War Orphan in San Francisco

Phyllis Helene Mattson tells the engrossing story of a childhood spent initially with an aunt and then in foster homes and orphanages in San Francisco where her mother managed to send her in 1940, in the final window of opportunity for escaping the Nazi occupation of Vienna. Her mother, never able to secure the necessary papers that would allow her out of Austria, worked as forced labor and then was killed by the Germans. Mattson’s father, was thrown out of Vienna late in 1939 by the Germans and then spent the war in an Australian internment camp when England, his temporary home, declared war on Germany.

Mattson became the primary link for the scattered family from the time she was ten until her father came to the US when she was seventeen. She used the treasure trove of letters, long stored in a box in the garage, to help tell her story.

Do you have documents or records that may shed light on your story? How might you use them?

Matson writes, “As I told my story, I told it as through it happened to another child, factually without emotion, a way to distance myself from the tragedy that I had experienced…” How close or how distant do you need to be from your story in order to tell it?

>> Click here to buy this book