Then and Now: Discovering My Viennese Family

Do you think you know all the members of your family? After returning from an August 2010 trip to Vienna, I discovered 102 letters from my grandmother and other relatives to my mother, who had left Vienna for England in September 1938. Instead of the 900 miles between Vienna and London and then the 4,200 miles between Vienna and New York City, imagine the letters as a conversation between family sitting around the kitchen table and chatting about daily or weekly events.

From these letters, I discovered names of family members and family friends who were completely unknown to me. This was not a total shock, since my mother hardly ever spoke about her life in Vienna, the Nazi occupation after the Anschluss, and any relatives and friends who were victims of the Holocaust, including her mother, my grandmother.

On May 18, 2014, I dedicated a Stone of Remembrance in Vienna, memorializing my grandmother. A chance meeting during that day led me to find and meet the last member of my family who had lived through the Holocaust, my Israeli cousin Shaul. He had survived the camps and a death march and, just a month before we met in person, was totally unaware that any member of his Viennese family was still alive.

Firsthand accounts of the Holocaust are becoming fewer each day. As a child of survivors and the grandson of a Holocaust victim, my hope is that THEN and NOW will shed some light on the lives of the Jews of Vienna and on my Viennese relatives so that future generations of my family, and other readers, can get some understanding of what life was like in the struggle to survive under Nazi occupation.