Summary of an interview by Bianca Schlegl

At the age of 17 Elisabeth Gratt joined the Red Cross and she started working as a nurse in 1942 in Wilna. The Jews had to wear a big yellow star on their clothes. One of her colleagues was a Jewish woman and in 1943 this woman was taken to a KZ. In the following year Elisabeth went to Florence and in 1945 she left the Red Cross and went home again. She lived with her parents and with her 12 brothers and sisters in Garanas, which is a small municipality in the styrian mountains. At that time life had been very hard and the war just aggravated the situation. Elisabeth said that she doesn´t want to go trough a war once again and she hopes it will never happen again. In 1947, she sarted working in a big factory, which produced clothes, she got a daily meal from the “Caritas-Organization” and this had to be enough for the whole day. People were very poor and didn´t have enough money to buy food, so they were happy about this small gift from Caritas, which consisted of just a piece of bread and some cheese and water.

In 1955 Leopold Figl proclaimed the words “Austria is free” from the balcony of the Belvedere Palace in Vienna. These words had a deep meaning for the Austrian population. On the 15th of May in 1955 the State Treaty was signed in Vienna and this event marked political recovery for Austria after the war. And the membership in the European Union in 1995 was also a big effort for Austria.