Trieste, Italy

Lisa (Rosenthal) Kraft

I was born in 1938 in Trieste, Italy, forty-three days after ‘Anschluss’ when Hitler’s troops annexed Austria. My father, Nandor Rosenthal, married my mother Trude Pollak in 1936. They searched for safe haven in an English-speaking country. Eventually, they received a permit to become legal aliens in New Zealand. The five of us arrived by sea three days before the start of World War II. My mother’s sister and her three Italian-born daughters fled Trieste and hid underground, pretending to be Roman Catholics. They survived and immigrated to Palestine in 1947. It took many long, anxious years before my parents learned that my grandparents, Josef and Regina Rosenthal, and Aunt Szeren perished in the hell of Auschwitz and Stutthof Concentration Camps in 1944.​