Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Lucy Glaser Merritt - July 8, 1991

Um, it seems to me that things that one should ask about, about Vienna. Did you, did you keep hearing about Sigmund Freud?

My mother was his student. She was uh, one of his students. I mean, he was just starting out then. She graduated in 1915. And Freud was just beginning so she took that as part of a course you know, just something to enrich her curriculum. So she knew him personally, as a teacher.Yeah. So we heard about him. And she felt he had some good points.

And Josef Breuer, did she.

He was a ??? I don't know who that was.

Well, Freud's colleague for awhile.

Oh yeah.

She may have even studied with him.

Yeah. Well, she was active in, in the medical group, so she probably knew many of 'em. And also they had a custom there that each doctor had to serve free time for prostitutes. They had health cards; they had to get health cards. So one of things that she did was work with them and she always felt that they were victimized by society. She did not. So I didn't grow up thinking of them as, as evil women like many of us did. I grew of thinking of them with sympathy, that they were put into a ba...bad spot in their life.

Was the city in Vienna.

Yeah.

in the war Europe.

Yeah.

How about other sort of famous Jewish cultural figures. Schnitzler? Arthur Schnitzler?

Well, we heard of him but we had no contact with him. We read his works. Of course we had that stuff at home. We had a lot of books at home for us to read.

Was the family multi-lingual?

Uh, no.

The children

Well, my father spoke Czech as well as German because he was born in Prague and that-although he went to the Germany University in Prague and my grandmother wrote in gothic script. But they-that was-they were truly Germanized. But he also knew Czech because they-that was a Czech population and of course later it became Czechoslovakia. Now my mother spoke Polish and Yiddish. My father considered Yiddish a lower form of life so then they never.

So your mother's family was from Poland then?

Well, she was from that part of Poland which had been Austria when my parents.

Galicia?

Galicia, yeah. She was born in ??? Lemberg. And they both came to Vienna to study and that's where they met, University of Vienna. So she spoke Polish as well.