Chancellor in Germany.[1] My father was very successful; he owned a factory until the civil war broke out in 1934 and his factory became the storefront.

      On March 11, 1938, the waltz music on the radio was interrupted. My parents had just started eating dinner. The Chancellor’s voice sounded calm and sad, “German troops are invading our country,” he told the Austrian people. “The world is not willing to help us to defend ourselves, and alone we are not strong enough. We will not fight or spill the blood of our German brothers. May G-d protect Austria…” His voice faded away and the Austrian anthem sounded up, mournfully, sorrowfully. At this point, my parents knew that we needed to leave. My mother doesn’t remember if we slept that night, most likely we did not. My father went to his office the next morning. A man with a brown armband with a red swastika was seated there. “Who are you?” he shouted. “The owner,” my father replied. “Not anymore!” the man bellowed, “Your Jewish company is being Christianized. Get out at once!” My father came home and my parents decided that we would go to my grandparents’ villa. When we went to leave in the car, my parents were stopped and because we were Jewish, our car was confiscated. We had to take the trolley to get where we wanted to go. My father had lost his job and now his car.

      That was the beginning. Now my parents no longer had an income or means of transportation. The nurse my mom hired when I was born was ecstatic that Hitler had arrived, and she left us at once. The maid stayed, but soon had to leave because Christian maids were no longer permitted to work in Jewish households. My parents recalled that during those very first days of the Anschluss, while we still were in our own apartment, the Nazis pulled Jewish people out of their homes and forced them to wash the Austrian campaign slogans off the streets.[2] They had a list of everyone who was born Jewish from the Jewish Religious Community.

      We moved into my grandparents’ house. Black cars with red swastika flags stopped before the house almost daily. The SS officials demanded to know where my grandfather was. They were not impolite. My mother was young, naive and frightened, as long as my father was not home. “My father is old and sick,” my mother would tell them, “he will come back when he feels better.” The Nazi’s thought my grandfather had a fortune in other countries, but he really didn’t. Perhaps they felt sorry for us. My mother was so young and had a new baby. “If you have any trouble with those Austrians, just call me,” one of them told her once and gave her his phone number. “Those Austrians are like wild animals.”

      One morning, my mother had just bathed me when the doorbell rang. She opened the door. A troop of young fellows with brown armbands and red swastikas stood there. “What do you want?” my mother asked, while holding me in her arms. They were young, even younger than my mother at the time. “You have to come with us,” they told her and grinned. “What for?” she asked them. “To wash the streets, of course.” My mother recalled that they talked in heavy Viennese dialect and thought it all very funny. “I have no time,” she told them. “Don’t you see, I have a baby.” They were taken aback. “She says she has no time.” They turned to the oldest one, who seemed to be their leader. “What should we do?” He looked puzzled, then shrugged. “If she has no time, we can’t do anything. Let’s go.” They marched off looking disappointed. “They could have killed you!” my father said to my mother when he came home and she told him what happened. “Yes,” she said, “I guess so. But they didn’t.”

      Long lines began to form before the American consulate. People searched the American phone books for possible relatives. My parents also filled out the application forms. It seemed that the entire world had closed its doors; France, Italy, Swit­zerland. No one wanted the Jews trapped in Germany. Austria too was now Germany. England accepted refugees on domestic visas. Doctors went as butlers, opera singers as cooks. One country that had no re­strictions was Japan. Some Viennese Jews went to Shanghai.

      On November 7, 1938, a seventeen-year-old German Jewish refugee, Herschel Grynszpan, shot and killed a secretary of the German em­bassy in Paris. The news was screamed from the radio. “Those filthy Jewish swine will pay for this!” At dusk, there was a commotion in front of our gate. The sounds of the first broken glass drifted through the windows.[3] The doorbell rang as if someone were leaning against it. Up to ten young thugs with brown armbands and swastikas stormed into our house. They raced through the rooms shouting that they were searching for hidden weapons. My father followed them from room to room. He looked much like one of them. I stood in my crib and smiled at them. For a split moment they stopped. They finally turned and marched out. They had never even noticed that my father did not belong to their troop. He came inside again quietly.

      Shortly before the year was over, our affidavits arrived from Ameri­ca. My mother’s sister-in-law had succeeded in finding some people to vouch for us that we would not become a burden to the United States of America. One of the sponsors was a physician, who would only sponsor under the condition that he would never have to see us. The other was Tante Bertha, a long-lost relative of my mother’s brother-in-law.

      Now my parents could buy tickets for the S.S. Queen Mary to take us across the ocean. My mother visited her grandmother for the last time, but did not have the courage to tell her that we were about to leave.

      My mother dressed me in my new traveling outfit, a pink quilted coat and pink leggings. Tied to my blonde hair was a matching hat that tied beneath my chin. I gave my parents a big smile and settled into my daddy’s arms. Our train to Zurich left late. My mother no longer remembered how we got to the Westbahnhof.[4] A taxi? The trolley car? She didn’t know. The main thing was not to draw too much attention to ourselves. My parents did not talk about their fears. People had been turned back at the border, they knew. The train station was swarming with people. Our tickets were for a sleeping car. That was the very last of our money. One could not take any money out of the coun­try anyway. My mother put me to sleep while she and my father sat up and waited. In the morning, we arrived at the border. Nazi officials stepped into the compartment. “Your passports.” The voices were as cold as their faces. No human emotions showed in them. My father handed them the pass­ports. They took them and studied them for a long while. Then they disappeared with our passports. My parents sat frozen. This surely was the end. My parents thought we would be taken off the train. The official came back. He returned the passports and asked for our tax statement. My father handed it to him. It fluttered in the air. He studied it for a long while, then handed it back. He stretched out his hand, “Heil Hitler.”

