Holocaust survivor shares her story

She fell in love — not once, but twice. Her first husband was deported to Aushwitz on one of Germany’s first “relocation” trains. As a dentist, he was then given the appalling job of extracting gold teeth from corpses after they were gassed. He was killed in 1942.
Her second husband, Dr. George Mandler, was a heroic member of the underground who rescued Jews from Budapest before he was incarcerated at a Czechoslovakian “work camp.” He saved Erika and her family from deportation; then they all fled the camp and the young lovers joined the Slovakian partisan fighters.
When Germans overran their camp, Erika and George fled amid machine gun fire with fellow partisans falling all around them. They escaped into an underground train tunnel; then they climbed high into the Low Tatras Mountains where they survived a brutal winter.
“Have you seen Dr. Zhivago?” Erika asked a group of Girl Scouts at the Jamesport school where she gave a talk. “That was us. It was so cold. So much snow.”
Now, after a long and happy life in Chillicothe, Mo., the 84-year-old widow is telling her story. Why? Because, like Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List,” she wants people to remember the six million Jews exterminated by Hitler — so they will never let it happen again.
Erika’s first 15 years were “the most wonderful life,” she told the group. Born in the City of Music, she enjoyed classical concerts and the opera. She and her friends (both Jewish and non-Jewish) played in Vienna’s beautiful parks. Non-Jewish friends visited in Erika’s home during Passover; she visited in their homes at Christmas.
That all changed when Hitler invaded Austria on March 11, 1938. New German laws mandated that all Jews sew yellow stars on their clothing to set them apart. When she gives a program today, the trim, attractive senior citizen wears a small replica. In the center of her Star of David are the words, “Never Forget.”
Immediately, Vienna’s streets became deadly. Thousands were arrested for the smallest infractions of the new anti-Jewish laws. The Germans recruited Austrian boys for “Hitler’s Youth.” They were indoctrinated, given brown uniforms to set them apart, and sent into the streets to persecute and harass Jews. Erika shakes her head sadly as she tells of one such incident.
“I remember two Jewish old men in our neighborhood. Both had long, white beards.” One day the “brown shirts” targeted the old men, laughing and teasing them. Then one of the boys took out a pair of scissors and cut off one of the men’s beards. The other boy took out a box of matches and set the second man’s beard on fire.
“You can imagine,” Erika adds. “His face was engulfed in flames. It was the most horrible sight I have ever seen.” What hurt Erika most was that several good people witnessed the event and no one tried to help the old men.
Jewish children could not attend public schools. They were also barred from the beautiful parks where Erika had played daily with her friends. Synagogues were burned. Homes and businesses were confiscated from the Jews and given to German sympathizers.
“The Germans ordered Jews to turn over all their gold jewelry,” Erika recalls. “We were law-abiding people.” Her father collected all their jewelry – even her mother’s wedding ring – and took it to the police station. The only jewelry to survive the Nazi conscription was a small necklace – a Star of David – which Erika had received from her parents as a birthday gift. “We just forgot it,” she explains. “I wore it all the time and didn’t even remember I had it on.”
Everyone who could legally leave began evacuating Austria. Erika’s parents, Simon and Henriette Raab, went to Czechoslovakia to manage resorts they owned at Marienbad and Fransfensbad. Erika and her brother Kurt, a medical student at the University of Vienna, were not allowed to leave. They stayed with their grandmother.
Since the window of legal escape had been closed, the youth decided to try to escape Austria illegally. They removed their yellow stars, took a train to a border town, and bribed guards to let them climb over the tall barricade to freedom. On foot, guided only by a light in the far horizon, the youth made their way in the Czechoslovakian countryside trying to find a train station.
Erika divides her story into “miracles.” The pair made it to a small village and sat down to rest under a stone monument. When daylight came they discovered the significance of the carved statues.
“There we were,” she explains. “Two Jewish children – sitting under a statue of the Virgin Mary holding the Baby Jesus – and we prayed like we had never prayed before. We prayed to the God of all Mankind.”
On the horizon, the youth could see two men heading their way. They were two local soldiers who took pity on the pair. They got them food, took them to a train station, and bought them tickets to join their parents in Trencin, Czechoslovakia.
“What a reunion it was.”
By wartime standards their next few months were wonderful. Although they had been affluent before the war, the Raab family had closed their hotels and restaurants and rented a small apartment in Trencin. All four worked to make enough money just to live. The parents worked in a restaurant. Kurt (who was fluent in English) gave private lessons to Jews hoping to immigrate to America. And Erika, fresh out of the Krugerheime Trade School for seamstresses, worked for a talented tailor.
