03:03

Ruth Deutschmann

Benjamin Epp

Innsbruck

2008-08-21

... Mother - wrote till she bled. She desperately wanted to leave, for America, and so she asked her fiancé - she was engaged once - asked him for an affidavit. I don’t know, if he did it or not. In any case it was very difficult to get a guarantee. You have to pledge for someone. - He even did it, I can’t remember exactly. In any case Mother wrote a lot, I know that. So he ... and Ilse - received an affidavit. There was also ... a writer, a very famous one, a Jew. - She wrote a book. ... She wrote: „Menschen im Hotel“. It was Vicki Baum! She seems to be related to us somehow. - her husband, he was with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, He ... was with the Philharmonic Orchestra. There .... was someone somehow, the wife or someone was a 'Brüll' I think he was a Brüll. .. Maybe that’s how they got the affidavit. - We couldn’t have left anyway, because we hadn’t yet reached the quota But when Ilse and I left, they had - they reached the quota later. And then they said, we should go to the Netherlands first. Everyone said Holland, it was Brabant, like a province. We’d go to the Netherlands, there our parents would pick us up. That was the plan. infortunately my father died in Vienna on the 15th of December 1941. - Father wasn’t healthy, it had something to do with his liver, unfortunately he died, so that didn’t happen. But mother would even have gone alone, she wouldn’t have cared, she didn’t want to stay. And then ... they took us ... - as my father was still alive then, ... I remember it well -, took us to the train station. Through the Quakers we got there, that’s some kind of sect. They did a lot, the Quakers. Thanks to them we got there.