Alfred Ament

Alfred Ament, the older son of Ernestina and Max Ament, was born in Vienna, Austria on September 15, 1927.

Alfred’s father was a successful manufacturer, and the family often spent their summers in the country. Alfred played with his younger brother, Hans, teaching him to ride his tricycle and play with a wind-up train.

When the Germans annexed Austria, Alfred was 11 years old. The Ament family fled to Belgium, where they immediately applied for visas to the United States. They received the visas in early 1940, but were put on a waiting list for berths on a ship. Alfred attended school and quickly learned Flemish. He made new friends and went to soccer games and swimming matches.

In May 1940, the Nazis invaded Belgium. Max, who held a German passport, was arrested and sent to an internment camp in the south of France. That fall, Alfred celebrated his Bar Mitzvah without his father. In spring 1941, Ernestina sold Alfred’s stamp collection for food. Later on, she sold her engagement ring. When ordered to report for deportation to a “resettlement camp,” the family fled to Marseilles in unoccupied France.

In spring 1942, Ernestina became ill and was hospitalized. Hans was sent to a children’s home in Izieu, and Alfred was sent to a home for teenagers. Even though he worked in the kitchen, food was scarce, and Alfred was often hungry. In the winter of 1943, the Nazis began raiding children’s homes, and Alfred was sent to hide on a farm with two other children. He learned to milk cows and to clean the pigsty.

In March 1944, Alfred and a convoy of 30 other children escaped to Switzerland with the aid of false identity cards.

Close to the border, the children scaled a ten-foot-high barbed wire fence and fell onto Swiss soil.

Alfred spent the rest of the war in a refugee camp in Switzerland. He corresponded with his mother until she died of tuberculosis. In May 1945, after the end of the war in Europe, he learned that his father had been killed in a concentration camp, and that his grandparents and Hans were murdered in Auschwitz Death Camp. Alfred was the sole survivor of his family.

Jews first came to Vienna from Germany in the 12th century. During the 19th century, Vienna became a hub for Jewish authors and intellectuals, and by 1923, the local Jewish community had grown to nearly 200,000, third largest in all of Europe. Vienna’s Jewish community maintained 60 synagogues, a vast educational network, and a variety of social action institutions. It was also in Vienna that Theodore Herzl established the first headquarters of the Zionist movement. At the same time, however, Vienna was a center of popular antisemitism. At the turn of the century, Karl Lueger was elected mayor on a platform espousing anti-Jewish views. Nevertheless, the Jewish community, among the most sophisticated throughout Europe, continued to thrive.