When I was a child, I used to visit my Viennese grandmother in the rent-controlled apartment on New York’s Upper West Side that she had been living in for nearly 50 years. I remember the intoxicating smells of sizzling schnitzel and her warm greeting in a thick Austrian accent.
My grandmother escaped the Nazi takeover of Vienna in 1938 underneath a sack of potatoes in the back of a truck. She managed to reach the UK, and later New York, where she joined a community of Austrian and German Jewish refugees.
She never taught her children German and refused to ever set foot on European soil again. She was incapable of watching films on the Holocaust, and never spoke about it with me.
