I was born in Vienna, where my parents lived a very lovely life and were very happy in Vienna.

My father was in business with his brothers and his father in a construction business.

My mother was very young when she met him, went to school with everybody.

But they lived a very nice life and they really loved Vienna.

They loved the music, they loved the culture, they loved the food, they loved the five o'clock teas.

They had many friends, they lived comfortably, and that all ended very suddenly.

My parents names were Stella and Rudy Hershan.

They married in 1933 in Vienna.

It was the year that Hitler became chancellor of Germany.

Hitler arrived on the scene and people were happy to embrace him.

They [my parents] thought, nothing's going to come of this and it's going to be all fine.

And suddenly they got inklings that maybe things are not going to be so fine.

One day my father was driving down the street.

He looked very Aryan, so he was not in as much danger as many.

But they stopped him and they said, you're Jewish?

Get out of the car.

And they took it.

And that was the end of the car.

They came to his business and said, get out.

And they took over the business.

Up until then, my parents were well-off.

We had a maid and also a nurse who looked after me.

My mother told me the nurse was ecstatic that Hitler had arrived in Austria.

She quit immediately.

The Nazis had a list of everyone who was Jewish.

They would pull Jews out of their homes and force them to wash the Austrian campaign slogans off the streets.

They knocked on my parents' door.

My mother answered with me in her hands nine-month-old, and said, come, you have to come scrub the streets outside.

And they were young Nazis.

And my mother looked at them and said, can't you see I'm busy?

I'm taking care of my little girl.

And they left.

She was very lucky.

They could have shot her then and there, but she was not frightened and she told them she couldn't and she didn't.

My grandparents, my grandfather was very smart.

He was a wealthy man, successful.

And he said, you know, I'm not happy with what I'm hearing.

I'm leaving.

I'm going to France, he and his wife, if things calm down I'll come back, if not, I'm not coming back.

And my parents stayed.

My father ran into a friend who was on line to get a visa.

My father said, oh, maybe I'll go with you.

It was all very casual and very not so scary at first.

Since the business was taken from him, my father had no income, so we moved into my grandparents house.

They had already fled to France.

Almost every day, SS officers came into the house.

They demanded to know where my grandfather was and when he was coming back.

My mother would tell them, my father is old and sick.

He'll come back when he feels better.

And then little things.

One after the other.

So they started putting together their possessions, whatever they could, getting papers, legal or not so legal.

And then when they got them, they found they weren't good enough.

They had to have a J stamped on them.

So they had to go through that whole process all over again.

They had my mother had a grandmother there that they said, well, they can't take her.

She's past 80, my age now, and they left her and she ended up in Theresienstadt and died there.

In November of 1938, I was a year old.

There was Kristallnacht.

Mobs of Austrians destroyed Jewish businesses and homes.

My mother remembered it well.

Around sunset, there was a commotion in front of the gate.

Sounds of glass being shattered.

Ten young men wearing those brown armbands with swastikas stormed into the house.

They raced through the rooms, shouting that they were looking for hidden weapons.

My father could pass as a gentile.

His blue eyes were a good clue.

He followed them from room to room and pretended he was one of them.

He told me that when they came into my room, I stood up in the crib and smiled at them.

That made them stop for a moment.

They finally left.

We were lucky that none of us were hurt.

The story of how we finally left Austria is one that I heard many times.

We went to the West Bahnhof, the main train station in Vienna.

My father had taken the last of our money to get a sleep car.

They stayed up all night.

I'm sure they were terrified that something would happen and we wouldn't be able to get out.

Finally, the train arrived at the border in Switzerland.

It stopped.

But it was the Austrian side.

Nazi officers came into the car and demanded to see our passports.

So they took them and they left the car.

Then they demanded to see the tax statement.

But my father had it.

Finally, they handed it back.

Gave a salute and said Heil Hitler.

And left.

Slowly, the train started to move.

My parents stared at each other in disbelief that we made it safely out of Austria.

The train stopped again, but this time it was on the Swiss side of the border.

Now, other officials came into the compartment.

My mother remembers that they too smiled at me when they checked the papers.

The train took us to Zurich.

We arrived as refugees with no money, nowhere to go.

But representatives from Jewish relief organizations were at the station, and they arranged for us to stay at a rooming house where we could get our meals and didn't have to pay.

They were able to phone my grandfather, who was in Nice, and was able to wire my parents a little money.

My grandparents could hardly believe that we got out of Austria safely.

They had been hearing horror stories and were scared to death that we'd be killed.

They went first to France, to Nice and visited with my grandparents, got some money from them, and then took the Queen Mary from there.

The parents followed soon thereafter.

And my grandfather, who was a very successful man in Vienna went with a suitcase with some socks and undershirts and tried to sell it.

Popping nitroglycerin all the time and never complained.

Never complained, lived in a small apartment in New York and survived it all.

But I grew up not knowing quite where I belonged.

My parents were very pro-America.

America's wonderful.

America let them in.

America was kind to them.

But my mother would still say, tu bis noch ein Wiener kind.

You're still a Viennese child.

I grew up with the Viennese food and the Viennese culture, and I never quite knew.

Do I belong here?

Do I belong there?

Until well in my adulthood.

I realized I belong to both.

The first time my mother and I went back to Vienna, it was it was a horrifying trip.

She really couldn't stand it.

She loved it.

And she didn't want to not love it.

And it was very hard to be there and not show that she still loved it.

But she but there was a lot of anger.

And even my son was invited back as the grandson of a survivor and lived with a Viennese family for about a month maybe?

They were not Jewish.

They treated him like their own son.

He's still in touch with the children of those people.

And they wanted, I think, what the purpose was to show the grandchildren that they weren't all Nazis and they all were nice people and they were nice people.

