02/14/2025 09:33:57 AMHannah Van Sickle

Prior to the German occupation of Vienna, Dr. Eric Ungar (b.1926) was aware of no threat to European Jews. In grade school, when some fellow students turned up in Hitler uniforms, it had little effect on him. At age 10, he enrolled in technical college (equivalent to American preparatory high school); after a year there, Jewish students were expelled and sent to an ordinary high school. A second dismissal, this time to a special Jewish school, led to a stark understanding among Ungar and his peers: “We slowly realized that a concentration of Jewish kids was not a good idea, so we stayed at home.” As the annexation of Austria loomed, Ungar’s father moved the family from their apartment in Leopoldstadt—a largely Jewish district—to the city center. One day, while Ungar was in the back room of his father’s store studying, a man came into the shop wearing a Nazi uniform; he demanded the store keys and money before declaring, I’m in charge now. In a moment, their livelihood was taken from them. When rationing began, extra provisions from the neighborhood butcher and dairy—given in secret to augment the significantly smaller rations allotted to Jews when compared with non-Jews—helped the family to survive what was becoming an untenable situation.

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