Viennese districts: 1st District

Charlotte Bamberger was born as Charlotte Hammerschlag in Vienna in 1904. She went to the Schwarzwald School. She began playing the violin at eight years old and studied at the k. k. Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst (Imperial Academy for Music and the Performing Arts) from 1918 to 1925. In 1936, became a viola player in the Palestinian Symphony Orchestra and emigrated to Palestine. She was unable to return to Vienna due to the “Anschluss”, instead following her husband to the USA where she pursued a successful career as a musician. She lived in New York at the time of the interview.

Kurt Goldberger was born in Vienna in 1925 and grew up in the 1st district. After the Anschluss in 1938, the Goldberg family was forced to leave their apartment. Goldberger escaped on a Kindertransport to Great Britain, where his mother had fled to a couple of months earlier. They emigrated to the USA in April 1944 where they were reunited with his father who had fled there previously. Goldberger worked for B’nai Brith for 21 years, campaigning for minority rights. At the time of the interview, Goldberger lived in New York.

Fred Sterzer was born in 1929 and lived with his family in Vienna's 20th district. In 1942, the family was sent to Theresienstadt and he was later deported with his mother and his diabetic brother to Auschwitz. He eventually ended up in a subcamp of Gross-Rosen Concentration Camp, from where he was liberated in May 1945. His parents were murdered. Sterzer returned to Vienna where he finished high school and then emigrated with his brother to the USA in 1947. There, he studied physics and later founded a research laboratory. At the time of the interview he was living in Princeton, New Jersey.