Even after 67 years, Erika blushes shyly as she tells about falling in love. His name was Eric. They were married June 18, 1940. He had booked passage for them on the last ship scheduled to take immigrants to Palestine. They were on the ship, moored in the Danube River, for two weeks. It never sailed. The British had closed Palestine’s borders and were no longer allowing immigrants.
Germany had now begun its “relocation” program, deporting Jews from other European countries to death camps in Poland and Germany. Eric received his letter to be at the train station the next morning for “re-settlement.” Erika went with him to the train and tearfully kissed him goodbye. The Red Cross told Erika after the war that his train went straight to Auschwitz.
Erika returned to her parents’ home in Trencin where she remained until all Jewish families in Czechoslovakia were arrested and taken to one of three “work camps.” The Raabs went to Novaky where Erika met her second husband – and lifelong soulmate – Dr. George Mandler.
Dr. Mandler was a physician in the camp and treated both guards and “Jewish inmates.” Prior to this, he and his brother, Otto, had been active in the underground, rescuing other Jews who were caught up in Hitler’s net in Budapest. The brothers were arrested and thrown into a Hungarian prison. They escaped, only to be arrested again in Czechoslovakia and taken to Novaky.
Because doctors were vital to the work camps, Dr. Mandler was able to save Erika and her family when their names were called for deportation.
After several months in the camp, George’s underground connections told him that Germany was losing the war. America would liberate from the West; Russia from the East. In a last ditch effort to kill as many Jews as possible, the Germans were on their way to destroy the work camps.
On Aug. 28, 1944, the prisoners could hear German grenade fire in the background. The Czechoslovakian commander (who didn’t want a German slaughter on his conscience) threw open the iron gates of Novaky and told the Jews, “Run! Save Yourselves. They will shoot you like dogs.”
Jews ran in every direction. “But, where could they go?” Erika asks. They had been in the camp for three years – they had no money and no transportation. Many were killed by the approaching SS in the hours that followed.
George had planned for just such a scenario and, once again, saved the Raab family. He took Erika and her parents to hide with a nearby farmer. Then he told her he had made plans to join the Slovakian partisans and fight the Germans.
A truck picked George up at the farm. “When he climbed into the back of that truck, I had an overwhelming instinct that I would never see him again,” Erika recalls. She ran after the truck. She took off her most precious possession – the Star of David necklace – and, as George leaned down to kiss her goodbye, she clasped it around his neck.
“May this keep you safe,” she remembers saying as the truck sped away. “Please come back to me.”
Later, George sent a jeep for Erika and she joined him at the partisan army camp in Harmonitz. Her parents remained at the farm. Her brother left to join a separate band of volunteers. She had no idea where he went – or if he was even alive.
At the camp in Harmonitz, George and his partisans did all they could to frustrate and stall the German Army until the Russians arrived. It was not to be.
“We packed supplies and slept with our boots on,” Erika adds. “In case we had to run.” The SS attacked at night with machine guns. Erika had to drop her bag of supplies (only taking time to retrieve family letters and pictures) because it was too heavy. Partisans were killed all around them. Erika counts it among her miracles that she and George made it to safety.
The Mandlers and another couple sought refuge in an underground train tunnel. Knowing troop trains could be coming through that tunnel at any time, they later abandoned the shelter and hid in a mountainous forest. George and the other man went to a farm house and got supplies; then the four began making their way up the mountain.
The two couples lived together over six months. They would chop trees and dig holes deep into the side of the mountain for shelter. They camouflaged the opening, sleeping back in the holes and cooking their food at night so the Germans wouldn’t detect the smoke. Every few weeks they would abandon their latest “home” and climb further up the mountain in case the Germans had discovered their hideout.
In March 1945 – after six frigid, grueling months – a Slovic partisan arrived at their bunker to tell the two couples that 1,200 Russian soldiers had just parachuted nearby. The Mandlers and other partisans (who were also hiding all over the mountain) were invited to accompany the soldiers across the Dumbie Mountain Range to safety. After surviving their six-month ordeal, some perished on that five-day walk across the mountaintop.
Erika thought she would be among them. “I was pregnant,” she explains. Half starved and weak, she fell into a snow bank and told George to go on without her. “I didn’t want him to perish, too” Erika says. George refused. He ordered her to open her mouth and dropped sugar onto her tongue. “Get Up,” he kept commanding, alternating additional sugar with his orders. The sugar gave her added strength to try again.
