Erika Mandler

Of Blessed Memory 1922 – 2010

Erika Mandler and her family left Vienna for Czechoslovakia after the German annexation of Austria in 1938. During the war, they were imprisoned in the Novaky slave labor camp in Slovakia, where she met her future husband, who kept them from being deported to the Auschwitz death camp. In August 1944, after the Slovakians took over the camp, they all fled and went into hiding. Her parents were betrayed and died in concentration camps in Germany. Erika and her husband hid in the Czech mountains, where Erika gave birth to their first child under terrible conditions and the infant eventually died. After the war, the couple tried to build a new life in Czechoslovakia, but immigrated to the United States after the communist takeover of the government.