Countries through which people fled: Hungary

Rachel Gross was born in 1915 as Rose Brock and lived with her family in Gols, Burgenland. She attended elementary school there, later a school in Vienna, and then finally a convent school in Neusiedl am See. In April 1938, Gross and her family were forced to leave Austria by SS and SA men who brought them to the Hungarian border and forced them through some woods and over the border. They were able to get a ship to Palestine via Romania. Gross ran a café with her husband in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Trudie Solarz was born Gertrude Braun in Graz in 1931 and spent her early years in Carinthia where her father owned a series of small department stores. He was arrested during the November Pogrom (“Kristallnacht”) in 1938 and deported to Dachau. The family were able to escape to London in March 1938. The family emigrated on a Kindertransport ship to the USA, settling in Philadelphia. Trudie Solarz worked mainly as a secretary and held lectures about her experience as a refugee. At the time of her interview she lived in Levittown, Pennsylvania.