Erika Schulof Rybeck was born in Austria on the 30th of December 1928 and grew up in the little town of Hohenau an der March, on the border with Czechoslovakia.   She lived with her parents, Friedrich and Gertrude Schulhof, in a villa on the grounds of the Hohenau Sugar Factory where her father worked as manager and chief chemist.  

Those early years were full of happiness.  Erika had lots of friends and she loved playing with them.  In the summer, her family holidayed in the southern province of Carinthia and they spent their days swimming or boating on the lakes or walking in the mountains.  

All this changed with the Anschluss in March 1938, when the German army marched into Austria.  Completely shielded by her parents from the events unfolding around her, Erika was unaware of the danger her family was now in.  Her parents were assimilated Jews and didn't practice any religion.  Only much later would Erika learn of their pride in their families' Jewish heritage.  

Under the new racial laws, Erika's father lost his job and subsequently, the family had to move out of the villa, leave Hohenau, and go and live with her ailing grandmother in Vienna.  As the situation for Jews in Austria worsened, her parents tried desperately to get visas to leave the country, but couldn't.  In the meantime, Erika secretly received lessons at a local convent.  

When they were able to find a place for her on a Kindertransport and arrange for her to stay at a convent in Scotland, they told Erika that they would follow her soon.  They didn't betray their fears as they waved her goodbye on her grand adventure on the 13th of May 1939.  It would be the last time they saw each other.

Four long days later on the 17th of May 1939, Erika arrived in Aberdeen and became a boarder at the Sacred Heart Convent at Queen's Cross.  No one knew any German and she knew no English, so her first months were hard, but she persevered and with the kindness of the nuns and her fellow boarders, she started to settle into convent life and in a few months was fluent in English.  

She drew comfort from the many letters and postcards her parents sent from Vienna, but after the war was declared in September 1939, communication became harder and letters from her parents became more infrequent.  As time went on she would get occasional messages from them via the Red Cross, but these too would stop and she did not hear from them after late 1941. 

Erika would spend the next eight years at the boarding school, then a further two years at a teaching college in Edinburgh before finally getting her U.S. visa to join her Aunt Mia and Uncle Fritz Treuer in Yellow Springs, Ohio.  

Arriving in the U.S. in July 1949, Erika once again had to start a new life.  She enrolled at the University of Dayton and on graduation became an elementary school teacher.  In 1954 she became a U.S. citizen, but more importantly, she met Walter Rybeck, a journalist through a mutual friend.  The couple shared lots of interests, loved spending time together, and in October 1954 were married by a rabbi.   The young couple went on to have two sons, Rick and Alex.  Erika became very attached to Walter's family and became closer to her Aunt Mia and Uncle Fritz and their family.  

In 1961, the family relocated to the Washington, DC suburbs.  They enjoyed the rich cultural life of the capital area and made lots of new friends.  Erika kept herself busy with her boys' education and participated in a wide range of volunteer activities.  She stayed in touch with her Scottish classmates and when the boys were old enough the family spent memorable holidays together visiting Austria and Scotland and touring Europe and North America.  

In 1946 a distant relative wrote to tell Erika that after she had left in 1939, her parents had been moved to a Jewish ghetto in the centre of Vienna.  Then in October 1941, they were transported to Lodz in Poland.  She didn’t learn the fate of her parents until 2002 when her son, Rick, and his wife visited Poland.  They discovered that when the Lodz ghetto was liquidated, her parents were deported to Chelmno on the 9th of May, 1942, where they were murdered – gassed in one of the sealed trucks that acted as mobile gas chambers.  Their bodies were buried along with other victims in one of the mass graves in a nearby forest.  After more than 60 years of uncertainty, this terrible news helped Erika understand what had happened to her parents.

Erika and Walter moved to a retirement community in 2005.  They made many new friends there and became active in a variety of clubs and organizations.  Erika wrote a memoir that was published in 2013.  Although they had no grandchildren, Erika and Walter generously bestowed their love and affection on nieces and nephews and the children of friends.   

Erika Schulhof Rybeck died at her home on the 18th of August 2021, three months after the death of her beloved husband Walter.  

Extracts taken from Erika's memoir, On My Own:  Decoding the Conspiracy of Silence, and from her obituary written by her son, Rick Rybeck.