Source : Yad Vashem Archive O3/7279 [Josef Schachter was born in Vienna in 1931. His parents were Orthodox Jews who had come to Vienna from Galicia in 1924.]
I can't forget the day the Nazis were marching in. They paraded right near our home. My brother who was seven years older than me, took me to the parade. They passed out little swastika flags and one was given to me. And he said to waive it. He warned me not to show any signs of being Jewish. Just waive it and look happy. I was sitting on his shoulders so I could see, and I was waving the little Nazi flag as the soldiers went by. This is one of the crazy memories I have. I had just been seven. Several days later we were all called by name in school, told to stand up, take our things and leave. The reason was Jews were no longer permitted to go to school…. Things at this particular point became very upsetting in the home as well because we could sense that there was something going on. I didn't understand until later that the commission that had been set up in Austria to confiscate Jewish wealth and Jewish businesses had begun to operate. First my father and mother had to make all kinds of papers, do all kinds of paperwork indicating what they owned and then, bit by bit, they had to turn it in. Bank accounts were frozen. The store was as it were sold. Officially it was sold. They had to sign the papers and as a result, the store was no longer ours. The amount of money that was paid for it was meaningless, and my father began to make all kinds of attempts to try and figure out how to leave Vienna. There were all kinds of rumours floating that the Siamese, at that time Thailand, Siam, was giving visas. And so outside of the Siamese consulate there were thousands of people waiting in line. And then there were stories that you could go to South America, to Argentina, and so the Argentine Consulate was besieged by Jews looking for papers, looking for ways to get out. The worst aspect of the whole process was that they suddenly became what is called stateless. They had lost their citizenship. They had lost their civil rights. It was a simple act of legality, and from this point on, you were no longer Austrians either. Here we are trying to figure out – no business, no income – how do you manage? At this stage, there is a mass roundup at night. At two o'clock in the morning, banging on the door. We wake and the thing I remember is a boot, a black boot coming through the door. The door is opened up. They grab my father and off he goes. We don't know what happened to him or why they take him. We hear all kinds of noises in the rest of the building as well. We discover that all the so called Ostjuden (Eastern Jews) had been taken and they were going to be sent…to the border with Poland… Meanwhile you can imagine my mother's fear and anxiety, as well as the rest of us…The father is gone, the business is gone. We don't know whether he is alive or dead. We don't know what's happening. It takes four, five days, we get word that he was able to make his way back through Germany, illegally. He came back to Vienna, but he couldn't live at home, because he might be picked up again. So he stayed with some non-Jewish acquaintances…. While he was hiding out, the Kristallnacht…Downstairs in the courtyard, in the ground level, there was a synagogue. We didn't often o there. We went to the Polischer synagogue, but this was another place where one could go for prayers. Here one morning I look out, the entire courtyard, this big empty space is no longer empty. Prayer books, Talis [prayer shawls], pieces of Torah, all over the grounds of this large courtyard. My mother did not permit us to leave the house or even to go outside into the courtyard, but we were able to see from this third floor where we lived, we were able to see down into the courtyard and to see what had happened and all the destruction…
