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Ernest Weiss

Home » Survivors »Ernest Weiss

This is the story of 28 relatives who lived in Vienna before, during and after Germany's annexation of Austria. It describes our lives in Vienna; our escapes through seven European countries; who survived; and those that did not.

In 1938, when I was 7, my father, Robert Weiss, 36, owner of the Eldorado Shoe Company in Vienna was arrested and sent to the Dachau Concentration Camp. My mother, Hedy, 33, my brother Peter, three months, and I, continued living alone in our apartment in Hietzing, a glamorous suburb of Vienna. Soon after my father's arrest, my mother was apprehended and made to clean cobble stoned streets in Vienna with thousands of other Jews.

My paternal grandfather Marcus Weiss, 69, was a co-owner of the shoe business with my father. He was instrumental in getting Yugoslav passports for his three sons and one daughter (all married with children) for their successful escape from Vienna. With Yugoslav passports in hand, my mother traveled to Berlin's Gestapo Headquarters to get my father released. She was successful.

Grandfather Marcus and Grandmother Hermina Weiss, 66, left for Yugoslavia in June, 1938. They settled in Koprivnica, a peasant town in Croatia. In 1941 they were apprehended and sent to the Jasenovac Concentration camp in Croatia. They

were killed there. On June 3, 1938, after 4 months in Dachau, my father was transferred to Vienna's Gestapo headquarters and released. The 4 of us then joined my grandparents Weiss in Koprivnica. In 1941, after Germany invaded Yugoslavia, we left for Portugal, Cuba and in 1946 arrived in Miami.

Heinrich Hacker, 50, Grete, 40, my father's sister and cousin Gerti, 11, also escaped to Koprivnica. After moving to Zagreb in 1941, they were beheaded on a bridge in Zagreb, witnessed by my mother. Their son, Hans, 17, while still in Vienna in 1938, traveled to a small German town near the Swiss border. With his friend Karli Loewi, they swam the Rhine River to Switzerland. He eventually came to America.

Gustav Jellinek, 28, was mother's brother, escaped by train to Paris. He pretended to represent my father's shoe factory to collect large amounts of outstanding money there. After France and Great Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, he joined the French Foreign Legion. When he was discharged in 1941 in Morocco, he worked for the US Army and then enlisted in the British Army. The British trained him for the Intelligence Corps and sent him to Germany until the War's end.

Fritz Jellinek, my mother's other brother, 32, and his non-Jewish wife, Maedi, a nightclub dancer, experienced marital problem because Maedi decided not to continue being married to a Jew. They divorced; Uncle Fritz escaped to Great Britain where he joined the British Army until the War's end.

My mother's cousin Lisl Wertheim, 15, escaped from Vienna with 150 others on an excursion river barge that sailed the Danube to Sulina, a port in Bulgaria on the Black Sea. The trip took three weeks covering 1750 miles. From Sulina a freighter took them through the Bosporus Straights in Turkey to Haifa, Palestine. In Palestine she met up with her Vienna boyfriend Bruno Vogler, 15, and eventually married.

Heinrich, 41,and Gisela Wertheim, 29, Lisl's parents, after allowing Lisl to travel to Palestine, escaped Vienna to Genoa, Italy to board a ship for Shanghai. In 1948 they joined their daughter in Israel.

Anna Weininger, 50, my mother's aunt, watched her husband Pepi board a train to Poland to begin a new life. In Nisko, Poland, Nazi Storm troopers forced the men off the train and shot Pepi dead, along with hundreds of others. When Anna received the news of her Pepi's death, she became distraught but eventually escaped, by foot, to Zagreb in Yugoslavia.

In 1939, my family had moved to Zagreb. Aunt Anna moved in with us. She then joined General Tito's Partisans until the end of the War. She spent the rest of her life in a retirement home in Zagreb, sponsored by the Yugoslav government. Herta, 18, and Lilly, 19, Weininger, daughters of Anna and Pepi, escaped to London with Uncle Fritz. They remained there until the end of the war. Herta died in London of an illness. Lilly was married in London and after the war settled in Czechoslovakia.

My mother's parents, Grandfather Jakob, 71, and Grandmother Emma, 68, left Vienna for Zagreb in 1941 after my mother, with her Yugoslav passports, returned to Vienna to convince them to leave. They lived with us in Zagreb (and with Aunt Anna). After my family left Zagreb for Portugal, my grandparents were arrested. They were never heard of again.

Otto Weiss, 42, my father's brother, Frieda, 38 and cousin, Edith, 14, left for Koprivnica with their Yugoslav passports. They escaped to Italy, were imprisoned for three years and after the British liberated them, came to America.

My mother's cousin, Helli Krousky, 16, lived in Znaim, Czechoslovakia. Her father, Josef Lamp, 41, a veterinarian in Znaim, committed suicide by injecting himself with morphine the day after his second interrogation by the Gestapo. Helli and her grandmother Sarah (my grandmother Emma's sister), were transported to the Theresienstadt (Terezin) Ghetto. Grandmother Sarah died there from an illness. While in the Ghetto, Helli married Jiri Ganz. They were both sent to Auschwitz. Jiri was shot to death. Helli was sent to an ammunition factory and in 1945 was liberated by the Russian Army. She now lives in Prague.

Her brother Frantisek, 19, escaped to Palestine after the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia.

I now live in Martha's Vineyard.