AHC interview with Helene Lilly Brenner.

January 14, 2008Helene Lilly Brenner, née Kurlandski was born on April 28, 1919 in Vienna, Austria, where she grew up in the 20th district. She had due endure anti-Semitism from childhood on. After the Anschluss her fathers business was looted by a former employee, and she was forced to scrub a street in Vienna. Helene Kurlandski managed to escape to Switzerland, but the Swiss Police arrested her in Basel and deported her to Nazi-Germany. Back in Vienna she escaped to Palestine in 1939, going by boat on the Danube to the Black Sea and then with a freight ship to Haifa. Her parents perished in the Holocaust. In 1952 she moved to the United States, settling eventually in San Francisco, CA.Austrian Heritage CollectionThe interview was made possible through a grant of the National Fund of the Republic of Austri