An unpublished memoir

“On March 11 1938, a Friday, everything changed and would never be the same again,” my 95-year-old grandmother Erika Renate Przibram wrote in her unpublished memoir, which she only gave to us two years ago. “That evening we gathered around the radio to hear Chancellor Schuschnigg announce his resignation. All day we heard planes overhead. My brother saw a fight at university between the anti-Nazi and pro-Nazi students. It was obvious to my parents that Heini, my brother, would get into trouble. My memories of our last weeks in Vienna are rather hazy. For many years I did not speak about them and no one asked. There must have been many visits to offices, taking passport photos and saying goodbye to our small group of loyal friends. The passport photos of Papa and me show how strained we looked.”

After seeing the synagogue burned down in November 1938, things worsened: “Mama and I were to leave on April 17 1939. I was very sad to leave Dicky [my dachshund] because I knew I would not see him again, and of course Amama, who was in her 80th year. Rosa [the cook] too came to say goodbye. I can remember the feeling of anticipation, sadness and excitement. At Rotterdam Mama asked me to get her a glass of water. I asked someone in my hesitant English: ‘May I have a glass of water for my mother?’ I think, if it is not too dramatic, that was the moment I ceased being a child.”

My grandmother and her parents survived; most of the rest of the family were claimed by the concentration camps at Dachau and Theresienstadt. But Vienna still bears witness to my long-gone family, as I recently found.