Recollections.

As a 12 year old child, in the year of 1940, just after having arrived in the US, Mary-Ann Reiss wrote down her recollections of the past two years, covering the events of March 1938 in Austria and her family's persecution and emigration. Many decades later, she found her writings again in form of a little notebook, written with pencil and fading away. This memoir then is cleared from some mistakes and in her current handwriting. It starts with her 10th birthday, which was only a few days before the Anschluss.digitizedMary-Ann Reiss was born Marianne Loewy on March 9th, 1928, in Vienna. She lived with her parents in Baden near Vienna in Lower Austria. She attended school in Baden but upon Anschluss she was immediately thrown out. In October 1938 she was sent to Vienna to a boarding school where she was with girls from two to 19 years of age, all being in similar situations. As of February 1939, the Loewys still had not obtained a visa and the situation became worse every day. The only chance was to emigrate illegally. Mary-Ann and her parents left Vienna in February of 1939 and entered Belgium with false papers. They boarded a ship in St. Nazaire, France on March 28th 1940 and arrived in New York in April 1940. Mary-Ann Reiss holds degrees from the Temple University, the Villanova University and the University of PA. She was a high school teacher for seven years and a professor at the Westchester University in Westchester, PA, for 25 years. She and her husband Kurt Werner Reiss had three children.Austrian Heritage Collectio