Alice “Litzie” Trustin Shoah Foundation Testimony Transcription (Part 1)

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February 16th, 1996. Interview with survivor, Alice Litzie Trustin. My name is Ben Nachman, N A C H M A N. Interview being conducted in Omaha, Nebraska, language, English.

Can you give me your name please?

Alice Trustin.

Have you always been known as Alice?

No, no. I've always been known as Litzie, which is really a normal derivative in Vienna of the name, Alice, which there is pronounced Elise.

And when were you born?

September 15th, 1926.

And your age today?

69.

And can you tell me the city and country in which you were born?

I was born in Vienna,V I E N N A, Austria.

Can you tell me something about your growing up years in Vienna?

Well, as I think all Jews in Vienna at the time thought they were very, very devoted Austrians and completely immersed in the life there and very comfortable. I was a quite a small minority in the class at school as far as Jewish children were concerned, but was very, very good friends with everyone. And everyone was delightful. I mean, I never felt any reason to be uncomfortable. And we had friends, Jewish friends, non-Jewish friends. Participated, I know my parents participated in all kinds of things and I was just, you know, going to school. But the shock that came on that, it was a Friday evening and we were at dinner when Hitler walked in in the spring of' 38. It was like you, even my sister and I, and I really didn't understand enough about it at first. You almost choked on everything that you were having right then and there because it obviously was a horrendous thing. There was no, not one shot was fired when the Germans crossed the border into Austria. There was no objection by anyone for this takeover. And immediately, the city changed. There were friends of my parents, non-Jewish friends, who all of a sudden became known to us as illegal Nazis. They had been illegal Nazis for, I don't know how long. And it seemed absolutely impossible that this could be true that these people could be this way. And I suppose it's what, we all tend to do this. Nobody wants to believe that these things can happen. My father was absolutely couldn't believe it. He kept saying, this is gonna blow over. Don't worry about it. It's ridiculous. People are not like that. But unfortunately, very quickly, things changed very fast. I went to school, so did my sister, for a while. And then one day, we were told to leave school early and there, as we came out of school, there were two rows, one on each side, of parents, and outside that, were, I don't know, I don't remember, it was very scary. It was full of HJ which was the name of the youth Nazi group. These were kids our age-

How do you spell that?

in uniforms. You know, I don't even know how you spelled it. It's really short for two names, I think, but nobody ever called it anything else. It was HJ. And they came to beat up the Jewish kids. And somehow, my mother had gotten, somebody had called my mother. Somehow she knew, and she got a lot of parents together, Jewish and non-Jewish at that time. And they came and that's how we were able to leave school and go home because we all, you know, schools were quite close to it was not like going to private schools. This was public schools. And after that of course, there was no more school because nobody wanted to go to school and have this happen again.

Prior to this happening, how was your relationships at school?

Wonderful, great. In fact, there were now for the most part, of course, these children were all Catholic. We had one evangelical Christian in the class who was the one that was picked on all the time. They didn't pick on the Jewish children. I don't know why. And this is probably why we felt so secure. And I used to feel so sorry for that girl. In Northern Germany, there are a lot of evangelicals, but in Southern Germany and in Austria, they were practically unknown and obviously ostracized, which was awful. But until all this happened, really our relationships with the children in school was great. And even after Hitler and after I stopped going to school, there were a couple of the girls in my class who would come and visit me and bring me little things which was very sweet and very thoughtful. And this is what made it so difficult to accept that up to one day, you were a part of everything that was going on and with that one event, it was entirely different. And you were a non-entity. You were not an Austrian citizen. You were not allowed to participate in anything community-wise.

Did any of this affect your father's work?

Oh, yes. My father had a men's clothing factory with two other partners. And I don't remember how long after the Anschluss, which was the beginning of the change in Austria that happened, but it didn't take very long. And they had a manager. The manager was put in charge of the whole operation. The partners were out of it entirely. The bank accounts were closed. You couldn't go and draw a check. Fortunately, this manager for a while, and I know he would've done it much longer had he been able to, but the Nazis were watching him. It was a whole total matter of who was watching who and how much fear there was involved. And it was terrible. And for a while, he was able to bring some money to us, but that didn't last very long either because obviously, he was afraid of being caught. And you could understand that. And things became pretty desperate, pretty quickly. And the family, we were such devoted Austrians, every one of us. My father had been born in Hungary but it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And my mother's family had originally come from Germany a couple of generations before. And all of them considered themselves very, very devoted, complete Austrian who happened to be Jewish. So we had no relatives anywhere with whom to get in contact. And yet, we knew somebody is gonna have to do something if anybody is getting out of there. One thing the dear old Austrian government also of course never wants to admit to, but I remember very well, I think it was on every Friday afternoon on every corner in the city, you could buy a newspaper called Der Stürmer, and that's spelled S T U R M E R. And it had little umlaut on the U, which was all pictures and articles that were 100% antisemitic with horrible pictures. And there is no way anyone can tell me that nobody in Vienna knew what was going on, where people were being sent to, what they were doing to them. This was propaganda that they published every single week. It was complete hate writing.

