Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

• Contents
• Map

Lucy Glaser Merritt - July 8, 1991

Do you remember at what point things started to change in school? You said you started to hear anti-Semitic talk and.

Well, they rearranged our school district. Um, it had been, I guess they felt too Jewish. So they rearranged it in some manner and mixed them more so we were more of a minority and they brought in some people from a different school and they were more pro-Nazi than the rest. And that was when I was in-I was fourteen. What year was that, '34, 1934.

So when Dollfuss came to power.

Yeah, Dollfuss came to power and Hitler was over there. And, of course, when Dollfuss was murdered and all this we were discussing that constantly in school.

Did your father think that Schuschnigg was any better than Dollfuss?

Yes. Schuschnigg had a lot of people were very. In fact, my brother and I went out to demonstrate for Schuschnigg the night-the few nights before the Anschluss and the Austrian police was chasing the demonstrator who was demonstrating for Schuschnigg and [laughs] one of them hit me on the back.

Tell me more about that.

It was a lot of uh, different groups were fighting actually. They-the Nazis were demonstrating and my brother and I and a number of other people of our acquaintance were demonstrating for Schuschnigg. And when we got together and it looked like it was going to be a free for all the police moved in and moved us out. So apparently their sympathies were clearly on the other side. Don't believe when they say that Austria was raped in '38.It was not.

You remember them that much?

I remember distinctly that they were dancing in the streets. I heard people talking, saying that the sun would rise, would shine, would come through if Hitler walked through Austria. The majority of them would have freely voted for him if they'd had a chance to freely vote. The vote actually of course was a yes or no. But the, the majority of them would have voted, the ones that I saw. And many of my classmates, some of whom do not remember this now. It was also interesting they avoided that discussion of anything. We talked of the years before the war and the years after the war. But not the Anschluss or anything like that, they did not now want to discuss.