Published in Sweden: Gertrude Pressburger’s Holocaust memoir

No words to describe how happy we are to see this heart-breaking memoir out in Swedish translation at Historiska Media!

LIVED, LIVED THROUGH, SURVIVED (Zsolnay 2018) is the life story of a down-to-earth working class family from Vienna who barely seemed to be aware of being Jewish. Than the Nazis invade Austria and Getrude, her siblings and her parents flee and will wander around Europe for months. In the last minute, the Nazis snatch and deport them. Gertrude will be the only survivor. After recovering in Sweden, she decides to go back to Vienna (!) where she spent most of her life, unacknowledged by her married family and her daughter as a Holocaust survivor. Only when the right-wing party came to power in Austria, did this old lovable lady stand up and faced the demons of memory.

“It’s not the most decent things that are brought out in people, but the basest.” Gertrude Pressburger’s simple and urgent warning of “the rhetoric of the extreme” was broadcast all around the world. She survived the Holocaust – the only one in her family to do so. At the age of ninety, she now tells her story for the first time.

Gertrude Pressburger was ten when Hitler invaded Austria. Although her Jewish family had converted to Catholicism years before at her father’s request, they were forced to flee. Their exodus through Yugoslavia and Italy took almost six years, and ended in Auschwitz in 1944. Gertrude survived – the rest of her family did not.

For decades, she could not talk about the experiences they endured, or about her brothers and parents, who were killed in there. Then in 2016, a prominent Austrian politician spoke about an imminent civil war, causing her dismay. But she was encouraged by the fact that her heartfelt words found sympathetic ears to write down her story together with a young journalist. “I didn’t come back to go through the same thing again.”