Lilly Geringer Drukker memoir

Lilly Geringer Drukker was born in Vienna on 13 January 1927. Her parents were Sophie (nee Karpel) and Josef Geringer, and her maternal grandparents immigrated from Sniatyn, Poland in 1894. Her father came from a family of musicians who had lived in various locations in the Balkans, eventually settling in Piraeus, Greece. When Josef was an adolescent, his father brought him to Vienna to further his musical education, and to meet the family of his own childhood friend, Chaim Karpel, who would help him with his training, and whose daughter Sophie he married in 1920. Shortly thereafter, Josef Geringer received a position as a violinist with the Vienna Philharmonic, with which he performed until shortly after the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938, when he was dismissed from his job. The takeover of Austria by the Nazis also impacted the children, who were forced out of their school and started attending a school for Jewish children only. Her parents began to make plans to emigrate, and through a friend who was an opera singer and who had already left for London, they made plans to send Lilly to a family in London who agreed to sponsor her. Josef Geringer was imprisoned at Dachau following Kristallnacht, and was released in part due to the intervention of a Nazi-party member who was spokesperson for the Philharmonic. He later joined a Jewish orchestra in Berlin until he received a visa and immigrated separately from his family to New York. In January 1939, Lilly was sent on a Kindertransport to England, and joined her sponsor family, the Tuckmanns, first in London, and then in Hove, where she lived until April 1940, where she and one of her brothers were able to immigrate to the United States and rejoin their parents. Josef Geringer performed in a number of orchestras around the United States, including New Orleans, where he family joined him for a year, until he was hired by the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and the family moved back there. Lilly, upon graduating high school in 1944, found a job at an insurance company in New York, and in 1962 married a Dutch immigrant, Leendert (Lee) Drukker.