The factory where Karl worked was not conveniently located for a young family with kids. Although the Alberts’ apartment was close by and Karl had a short commute, the school that Frederick and Charlotte attended was quite a distance away. “There were no other kids around. And my mother never invited other children for birthday cake or something back then. We were alone,” said Charlotte. “And we always walked to school alone, back and forth, forty-five minutes each way, by foot, no bicycle.” For entertainment, Charlotte and Frederick would hang out around the factory and talk to the adults who worked there. Once they shut down the electricity by playing with the circuits and exposed cables. “They were repairing something and no one told us. Frederick could have been killed!” Their world consisted of school, playing in the factory, and painting, a hobby both siblings loved well into adulthood. In their structured and isolated world, they had a privileged though lonely childhood, while the rest of Germany struggled around them.

When Wall Street crashed in October 1929, so did Germany’s economy. The country relied heavily on U.S. investments, and when the United States began to recall its loans, Germany hit rock bottom immediately. Before the stock market crashed, 1.25 million Germans were unemployed. By 1930, nearly 4 million were out of work, about 15.3 percent of the population. Many people had to rely exclusively on part-time work, and those working full-time had to accept lower wages. By 1932, more than 30 percent of the German workforce couldn’t find jobs.5

Hitler, who had not been taken seriously by any German with influence before the crash, suddenly had a growing audience. As the leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, he vowed to end unemployment in Germany. Having predicted economic disaster when the Dawes Plan was put into effect, he was listened to when he spoke to a broken nation desperate for a leader who could salvage the economy. What started as a right-wing discussion that scapegoated Jews and chastised the German government for its defeat in the Great War and agreement to the Treaty of Versailles catapulted into the country rallying around Hitler’s leadership.

The Alberts continued to go about their daily lives as if nothing about Germany’s new leader was out of the ordinary. The rhetoric, the new pledges to Germany and the Führer—Margarete and Karl didn’t say a word against any of it. But the climate had changed, and the treatment of the Jews in the small town of Oppeln had changed too. Oppeln had a small Jewish population, 607 people in 1930. By 1936 that number had dwindled to 453 as anti-Jewish hostilities increased along with Hitler’s rhetoric.6

The Alberts’ time in Oppeln lasted until Frederick was eight years old. Karl then temporarily uprooted the family to the southern town of Ulm for a short-term work opportunity. But the biggest and most significant move came around 1935, when the Alberts relocated to Vienna, Austria.