Paul Schratter Collection 1870-1999

Abstract

Questionnaire of the Austrian Heritage Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute, various vital documents and certificates from families of Emil Schratter and Margaethe Schratter nee Schall. Correspondence includes letters concerning emigration to the United States, war-time correspondence from friends or family who were unable to leave and a letter to Paul's fiance relating his journey to Austria after the war in search of his relatives. There is also documentation regarding his adoption in 1945 by his father's fiance, Auguste Koch, who as a gentile survived the war, and her assumption of the name Schrattner in 1947.Paul Schratter, 1999Paul Schratter, son of Emil and Grete Schratter (nee Schall), was born in Vienna on March 6, 1922. One of his cousins was famous physicist Felix Bloch. In 1938, at the age of 16, he immigrated to the United States by himself. His father could not get out of Austria and his mother had died in 1926. Contact with his father was severed with the beginning of World War II. All attempts to bring the rest of the family to the US failed. Paul Schratter served in the U.S Army from 1942 till 1945, working as an interpreter for war prisoners. In Vienna, he found out that his father and many other relatives had died in concentration camps. He and his father's fiance, Auguste Koch, a gentile who had aided his father and the family until their deportation, decided to undergo an official adoption procedure, and he became the son of Auguste Koch in 1945, who also took his father's name several years later. In the US, he lived in Baltimore and in 1947 married Marlis Doser (born Marie Luise Goldschmidt in 1919). The family moved to Boston, and in 1951 their daughter Reina was born. Paul Schratter worked in international marketing traveling all over the world.Austrian Heritage CollectionSee also Paul Schratter's memoirs (ME 1396) and the diary of his mother Margarethe Schall (ME 1181).digitize