Miniature ivory penknife carried by an Austrian refugee family

Elisabeth (Liesl) Ornstein was born on November 8, 1927, in Vienna, Austria, to Hildegard Fulda, born in 1900, and Dr. Paul Ornstein, born in 1898. Hilda’s father was a successful businessman and Hildegard received Lutheran instruction, but was never baptized. Paul had ceased to practice the Jewish faith prior to meeting Hildegard. The couple met when both were studying medicine at the University of Vienna. Paul was the director of a private clinic that specialized in cardiology. She had a brother, Georg, who was born in 1930. The family was wealthy and lived in the Wahring district of Vienna. In 1933-34, Hildegard converted to Catholicism and the children were baptized. They were cared for by their nanny, a Catholic peasant, Emmy Burgmann, and they attended Catholic schools. On March 12, 1938, German troops marched into Austria and annexed the country. Anti-Jewish legislation was enacted prohibiting Jews from many cultural and economic activities. Despite their conversion to Catholicism, the Ornstein’s were considered Jews under Nazi racial laws. Elisabeth and Georg were sent to live with their uncles in Frankfurt, Germany, due to the increasing anti-Semitism. The November 1938 Kristallnacht [Night of Broken Glass] pogrom was particularly brutal in Austria. The children’s uncles were arrested and deported to concentration camps. Hildegard brought the children back to Vienna and they redoubled their efforts to get out of Austria. The Jewish Refugee Children’s movement found a family in England, Esme Cooke’s, willing to take in Elisabeth as a foster daughter. The English Quakers agreed to find a family for Georg and included both children on a kindertransport that left Vienna for England in January 1939. When the war began that September, the family Elisabeth was living with went to their country home and she was enrolled as a day student in a boarding school. Georg was placed with the Parrot couple in Scotland where he was very happy. But he was removed from there and sent to a home closer to Elizabeth. But they were not able to see each other, although they continued to correspond. Elisabeth kept a diary during this time, and the entries show her efforts in trying to remember German. Her parents obtained visas for the United States with the help of distant Fulda relatives and arrived in New York City in January 1940. They moved to Buffalo where Paul worked part-time at a hospital while preparing to take the qualifying medical license exams; Hildegard cleaned houses. After the evacuation of Allied troops from Europe at Dunkirk in June 1940, they decided to get the children to the US. Because of U-boat activity, the children traveled separately and their travel information could not be shared. Elisabeth travelled via the H.M.S. Antonia from Liverpool to Montreal in September 1940 and then by train with other refugee children to New York. No one was there when she arrived. After two days, her mother arrived and they waited together for Georg. This was the last children’s transport to leave for the US because the one before Georg’s was sunk by the Germans. During the fall of 1941, they learned that Elisabeth’s grandparents and great-aunts had committed suicide on the eve of their deportation to concentration camps. After passing his exams, Paul changed their name to Orsten. Fourteen year old Elisabeth had to attend kindergarten classes to learn English. Later, she received a scholarship to Manhattan College. In 1948, she joined the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), and translated captured German military documents for three years. Her brother served in the US Air Force and attended MIT. He received the Presidential Medal of Honor under President Truman for designing the first airborne nuclear detector capable of measuring radiation in the clouds. He and his wife were killed in a car crash in 1997. Paul died in 1957, age 59 years. Hildegard passed away in 1998, age 98 years.

The miniature pen knife was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2008 by Elizabeth M. Orsten.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Elisabeth M. Orsten