They really were.

But I remember the first time when we went, we were in a horse and buggy.

My mother sitting up front with the horse and buggy driver and of course speaking German in her Viennese accent and she said to him, so tell me, how is it really now?

Have things changed?

And he said, well, yeah, they've changed.

Now you can't say that Hitler should have killed them all.

So you knew.

I mean, we wanted to jump out of the horse and buggy.

You knew what he was thinking.

That feeling was still there.

My husband, we went with my children.

They were seven and ten at the time.

And my husband and he was an American born.

No idea, except from what he heard from us.

And he was terrified.

He was looking over his shoulder all the time.

He was so uncomfortable being there.

And my mother couldn't understand why I wasn't falling in love with the city that she loved so much.

Well, to me, it was an enemy city that threw us out, so I couldn't fall in love with it the way she felt.

And it was also they were thrown out because they were Jewish.

They were Viennese Jews whose allegiance was to Vienna, not to the religion.

It was not as important to them as the culture of Vienna, and they were thrown out for something that they didn't care as much about.

And it felt so unfair.

They never got over it.

They never got over it.

When we went back, we went to the house where where they lived and the people let them in, let us in to see and some of the furniture was still there.

It's just hard to imagine all of it, except now when you see it happening all over the world and people going through the same thing and you think, you know, once was enough.

Why would anybody do this again?

Don't they remember?

Don't they care?

And evidently they don't.

Judaism was never a very big part of my growing up.

And it definitely wasn't a part of my mother's growing up.

I think it was a little bit more in my father's growing up.

When we were in America I know for the high holidays we sometimes went to one or another of the relatives, but it was never a big deal.

We always knew we were Jewish.

It was never denied.

It was never not accepted.

But it wasn't a big part of our lives.

I remember my first boyfriend was had one Jewish parent, not two.

And my father said when the relationship was over, he said, you know, we prefer.

And I never knew that they would prefer.

I never knew it mattered.

But I did marry a Jewish boy and his family did care about the religion.

So my kids got a little bit more than I got.

My grandmother Lucy, after whom I was named, and my grandfather Felix had no feeling for religion at all.

He was totally agnostic.

She grew up in Czechoslovakia and went to a convent school because they spoke Czechoslovakian and so she never had any feeling for it either.

So I mean, where would I get it from, that strong feeling?

I just and even when I go to synagogue, I go because I think I'll find something that I'm looking for, but I don't.

I think my parents felt anger and focused on the anger instead of embracing the religion.

It just, it just didn't, it didn't play an important part in their lives.

My father was somewhat religious, but when this happened, he thought, if this could happen, there can't be a God.

So he gave up on God.

He found golf instead.

That was his solace.

they used to call survivors just people who had been in concentration camps.

Fortunately, we escaped that.

But they changed it somewhere along the way, and anybody that was there during that time and had to leave became a survivor.

And I guess I was a survivor, even though I was a year and a half and grew up here.

English was my first language.

But the culture doesn't leave you, and that feeling for Austria doesn't leave.

And the anger that my parents felt.

And the family stayed very close together because there was nobody else.

So the relatives spent all their time together.

It was an adjustment that never quite adjusted?

My mother became a writer here and loved New York and loved her life here.

But still, that Viennese sentiment and that Viennese love never left.

And I found with her she died at 99 and a half.

And I don't think for a day forgot what happened to her when she was so young.

And other relatives as well.

I mean, and then it translated into now what was happening here that they lived through it once.

They didn't want to live through it again.

They couldn't have stood what was going on here.

I always knew about the Holocaust.

I mean, those were stories that that was everyday conversation was something I always knew.

I never considered myself a survivor.

I considered myself the child of survivors.

But even then, survivors were people that were in concentration camps.

We were survivors, our lives were changed.

I think when it hit me the most was on a trip in California visiting a friend.

And there was an exhibit of Princess Diana's clothes on the Queen Mary.

It was in California.

And I was there and I said, I'd love to see it.

So we went.

And there was the Queen Mary.

That was the ship we came on.

And when I saw it, it hit me like like a ton of I can't even describe how it hit me.

I could just visualize my parents standing on that ship holding a year-old baby going to a country without money, without language, without knowing what they were going to, how they were going to survive.

And I first had a real picture of what that must have been for them.

It was horrific.

But they never let me feel that.

Every once in a while my mother would say, but I got you out.

I got you out.

They did at one time think of having me change my religion, changing my religion as a baby and having me survive that way.

And took me to a church and the priest said, we'd love to have that little soul.

And my mother couldn't do it.

So how all the parents did it that put children on trains and however they could get them out.

My mother's sister took her, she had an infant and walked out of Vienna and walked over the mountains with him, strapped to her and survived.

I had an interesting experience recently.

I went in for some body work and the person that was working on me could feel tension in my body.

And I really it was the election.

It was the thought that democracy could be lost, that I knew that emotionally it bothered me.

I mean, I don't want to live through this a second time.

But I didn't know that it would go through your body too and you react physically, not only mentally.

And I think it bothered me more than it bothered people that hadn't experienced or lived with the stories of the experience.

It just stays with you.

It's part of you.

Telling the story makes it all so more real.

I don't focus on it as much as my parents did.

And of course, now that my mother's gone, I don't hear the stories all the time.

But like this morning when I spoke to my mother's friend who lived through it in Paris, and then the stories are alive.

They're alive and they're still there.

And I guess they'll always be alive til we're gone.

But there can't be that many survivors left.

It's been a long time.

I really resist watching Holocaust movies.

Holocaust stories.

I just can't and things like even movies like The Producer, which everybody thought was hilarious.

Well, to me, Hitler isn't funny, and I don't see how you can make a comedy out of it.

So I resist all those things.

I don't want to remember.