Before and After Auschwitz. My Life until 1945 By Helen Otley, Translated and with an Afterword by Lowell A. Bangerter

This autobiographical narrative outlines the early life of a woman who witnessed both the ride of Emperor Franz Josef through the streets of Vienna following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in 1914, and the entry of Hitler into Vienna in 1938. The account portrays the events of Helen Otley's childhood and youth, illuminates her experiences in the Austrian education system, presents impressions of intellectual and cultural life in Austria between the wars, gives information about conditions in German industry in the early 1940s, and describes in detail her confinement in the Auschwitz concentration camp and a women's prison near Leipzig. Helen Schlesinger Beck Otley was born in Vienna in 1911. She received a doctorate in physics from the University of Vienna and then worked for German industrial concerns in Berlin and Dresden. Because of her association with a communist group in Berlin she was arrested and convicted of subversive activities. After her initial arrest she was sent to Auschwitz, and following her trial she was confined in a women's prison near Leipzig. When the war was over, she worked in Vienna for several years, married, and eventually emigrated to the United States.