Do you recall who published this paper?

No, I don't know. I don't know. But it was certainly available every week on every corner. And then, of course, they started all these horrible things where the Austrians were just as organized as the Germans in keeping records of everything. And since I didn't realize this until I saw the copies of my report cards from Vienna. On every report card, it not only gave your name, address, et cetera, it also gave your religion. So in their records in the city, they had all the addresses and names with religious affiliation. So they knew immediately where a Jew lived and where he didn't. And they would come, this was the beginning of it, on Sunday mornings. They would have, I don't know who did it, but they obviously were delegated it to do this. They would paint huge swastikas in indelible paint on street corners. And then they would knock on Jewish homes' doors, get the men, and no matter what age, what condition, and drag 'em out to these corners and make them scrub with buckets and scrub brushes. And this was the Sunday morning entertainment. And of course, you couldn't erase those things 'cause it was indelible paint. And I would stand at the window in our apartment and I would watch them dragging these people. I couldn't see the street corner but I know that this is what happened. And it was so cruel and it was so mean and the Austrians loved every minute of it, loved every minute of it. It really irks me so that to this day, the Austrian government still has not admitted that they were as much at fault of creating the horrors for the Jews as the Germans were. In fact, it was really in Austria that it picked up speed. And they came up with these creative ways of humiliation and hardship and misery for the Jewish population, which then, went back to Germany and of course, was taken up there with glee too. The worst thing of it was that you woke up every morning and you were very afraid because you never knew what on earth was going to happen. You didn't know if they were gonna come and get you or your parents or your other members in your family. And I guess I should say we were very lucky because, in our family, we lasted for quite a long time except for one uncle who was unfortunately picked off the street one day. And the family got notification that he was in Buchenwald. And he unfortunately, or fortunately really, he didn't last very long. And the family, this was my father's sister and her family, wanted to leave and had no idea how to do it. And of course, there developed a black market. And at that time apparently, you could buy permits to go to Shanghai, and believe me, if you lived in Vienna or anywhere else for that matter probably in Europe in those days, and you thought of going to Shanghai, that was probably worse than anything else you could think of because whoever thought of going to China. And anyway, they did manage to pool their resources and they started on the road to Shanghai by boat.

Were these the parents of this cousin that was taken away, or was this an uncle?

This was the mother and the sons of the father who was taken away.

What was his name, do you remember?

His name was Yosef Goldberger, and his mother was Tanta Etilka, and the boys were Rudy and Walter. Rudy is now living in Vienna and Walter is in Miami with their families, but they ended up in Siberia where the Russians took them, and they were not mistreated. They just, you know, were worked like animals but so was everybody else. Not because they were Jewish, it's just because they were in Siberia and they were cheap labor. And that's what they were used for. But eventually, my mother realized something had to happen. And she had been a nurse in World War I, and the Germans and the Austrians recognized that someone who had served in the military or as a nurse, which was part of serving for the military, was able to try and apply for a job outside the country.

Had your mother worked as a nurse in Vienna up to this time?

Well, she was actually at a field hospital in Trieste, which at that time was Austria, which is now Italy.

This was during the war?

This was during the World War I.

After World War I, did she work as a nurse?

No, no.

She didn't.

But it was a fact that during the war she had served for, I don't know, I have no idea how long, but for whatever time it was, that allowed her, that made it possible for her to apply for a nurse's job in England. And England at that time made it possible for people to apply. So my mother applied and she was granted a permit to come to England as a nurse. And of course, my mother was only 42, you know, I'm 69 now, when I think of when I was 42, if such a disaster had happened, it's unthinkable, it's unthinkable what she went through. And I remember there was this family get together. And my mother said to the rest of the family, now I'm gonna have to go and leave Berthold, my father, and the children and all of you, because if I don't go, nobody is gonna get out of here. And she was absolutely right. And the family didn't want her to go. They were dead against it, but she did. And it was, she was the only one that was the cause for my sister and I, for one of her sisters, and two of my father's sisters to get out of Vienna. And they were the only ones who made it out alive.

