Ralph and Diane Dressler experience family history on a trip to Vienna



Diane and Ralph Dressler met with Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen (right) during their visit.

Diane and Ralph Dressler met with Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen (right) during their visit.

Ralph Dressler and his wife, Diane, are proof that one short conversation can have an unexpected impact. Back in 2018, Dressler, a retired headhunter and Cherry Hill resident, ran into an old family friend at the Katz JCC, who mentioned a trip to Austria taking place the following summer. Hosted by the Jewish Welcome Service Vienna, which serves as an ambassador for Jewish culture in the city, first- and second-generation offspring of Viennese Holocaust survivors were invited for a one-week, all-expense-paid program to explore their families’ histories.

Dressler, the son of a survivor who had escaped Vienna at the age of 23, was ready to sign up on the spot. Though he had been to Vienna with his father in 2000, this was an opportunity to learn more about what had happened to the rest of his family. Plus, he said, “It was a free trip to Austria!”

Before the trip, Dressler knew only a rough sketch of his father, Adolf’s, war experience. Born in Vienna in 1915 to Polish parents, Adolf worked as a dentist’s apprentice until 1938, when he and his brother made one failed attempt to escape illegally, then another attempt in which they were successful, leaving their parents behind. Smuggling themselves to Italy, they sailed to Israel (then Palestine), where Adolf worked a variety of jobs, including a field hand in the Jaffa orange groves, a taxi cab driver, and as a supply sergeant in the British Army. In Israel, Adolf met and married Blanka, with whom he had Ralph in 1950. The family immigrated to the United States in 1954 and settled in South Philadelphia, where Adolf had relatives, and where Ralph Dressler, his brother, Mark, and his sister, Linda, grew up. Over time, Adolf learned that his parents had been killed in concentration camps.

Diane and Ralph Dressler stood at the front door of Adolf Dressler’s old apartment in Vienna.

Diane and Ralph Dressler stood at the front door of Adolf Dressler’s old apartment in Vienna.

In September of 2019, Ralph Dressler, Diane, Linda, and Linda’s daughter, traveled to Austria, seeing the countryside and Salzburg before joining up with the Jewish Welcome Service trip in Vienna, which included 40 other participants from six different countries. Among the events on the itinerary were tours of the city, the Jewish quarter (where they stayed in Vienna’s oldest hotel) and the Jewish cemetery, as well as meetings with the president of Austria, Alexander Van der Bellen, and members of parliament.

“The president was unbelievable,” Diane recalled. “He was just incredibly warm. He basically apologized for what happened and said that Austria is now moving ahead and they’re not tolerating anti-Semitism. They’re bringing people here because they want them to feel welcome. He kept saying, ‘This is your home.’” Over the course of these meetings, Dressler learned that he was eligible for Austrian citizenship, as the first-generation descendant of a Viennese native. “I didn’t take it,” said Dressler, “but my children are eligible, too.”

The Dresslers and the other trip participants met with representatives from Jewish Archives, who presented them with their family histories and addresses in the city, then sent them to discover them on their own. “My father had always thought his parents were taken from the home address he escaped from to the concentration camp,” said Dressler. “We learned that what happened was, soon after he left, they were moved to the Jewish ghetto to a different address, which we visited while we were there, before they were sent to the camps. My father never knew.”

The meetings with the Jewish Archives people fleshed out smaller details that put the larger picture together. Said Diane, “We didn’t know [Adolf] had ever applied for a visa. They showed us the application. He applied in March of ’38. In May of ’38, he was rejected. So it was sometime between May of ’38 and Kristallnacht in November that he escaped.”

The Dresslers also discovered what happened to Adolf’s parents. The family had believed that both of them had perished at Theresienstadt, but the archives showed that while Dressler’s grandfather had died there—they gave them a copy of his death certificate— his grandmother was transported to Auschwitz 10 days after her husband’s death. “There’s no record beyond that,” Dressler said. “We don’t know if she died at Auschwitz, if she survived Auschwitz…”

Seeing her great-grandfather’s cause of death (“Pneumonia”) on his death certificate raised some questions for the Dresslers’ niece. “She said, ‘Do you really think he died from pneumonia or from something else?’” Diane recalled. “They worked everybody to the bone and didn’t feed them. They also had firing squads.”

The Dresslers also met the curator of Vienna’s small Kindertransport museum, who illuminated some of the history of the children who escaped the Nazis via train. “We didn’t have any clue all the people the parents had to pay off to get their kids on the transport to London,” Diane said. “I didn’t know that the Quakers were involved. They put themselves on the train to take care of the kids.”

Inviting the families of survivors to Austria free of charge, giving them their family histories, and offering them citizenship is a statement of rectification the Dresslers appreciated, though, Diane suspected, it was motivated at least in part by guilt. “I think there’s also tremendous, tremendous Viennese pride. They don’t want to be ashamed of what they did. And this is how they’re repaying it.”

Leaving Vienna, Diane returned home with a deeper sense of purpose. “Being there it made it more real. It made us both more aware that this is something we have to acknowledge. We can’t just say, ‘We had a nice trip to Vienna.’ We have to perpetuate what happened.”

For Dressler, the trip was a mix of emotions. “The highlight was just being back in Vienna. But I really could kick myself because I didn’t know about this when my father was still alive. Then, I could have taken him. I’m melancholy about that. He would have appreciated it.”

“I think about walking the streets where my dad walked, his brother, my grandparents. Now there’s not much of a sign, other than the memorials, of what happened there. In a way, it was kind of sad. But in another way, there was closure. Vienna’s a beautiful city, despite everything else.”

Descendants of Viennese survivors who wish to learn more about the Jewish Welcome Programme with the Jewish Welcome Service Vienna can visit jewish-welcome.at/en/.

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