Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Lucy Glaser Merritt - July 8, 1991

Um, when the Germans marched in um, after the Anschluss because this was the Austrians, they, um.

Will this mar your table?

No, don't worry. They did terribly degrading things to Jews.

Yeah, you, you had to wash the sidewalk.

Did you or your family ever experience any of that?

No, for some reason they never picked on me. I, I guess I was not fashionable enough. They picked on the people, you know everyone has their ideas of what a Jew should look like and they thought they would be very fashionably dressed and I was not. So they never stopped me. But they-I, I saw them stop people and uh, scrub, make 'em scrub the sidewalk and uh, that contained very strong soap because it seemed to ??? on their hand very quickly. And I saw them attack a man for no reason at all. He was just walking there and they had these troops. Now I know what they were, the Einsatzgruppen. And they would step in front of you and then you couldn't help but touch 'em. And then they say oh, you bothered them. And so they attacked this man. And someone attacked my mother. My mother was so little I couldn't believe anyone would do that. She was only four foot, eleven. He hit her on the head with aboard. But then he let her go so she came home. And my father was arrested of course on the Kristal...Kristallnacht. Because he was out trying to buy a paper and they nabbed him there. But my brother had not run into anything and I hadn't. It was lucky.

And you observed all this?

Yes.

What, seventeen-year-old, six...seventeen year old?

I was uh, I was eighteen, I just turned eighteen.

So what ran through your mind during all this?

Well I was very confused. I couldn't believe that people would do that. And I had thought these people were my friends. Well, some of them were. And it was confusing and frightening and... Mainly a feeling was one of being scared. I remember one, waking up at night and they were singing this, uh. [singing in German]

Yeah.

Uh, you ??? wait for the night of long knives. And it occurred to me that they might actually mean that. I, until this time I didn't believe it, that they would actually go kill people, but then it occurred to me that's exactly what they were going to do. That obviously that was our prospect, so you better do-try and get out if you can. And if not that look at just the alternative.