Tribute to Nazi Eyewitness Lucia Heilman

ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation), January 15, 2024
German original: https://wien.orf.at/stories/3240746/

Lucia Heilman, now 94, survived the Nazi era in Vienna as a Jewish child. She still talks about this in schools. On Monday, she was honored with the state's Golden Medal of Merit at Vienna City Hall.

Heilman was born Lucia Johanna Treister in Vienna in 1929 and grew up in Alsergrund. In 1938, Lucia was expelled from school due to her Jewish background. In 1941, after her grandfather had already been deported to Buchenwald in 1939, a close friend of her father's hid Lucia and her mother in his workshop in Mollardgasse. After a bomb hit, they spent almost six months in a musty, dark cellar in Gumpendorfer Straße. Heilman still remembers the formative feeling of fear today.

"The fear, the uninterrupted fear that lasted day and night. The fear that the doorbell would ring, that someone would come and take me and my mother to Buchenwald or another concentration camp," Heilman told "Wien heute."

"I cannot forgive"

Family members and acquaintances were murdered during the war. But some of the people in Vienna remained the same after the end of the war, she says: "After the war, my mother sent me to fetch milk. I came into the store and they said I don't sell milk to Jews."

Nevertheless, Heilman stayed in Vienna, graduated from high school and studied medicine in Vienna. She became a doctor, married and raised two daughters. She first spoke about her survival as a "submarine" in Vienna in connection with Israeli photographer Alisa Douer's film project "Whoever saves a life saves the whole world" (1993). She has been active as a contemporary witness ever since. She continues to work against forgetting Nazi crimes, but she does not forgive: "No, I can't forgive."

"Sad" about the resurgence of antisemitism

She tells her story to children and young people in schools. "They should only know, and what they do with their knowledge is up to them," said Heilman. When asked how she feels about the fact that anti-Semitism is resurfacing today, she says: "I'm sad, sad that people haven't moved a millimeter in human terms."

In the 2013/2014 season, Heilman took part in the production of "The Last Witnesses" at Vienna's Burgtheater, and in 2017 she was a speaker at the Festival of Joy. Her story and that of her rescuer Reinhold Duschka is written down in the book "Am Seil - Eine Heldengeschichte" by Erich Hackl.

"You have honored this city"

"In her later life, Lucia Heilman worked tirelessly as a bridge builder and admonisher against anti-Semitism and racism," emphasized City Councillor for Culture Veronica Kaup-Hasler (SPÖ). "It is not the city of Vienna that is honoring her, but you have honored this city with your work, whether as a doctor or as a contemporary witness. Especially now, when we have to lament the flare-up of anti-Semitism and xenophobia all over the world, it shows how important it is for a society to speak out and that each of us must not tire of raising our voices loudly against injustice and for humanitarian values," said Kaup-Hasler.