Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Lucy Glaser Merritt - July 8, 1991

When you think back on this, is there any, are there any memories that stand out more than others? Things that maybe you.

About the Anschluss or about.

About the whole period. Your experience staring uh, starting.

Well, the worst thing I ever saw was somebody beating a little boy who was bleeding and bleeding a blind man. It was a blind man with a beard you know, payes and everything, and the caftan, and so clearly a, a Eastern Jew and some kids who were hitting and kicking a little boy. And the worst of it was I was afraid. I could have helped him and I was so paralyzed with fear and I just stood there and watched it. And this wasn't an SS-man. It was not somebody big against whom I couldn't fight. But by then you had become so immobilized. I just stood there and watched them plague the poor little kid.

This was after the Kristallnacht?

Pardon?

After the Anschluss?

Yeah. Oh yeah, they wouldn't have done that before the Anschluss. I never saw any uh, act of hostility before that. My parents did run into something in '34. We had always gone to stay with farmers in the summer for a couple weeks for vacation. And in '34 he wrote us and said that uh, the neighbors were getting after him, that he is being taking in Jews. And so he didn't want to take in the family. And so you see that they were already responding to what was practiced in Germany. Now that was voluntary on his part. And we had come there for many years and they knew us well. So we went someplace else. Another part of Austria. But that was the only thing I remember that came up before that.

What when you. On a normal day, are there any things that maybe touch off an association to something that happened in that...

No.

five to ten year period?

In the period before the Anschluss, no. We were always engaged in many hypothetical arguments about uh, the importance of ???and ??? or whatever they were thinking at that time. But uh, it didn't stop us from going out on a hike together, for instance. I have many pictures and I see some of them where the people, especially one of them, was very a...active in the movement, the Nazi movement. But we always went out together as a group and it... It didn't seem to bother him at that time. And now he doesn't recall anything ever having been anything but a very good friend. [laughs]