Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Lucy Glaser Merritt - July 8, 1991

Um, we'll go back to this. Um, was your family religious?

No. My father was a little and he became acutely religious after he came over here. It, it suddenly blossomed in him. But my mother could care less. And, uh.

So he.

neither my brother nor I were religious. And her youngest brother used to say-he would fast-on Yom Kippur he would say that-he would fast when he had no food and he would put all his Yom Kippurs together. That uncle survived.

So would you call yourself an assimilated family?

Yes, yes we were.

And what did your father do?

He was a lawyer and worked in a bank.

Um, and your mother, did she.

And ??? was an MD, practicing MD.

So they must have had uh, non-Jewish clients, non-Jewish patients.

They had either/or, yes. My mother had and she never distinguished. And in fact that very thing probably saved my brother because the caretaker's son who was a big wig in the Nazi party had a heart attack, a seizure of some kind. And that was a month before the Anschluss. And my mother took care of him and he had no money and so she said well, that's okay. When they came to round up the people on the Kristallnacht they passed our door and I think that had to do with the guy downstairs, because they got everybody else that night.

Before we get to the Kristallnacht, as a family did you observe any of the Holidays?

Yes, we uh, uh, Pesach, Passover we observed. And my father fasted on, on Yom Kippur.

Did you attend synagogue?

Pardon?

Did you attend the synagogue as well?

No.

Not on Holidays either.

He did. Yeah, I think he did on Yom Kippur. Believe he went, I'm not sure. When we were in school we had to go. That was-we, we were obliged to go with the rabbi whenever he asked us to. But we didn't regularly, no.