Lilli Tauber with her sons Willi and Heinz Tauber

This is a picture of me and my two sons, Willi and Heinz Tauber. The photo was taken in Vienna in 1959.

I met my future husband, Max Tauber, in the Mozart café behind Vienna's opera. He had just come back from England where he had visited his sister. We immediately had a wonderful time. That first meeting took place at Whitsun 1953, and we got married on New Year's Eve 1953 at the registry office in Vienna. There were many people at the wedding: Aunt Berta, Uncle Roland, Uncle Richard, Aunt Helene, my husband's parents and many, many others. Afterwards we had a big wedding party.

Our son Willi [Wilhelm Tauber] was born on 3rd December 1954, and Heinzi [Heinz Tauber] followed two and a half years later, on 11th August 1957.

My sons, Wilhelm and Heinz, are Jewish and circumcised. They didn't attend religious classes and didn't have a bar mitzvah though. They were raised conscious Jews nonetheless. We have always been a very Jewish family, talked a lot about Jewish life at home and told our children our life stories - not only about the Holocaust but also about Jewish history in general. Our friends and relatives who survived the war are Jewish, too. My father-in-law came from an orthodox family and sometimes took my sons to the synagogue on holidays.

My older son, Willi, finished seven years of grammar school and Social Academy. About ten years ago he also took external examinations to receive the diploma of a psychotherapist. He is a social worker and a psychotherapist. He works with Caritas in the morning and with Esra [Psycho-social center for Shoah victims and their families] in the afternoon. He has a private practice as a psychotherapist at Esra. He is married to a non-Jewish woman, and has one daughter from his first marriage.

My other son, Heinzi, finished a Secondary College of Engineering and then went to Social Academy. Caritas has offices at the Westbahnhof and Sudbahnhof railway stations in Vienna and whoever needs help can go there. A lot of homeless people seek help there. Heinzi worked there for a while, and later he got a job in the furniture warehouse of Caritas. Those in need can go there and get furniture. By the way, the prelat of Caritas was Dr. Ungar, a baptized Jew from Wiener Neustadt. Anyway, they later started selling the furniture from the warehouse and used the money to employ staff. An association for homeless people called 'Arbeitsgemeinschaft für nicht Sesshafte' was founded, and the members of this association clear houses and do various other things. The most important thing is that my son employs people who wouldn't be able to get a 'normal' job any more - long-term unemployed people or former prisoners. He has to make enough money himself in order to be able to pay them.

His wife's name is Elisabeth [Tauber, nee Ranzenhofer] and she works as a probation officer.

Photos from this interviewee