Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Lucy Glaser Merritt - July 8, 1991

I'd like to come back to Dollfuss in a little. But you, you said you had some religious training.

Oh we all had to you know, school, twelve years obit. Twice a week.

So when a priest would, the priest would come into your class.

No, the priest would teach the Catholics. The rabbi would teach the Jews. And the Protestant would go to another school because there weren't enough.

So did you leave the room at that time?

We went to different rooms, but we heard what he said from the other kids.

Um, how many other Jewish children were in your class?

There were twelve, twelve or thirteen.

Of. How large was the class altogether?

Oh, our class was about forty, thirty-two of whom graduated. And we had a reunion in, in, our fiftieth high school reunion and there wasn't a single Jewish student who died in a camp, not one in our class, which is a miracle because we graduated in 1937, just before the Anschluss.

Did the whole class survive?

There were two who were executed as um, some political activity, but they were not Jewish. Everyone else.

All the Jews survived.

All the Jews survived. Well, two died of natural causes just before that, but, just before we, we had our reunion. But every one of them survived.

Survived the war.

Yeah. Not their parents. Just the students themselves, because very often they sent the boys away, thinking that Hitler was going to take the boys. And then the parents were going to stay and then the parents died. That happened to several classmates. One living in New York that happened to.