Another tragic story
Hessel Meilech sent me the following story that you may want to read as a reaction to my posting about “The Woman in Gold.”
www.cbsnews.com/news/buried-in-the-past
The story originally aired on Nov. 12, 2003. Imagine waking up one morning to find that almost everything you knew about yourself was wrong.
Two brothers did not know that they were Jewish or what affected their mom.
Chris and Rich Andrews, brothers, were raised on welfare by a single mother suffering from mental illness. When she died, they were left with nothing, or so they thought.
Thirty years later they learned that the truth about what had been buried in the past. They knew that their mother loved them, but they knew little about her past. Their mother Elizabeth was born in Austria into a rich Jewish family. By all accounts, she was a happy, carefree child. But at age 45, she committed suicide. She was penniless, divorced, and the mother of two teenage sons.
The brothers grew, married, had children. Rich became a tennis pro and Chris an entrepreneur.
On July 2, 2001, thirty years after their mother’s death, a letter arrived from a bank in Germany, stating that it specialized in the search for missing and unknown heirs. They were told that they inherited real estate valued at over $400,000 in Vienna.
They went to see their property. It wasn’t a palace but it was a beautiful large building with a guard in front of it. They asked if they could look inside, but were denied access. They got in later. It wasn’t the Austrians who kept them out of their inheritance. The building’s tenant was the United States government. A section of the American embassy was there.