Can you tell me something about your extended family in Vienna during these years prior to the war?

All right.

When the Germans first came in.

All right. My mother had, I remember my grandmother very well. My grandmother was alive and my mother had two sisters and one brother. The youngest sister was the one my mother was able to get out to England. The other sister, Tanta Greta, and her husband ended up in Theresienstadt. And that was, they never came out of it. Her brother, Fritz, and his wife, Lily, they were taken and nobody ever knew where they went. We just never heard a thing. This happened after I was already in England, but there were letters. I don't know how the system worked. You couldn't send this information through the normal channels, but people would smuggle letters to Hungary or to I don't know what other countries, because Hungary was one of the few countries that wasn't at that point taken over by Germany. And they would mail letters on to people in England or probably the states or anywhere else. And this is how we found out what happened to the family at certain points because my father wasn't taken until January 1941. And he was sent to, the German name is Litzmannstadt. The Polish name is Lodz, which was the ghetto in Poland. And we never heard anything more from anyone about that.

What were the circumstances of your father being picked up?

Well, that was the very, he was one of the very last Jews in Vienna to be taken. They had it down to such a system. They had their lists. They could tell exactly what Jews had been already sent to concentration camps, what Jews had left, and who was still in the city. My father had meanwhile moved into a very small apartment on the top floor in the same apartment building, hoping that nobody would notice him there, but of course, everything is down in black and white and very organized. And he was in that last group that was sent outta the city.

Do you remember when they came to take your father?

Well, I wasn't there. You see, I left in '39 and my father wasn't taken out of Vienna until 1940, January 1941.

Was he living by himself at that time?

Yes. Yes. And on my father's side of the family, fortunately, which I had mentioned the one aunt, my father's sister, Etilka, and her two sons and the wife of the older one had gone and ended up in Riga. And then in Siberia. But the other sisters, the youngest sister, my mother was able to get to England and the next youngest sister, she was also able to get out of there. The one sister and her husband, Tanta Greta, and another Uncle Fritz, which was a very common name in Vienna, had gone to Israel in the thirties. He was an engineer and they lived in Haifa, but the next to oldest sister, Tanta Eran was married to an un-Jew. They never had any children, but when this Hitler thing kept going on, her husband who at the time of course was probably in his middle forties. And she knew he was gonna be called up into. He was not Jewish. He was be called up into the army. She hid him in the coal cellar in her apartment building. They lived in another district in Vienna. And I don't think anybody ever knew that she was, obviously, they couldn't have known that she was Jewish because they never even tried to reach her for that reason. But she had her husband hidden in the coal cellar and took care of him throughout the war.

This was so that he avoided going into the army?

This is so he wouldn't have to go into the army. And she was the only one left in Vienna. [clears throat] And I had one cousin who was at the university at the time in Vienna when Hitler walked in and he was a very well-known communist. And the moment the Germans walked in, the first thing they did was go after the communists before they even got their things organized about the Jews. And he literally was hunted down and he could not stay in his own home. And he would have to change his living, his night time arrangements every night. He stayed with us sometimes and other members of the family. And he shortly, probably five, six months after Hitler came, he fled illegally to Belgium. His name was Hans Luvid. And his girlfriend who had also been at the university there, followed him. And they were married in Belgium. And in due time, had a son who was named after his grandfather, Otto. And the Germans when they got into Belgium, found him and he was sent to the Pyrenees, a slave laborer. He escaped there and came back to Belgium somehow. But unfortunately, they got him again and that was the end. But an interesting part of that story, the little boy was given by his mother to a family, a farming family in Belgium, and she joined the underground and stayed in the underground till after the war. And when she tried to reclaim the child, they didn't want her to have it, but she went to the courts and she was given the child and they now live in Israel. And we hope to go next year as a matter of fact, and I will look forward to seeing him and his family.

Have you been in correspondence with them over the years?

Not with him, not with him. I have kept in touch with everyone else but I never knew him, but I hear about him from my other cousins who have seen him in Israel, who have gone there several times, the one who lives in Vienna and the one who lives in Miami. So I'm sure I will have a way of getting in touch with him.