Buildings stood taller than mountains. The sky never darkened. The inhabitants never slept. There, possibilities knew no limit. Greta Zimmer wondered if what she had heard about New York City was true. As a child, Greta never thought she would visit such a magnificent place.
Greta was born far from Times Square’s bright lights. During her idyllic childhood, Austria’s blue lakes, white-capped peaks, and green valleys surrounded her. Classical symphonies, Renaissance paintings, and live theater were featured in city centers. Even at a young age, she cherished her country’s stunning beauty and creative voice.
Greta’s mother and father treasured Austria, too. In their beloved country they raised their three daughters with a deep understanding of the Jewish faith and a rich appreciation for the arts. Greta learned to play violin and piano at a young age. She performed in concerts, or at least that is how she saw them during an innocent time. At the end of each performance, her mother, father, aunts, and uncles stood to applaud Greta. They adored their musician.
During the early 1930s money was hard to come by in Austria. But the Zimmers could have been worse off. Accustomed to difficult times, Jews in Austria supported one another. They communicated, networked, and prayed. Neighboring non-Jewish communities took notice. What they saw—Jews struggling to rise above economic hardship—bothered them. They wondered at what expense to themselves did their Semite neighbors make do.1
People wondered in Germany, also, and rushed to judgment. Nazi leader Adolph Hitler pushed forward a solution to “the Jewish problem.” The plan did not bode well for Jews. The Nazis set out to brutalize and humiliate a proud and industrious people. Their scheme spread quickly to nearby nations.
In March 1938 Hitler invaded Austria, his birthplace. The Austrians did not resist.2 The Anschluss, a union of Austria and Germany, pleased Hitler. Many Austrians welcomed the arrangement. Most Austrian Jews did not.
Hitler wasted no time demanding an immediate and brutal crackdown on Austrian Jews. As LIFE magazine reported, regarding the Nazis’ actions in Austria, “Jews were beaten, spat on, ejected from theaters, stores, all in accordance with the Nazi explanation that the Jews had ruined the Germans.”3 No doubt the persecution of Jews bothered many outside the Jewish community. However, fear or disbelief stopped open opposition to the Nazi regime. The treatment of Jews worsened.
In Greta’s homeland, anti-Semites forced well-dressed Jews to perform menial labor in public forums. Her people were made to wash streets, scour sidewalks, and scrub buildings, sometimes with tiny brushes they had to dip in burning acid and water.4 These locations and structures were already clean. The Nazi orders had another, sinister, purpose. Locals gathered to heckle, taunt, and laugh at the humiliated Jews. Even Jewish women and their children were forced to perform this menial labor. In at least one instance, Nazis ordered Jewish women in fur coats to scrub Vienna’s streets while German soldiers urinated on their heads.5 As the Nazis forced the Jews to perform these acts, Austrian civilians gleefully smiled in the background, heightening the Jews’ degradation.6
By 1938, Austrian Jews sought shelter from the looming slaughter. For most, their efforts proved futile. The Nazis hunted them down. Almost everyone who could have helped the Jews either looked away or froze. Horrible stories of mistreatment drew the international community’s attention, but not their assistance. The community of nations, including the United States, refused to ease immigration quotas. Many Jews took flight anyhow. By 1939, 20,000 Austrian Jews had fled their homeland.7 The Zimmers stayed in Austria.
As conditions worsened and opportunities to flee began to evaporate, Greta’s family worried more. Why worry did not result in the immediate relocation of the Zimmer daughters perplexes the logical thinker. But logic did not govern the Zimmers’ thought process. Paralyzing fright did. Other factors may have delayed the Zimmer girls’ departure. Up until 1939, the Nazis fanatical forces had not yet inflicted as much cruelty toward the Zimmers as they had on other less-fortunate Jews. Not all of Austria’s Jews washed Vienna’s streets. Also, the Zimmers underestimated the degree to which Hitler would go to solve the Jewish problem. Even today, despite clear photographic evidence, the extent to which the Nazis carried out the final solution remains unfathomable. Whatever reasoning impacted their decision most, the Zimmer matriarch and patriarch hoped for the best and opted to keep the family together and in familiar territory.
In 1939 the Zimmers’ thinking changed. As atrocities mounted, opportunities to leave Austria dwindled. Soon, those opportunities would vanish. Greta’s parents knew they had to act before it was too late. They recognized that conditions for Jews in Austria had deteriorated to appalling levels, and perhaps they had yet to experience the worst. The Zimmers made the fateful decision that security for their girls was paramount. Though they would be separated from their daughters, their girls would be safe and that was what mattered most to them. One daughter found haven in British Palestine. The Zimmers secured passage to New York for their other two daughters, Jo and Greta.
At fifteen years old, Greta understood why she and her sister needed to make their way to a foreign nation still struggling through the Great Depression. Everything she loved in Austria had either been destroyed, or soon would be. Fanatical forces greater than her family’s capability to fend them off made grim forecasts painfully predictable. Her mother and father had no choice but to break up the family. Greta comforted herself that the parting would be short. Certainly, she trusted the separation would be temporary.
Greta took little more than fond memories on her journey to the United States. She left much behind in her beloved Austria. She longed for her youthful days spent singing and playing for an appreciative audience. Most painfully, she dreaded leaving her parents. Tragically, 1939 proved to be the last year Greta’s relatives heard her perform. Shortly after Greta and her sisters left their homeland, Nazis rounded up her parents and aunts and uncles like cattle bound for the slaughterhouse. After the war, Greta learned that the Nazis had transported her mother and father to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Though she never investigated the particulars of her parents’ fate, Greta knew they would remain beyond her embrace forever. She never returned to Austria.