At the first village, the Russian soldiers dropped off their refugees at a small hospital and continued on. Still in the same clothing in which they had escaped from Novaky six months earlier, Erika and George were in dire condition. Fatigued, dirty and lice- infested, they stripped off all their clothes. “They burned them I hope,” she adds. Nurses shaved George’s head and soaked Erika in kerosene to get rid of the lice. They were given baths, new clothes and large glasses of milk.
“It tasted wonderful but we got the biggest case of diarrhea.”
Erika later gave birth to a tiny baby daughter. Due to too little food and the privation of the long winter months, their baby died two days later.
The war ended on May 8, 1945. Thus began a new life for the Mandlers. First they tried to find friends and relatives. The fates of many will never be known; however, Erika said the Germans had kept detailed records in the camps. The Red Cross provided much information.
When the Mandlers went to the farmhouse to find her parents, they met Kurt, who had also gone to find the Raabs. Both Kurt and George’s brother, Otto, had fought with separate partisans and survived the war. Erika’s parents had not.
German police had discovered the Jewish hideaway. They were arrested. Her mother was sent to Ravensbrueck where she died of starvation. Her father was sent to Buchenwald where he was alive when the Allies liberated the camp. He died two days later.
George’s mother, Camille, and sister, Ann, were arrested in Prague and taken to the ovens in Auschwitz. Erika’s grandmother (where she and Kurt stayed after their parents went to Czechoslovakia) was also arrested and killed — along with her mother’s youngest sister.
Since they were all now part of the Communist Eastern Block, George and his brother soon decided they wanted to bring their families to America. Otto went immediately to the U.S. embassy to begin his application. Each country accepting immigrants had a quota limit and each new applicant was given a number. Otto was number 12. He was able to immigrate to America two months later.
One week after Otto applied at the embassy, George and Erika followed suit. In that seven days 1500 more had applied. Their number was so high it would be four long years before they could join his brother.
“Otto sent us a ticket on the Queen Mary and we arrived Dec. 17, 1949 in New York Harbor. I’ll never forget my first view of the Statue of Liberty. We just sat there on the deck,” she recalls. “We were the last ones off. Otto had come to meet us and he got frightened that something had gone wrong and we weren’t on the ship.”
Erika’s brother, Dr. Kurt Raab, finished his medical degree in Vienna before immigrating. He went first to Canada and then came to the United States. Today, he is 94 years old and lives in Australia.
Dr. Otto Mandler and his family stayed in New York where there was a large population of immigrants. George and Erika, however, wanted to move to a small town. “We wanted to become Americans,” she explains.
Eventually, Dr. George Mandler answered an advertisement in the “American Medical Journal” soliciting an eye, ear, nose and throat specialist for a small Midwestern town. He called Dr. Donald Dowell of Chillicothe; then he flew to Northwest Missouri to look the town over. (Several in the audience at Jamesport were former patients of Dr. Mandler during his long career in Livingston County.)
“We moved to Chillicothe in August 1951,” Erika ends. “We had a warm reception and a wonderful life.” Their daughter was born in 1954. She was named for both of her grandmothers who were killed in the Holocaust. The Mandlers’ happiness was complete with their naturalization ceremony in Kansas City in 1955 when they became United States citizens.
What happened to the Star of David necklace Erika put around George’s neck during the war? “He never took it off.” Erika recalls, even when he had surgery, the nurses were instructed to tape over it. “You can’t take it off,” Dr. Mandler told them. “It saved my life.”
When George died in 1994, Erika removed her childhood gift from his neck and put it back on her own. She never takes it off.
Now, Erika fills her time sharing her holocaust story. In an effort to document the tragedy for future generations, Steven Spielberg has taped her story – along with thousands of other survivors – for the “Shoah Visual History Foundation.”
Erika shakes her head during a question and answer period at the Jamesport school. “No, I have no desire to visit the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., nor the memorials at Dachau and Auschwitz. Those museums aren’t for me. I will never forget.”
However, there is one memorial that the holocaust survivor did visit. It is the Forest of the Righteous in Israel. In that park, a tree is planted for each “righteous” person who helped a Jew during the war.
“Why did I survive?” Erika asks. “I guess to tell my story. But, I know for sure, I would not have been alive had it not been for some of those righteous people helping me. Just don’t forget – so we will never have to relive such a time again.”