      Slowly, the train started to move. My parents stared at each other unbelievingly. New officials came into our compartment. They spoke in a Swiss dialect and smiled at me as they inspected our passport. We were in Switzerland. My mother believed that the first thing she did when the train gathered speed was put on some lipstick. In Nazi Vienna, one did not dare to draw attention to oneself. My mother’s gray face looked back at her in the mirror. How was she going to feed me? Change me? She can’t remember. “We are safe!” she said to my father. “We really are safe!” He looked at her like a forlorn little boy, even though he was nine years older than she. “But how will we live? We have no money. We are going to America. What do I know about America? I don’t speak English” he asked my mother. “I don’t know,” she said, and a new heaviness started up inside my mother. “I just don’t know.”

      Desks with representatives of Jewish refugee organizations lined the train station in Zurich. “You people have any relatives here, any mon­ey?” My parents shook their heads. The lady at the desk inspected our passports. “I see you are going on to America,” she commented. Then she wrote something down on a piece of paper. “Here is a pass for a small rooming house,” she told us as she handed it to us. “You can stay there free of charge for three days. You will get your meals there also.” We were refugees; homeless, penniless, foreigners. The rooming house was clean and pleasant. We got a room with two beds and a crib. My parents phoned my grandparents in Nice. Collect, I believe. My grandfather did not have the fortune in foreign currency, which the Nazis thought he had, but he did have some money, and he wired us a little. When my parents tried to tell them about what was happening in Aus­tria, my grandparents were in disbelief. “How lucky you are that nothing happened to you.” “Yes,” my parents said, “we are lucky; very, very, lucky.”

      When we finally got on the train, it took us to Paris and from there, we went to Cherbourg to embark on the Queen Mary. On February 9, 1939, we arrived in New York. “Welcome!” said the customs official who inspected our passports with our immigration visas. “Glad to have you here, folks.” We ended up getting a small furnished apartment on upper Broadway. It was nothing extravagant; there were large water bugs in the kitchen and one time we saw a rat scurry into a wall. My father got a job working as a mechanic. He earned $15 each week.

      My father wanted to get a better job so my mother called one of the Jewish organizations to ask for help in finding him one. She was told that places like the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Bethlehem Steel were in desperate need of laborers. My mother left me with my aunt and went to Bethlehem Steel. There were so many people there and my mother was the only woman, but a nice man in line told her that North American Steel needed workers and would gladly take my father as an employee. She went off to North American Steel and met with the manager, Mr. Michaelman, to whom she explained the situation. Mr. Michaelman gave my father the job and said he would meet him at his house on Sunday.

      On Monday, my father started his new job. He worked many, many hours of overtime. But now he earned almost $100 a week.While the country went to war, my mother went to work. I was four-years-old and needed other children to play with. The Children’s Colony was a Montessori school run by an Austrian educa­tor for children whose emigre mothers worked. My mother registered me there and found a job selling cosmetics for Elizabeth Arden, at a store on Thirty-Fourth Street, called McCrory’s. Now she earned $15 a week.

      A letter from my grandparents had come. They had been transported from Nice to a detention camp in Gurs, in the Pyrenees. My neighbor asked her parents to issue an affidavit for my grandmother and grandfather. Somehow, even though it was wartime, through the help of Jewish organizations, my parents managed to bring my grandparents to America. My grandmother went to work sewing in a factory. My grandfather, quite old and ill with a heart condition, became a traveling salesman. My parents managed and the family agreed that Vienna was a place to which we would never return.

      And one day it was over. Hitler and the entire brown horror had been defeated, wiped out. My father started his own ironworks company with his brother. They worked day and night to make a go of it. We moved to a nice apartment in Forest Hills. My mother quit her job selling cosmetics and took courses at New York University. Her childhood dream was to write. Everyone learned what had happened in Europe while we had tried to build a new life in America. We learned about the gas ovens, the millions and millions who had been murdered. It was too horrible to believe. My grandmother found out through the Red Cross that her mother had died in Theresienstadt, the concentration camp for the old. She died of “pneumonia.”

            I went to Forest Hills High School and then on to Syracuse University. I met my late husband Allan during my senior year in high school. We got engaged during spring break in Syracuse and so I transferred back to NYC, Mills College of Education. I earned a degree in Early Childhood Education in 1959, two years after my marriage to Allan. I earned a Master’s Degree from Queens College in 1969 when my son Larry was 9 and my daughter Sheryl was 6. We lived in New York until 1978 when we moved to Tucson, Arizona. I have been in the teaching world for all those years and currently am an Adjunct Professor at Pima Community College, supervising student teachers. My husband Allan died in 2007, one week short of our 50th Anniversary. My son Larry and his wife Ellen have 4 daughters; triplets plus one. I have been very lucky to have them close all these years.

[1] This story is an excerpt from Stella K. Hershan’s book, A Memoir of Nazi Austria and the Jewish Refugee Experience in America. Ms. Grabell is her daughter.

[2] Anschluss is the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany on March 12, 1938.

[3] Kristallnacht, also referred to as the Night of Broken Glass, was a pogrom against Jews conducted on 9-10 November, 1938, throughout Germany.

[4] Westbahnhof is a major Austrian railway station.