In 1939 Greta’s New York relatives welcomed their cherished nieces. An expansive ocean, a powerful country, and a nation’s largest city protected them from Adolph Hitler’s reach. But the Atlantic did not insulate Greta entirely from Europe’s miseries. The war that had engulfed her homeland soon drew in the United States. Once again she endured good-byes, as friends turned soldiers and sailors left to do battle with the Germans and Japanese.
During the ensuing years, Greta thought often of those New York friends who had left to fight in Europe or in the island-hopping campaigns in the Pacific theater. During their absence, she and her sister pinned troop locations on a large world map that hung in their bedroom. The accuracy of the pin placement was completely dependent on these friends’ letters, but the exercise provided them with some comfort. A soldier’s or sailor’s written communication meant that they had survived the war—at least up to the date of the postmark on the envelope. Those letters heartened Greta, who anxiously awaited her friends’ return to what was now her home, too.8
As the war raged on, Greta and Jo shared memories, told secrets, and competed with one another. Rivalries arose over matters of all sorts. Even their respective heights generated contests. Almost every morning the sisters measured one another down to the fraction of an inch. At sixteen, Greta reached her adult height—five feet, four, and, three-quarters inches. While she had not attained the standing of a basketball center, with a little help from heels she could garner attention in a crowd. A smile that made her eyes twinkle, as well as a slim and attractive figure, enhanced her good looks. No doubt World War II servicemen who flocked to New York took notice.
As the war progressed, Greta volunteered as an air-raid warden in her aunt’s neighborhood. During blackouts Greta walked along nearby streets looking for the slightest sliver of light. When stillness and a moonless night accompanied the blackness, an eerie serenity settled in. She knew this tranquility amidst a terrible war could not last for long. The two conditions were incompatible. One had to prevail. On those dark nights when Greta looked for light behind black-painted windows, thoughts of distant battles triumphed over peace. She longed for the day when the outcome would be different and those who had gone to fight could return home.
During the war’s final years, Greta graduated from the Central Needle Trade School in New York, a predecessor of the Fashion Institute of Technology. Shortly afterward, a friend who worked at a New York City dentist’s office informed Greta about a job opening for a dental assistant. Even though this vocation would sidetrack Greta temporarily from her passions, including the theater and painting, she thought this line of work would at least help pay the bills and might even prove interesting in the short run. After Greta followed her friend’s lead, a dental practice in Manhattan hired her to clean teeth and prepare patients for fillings and tooth extractions. The office was located a short walk from Times Square.
At about the same time she started working as a dental assistant at the office of J. L. Berke, a woman who made it her business to look after young working girls rented Greta a room in Manhattan. The move brought her closer to her work and the heart of the city. She shared the apartment’s living space with several other girls. Greta had her own bedroom and a mother figure to look after her. She appreciated both.
Within weeks of moving to her new residence, Greta knew her way around the city almost as well as a native New Yorker. She learned to navigate complicated subway connections, rush through crowded streets, and find some refuge among skyscrapers. One such place, close to Times Square, served the best lemon meringue pie in the city. There, with a cup of boiling black tea in hand, she escaped from the war, if only for a few moments.
But the fantasy of forgetting about the war always expired quickly. Signs and symbols throughout the U.S. home front ensured that thoughts of war were ever present. Gold star windows, news about atrocities in Europe, and pictures of kamikaze attacks in the Pacific reminded everyone that war raged on. Only victory could end these constant reminders. Greta yearned for that day.
With the Allies’ triumph in Europe on May 8, 1945, Greta waited expectantly, and not at all patiently, for news of the Pacific theater’s victorious conclusion. The next three months continued with reports of harrowing battle scenes, dashing hopes for a quick Allied triumph. Though news agencies promised the war would end victoriously for the United States and its allies, Greta worried more than she hoped. Almost every news bulletin reinforced her anxiety. News reports on August 6 heightened her angst to new levels. The atomic bomb’s detonation over a Japanese city ushered in a new and uncertain era. Restless nights followed. Greta’s bouts of broken sleep continued despite a New York Times article that assured readers the atomic bomb caused limited human destruction.9 Greta could still trust, but she was not naive. The sight of mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki told her a new and dangerous time had descended upon the world. She knew, too, that dropping a bomb that was capable of wiping out a major city meant that thousands of civilians must have been killed. There had already been too many American, Austrian, and Asian deaths.
Sometimes the sense of loss overtook Greta. To cope, at night she prayed for peace. Weekday mornings she hurriedly prepped for work. Her morning routine included a quick shower, a short make-up session, and a light breakfast that she ate rushing out the door: just over a half-hour. Afterward, a subway fare and short walk brought her to the dentists’ office at 305 Lexington Avenue, near 38th Street. There, Greta changed into her uniform, which consisted of a white dress, white shoes, and white stockings. Rarely did she go out in public wearing her dental assistant uniform.
When Greta arrived at the dentists’ office, she passed through a waiting room where numerous publications covered tables. Throughout the day, patients thumbed through the strewn newspapers and magazines. The practice killed time and often distracted them from the purpose of their visit. By early August 1945, many headlines practically predicted the day and time of the Japanese surrender. Afraid of disappointment, Greta tried to ignore these promising articles and darted into the office to prepare for the day’s work.
As the warm days of August 1945 wore on, Greta tried to focus more on her responsibilities at Dr. J. L. Berke’s dentist office than on a prolonged war over which she had no control. She arrived at work by nine o’clock on most mornings, took lunch after both dentists did, and left for home around five o’clock But even with the consuming duties of each day, like most Americans, the Austrian dental assistant tried to picture that moment when the war would become part of a painful past. She thought the celebration would outdo any that New York had ever experienced. The unleashing of pent-up emotions might even overshadow the revelry of V-E Day months earlier. Her wish encouraged an unrealistic expectation, one whose fantasy paled compared to what was ahead.