Erica Lustig-prean
Relative of Anne Frank who fled to Britain and later gave talks to young people about the Holocaust
ERICA LUSTIG-PREAN, who has died aged 92, escaped Germany in August 1939 and after the Second World War campaigned for the underprivileged and all refugees.
As a child in Aachen, on the Dutchgerman border, Erica Lustig-prean recalled Kristallnacht on November 9-10 1938, when synagogues and Jewish homes, shops, schools and hospitals were burned and looted throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland.
The Nuremberg laws segregated Jewish children and she was moved from her Catholic school to a Montessori school in the city with a distant cousin, Anne Frank, whose maternal grandmother Rosa Hollander was a regular visitor to the house. She fled from the school when the Brownshirts arrived to beat up the children.
She also recalled the first visit to her home by uniformed Nazis, which ended in farce. Pushing their way into the drawing room, the Nazis were confronted by a large oil painting of her grandfather with his brother in their officer uniforms from the First World War: both had been awarded the Iron Cross. The Nazis saluted the painting and left, but had they searched the house they would have found two Jews her grandfather was hiding pending their escape to the Netherlands.
In 1939 Erica’s grandparents managed to secure an English sponsor for their daughter, Ilse Stiebel (later Barrington), to take Erica to England as refugees, and they fled from Germany two weeks before war began. They were each allowed to carry a tiny suitcase and the equivalent of 10 shillings. There, Ilse Stiebel was among the first 50 Allied volunteers to join the Auxiliary Territorial Service.
But young Erica suffered several unhappy moves to various, often appalling, refugee hostels during the Blitz. Eventually she found a new “family” in The Beacon, a large house in enormous grounds in Tunbridge Wells run as a refugee home. The girls there identified themselves as sisters, and Erica was one of the last survivors of this group, who had enjoyed lifelong friendships.
The teenage Erica was unable to join the street revelry of VE-DAY: she only recalled vomiting with relief that she was safe from extermination.
She was born Erica Stiebel in Aachen, Germany, on March 18 1930, to Martin and Ilse Stiebel; her father was cantor in the Aachen synagogue. After her parents divorced she was brought up by her maternal grandparents, Carl and Emmy Bernstein, textile manufacturers.
Having acquired a British passport in 1947, Erica returned to Aachen to see what had become of her birthplace. As she walked through the ruins of the street where she had lived, an old friend from the Catholic school saw her and ran across the road to hug her crying out in joy: “Erica, du lebst noch.” (“Erica, you are still alive.”)
A spell was broken for her and the fears eased, though it was another year before the fate of individual members of her family became clear, through the Red Cross tracing service. Her grandparents were among some 96 close and wider family members murdered in or on their way to the concentration camps.
Post-war, Erica studied at secretarial college in Tunbridge Wells, and it was through one of her “sisters”, Martha Preston, working in the offices of Bakelite, that she met her husband-to-be Wolfgang (John) Lustig-prean, son of a satirical anti-nazi journalist and former director of the Vienna Volksoper who had fled from Austria. At first this rather shy man did not impress her, and it was only when she recognised how well-read he was, and saw his intellect, that the relationship flourished.
In 1952 she was introduced in Vienna to her fiancé’s family. She was, she felt, just a poor Jewish middle-class refugee girl about to meet one of the most important aristocratic families in Austria. She was greeted by her husband’s great uncle, Field Marshall Duke Julius von Preanfeld, who clicked his heels and kissed her hand. Her father-in-law, Duke Karl von Lustig-prean von Preanfeld und Fella (director of the Vienna Conservatoire and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra) was just as charming and cultured. They bonded through a shared love of music and the arts, and thereafter trips to Austria became a pleasure.
Possessed of an infectious laugh, wit and energy, Erica shared with her husband a deep concern for the manner in which all refugees and vulnerable people are treated. She gave without fuss to refugee causes and homeless charities, and, after blindness struck her husband, she started to give to the RNIB and similar charities. Latterly she donated cash and clothing to assist Ukrainian refugees.
Having overcome the stigma of being declared an “enemy alien” at the beginning of the war, something which caused her and her “sisters” much pain and unease, she was alert to the choice of language when discussing the plight of refugees. As she grew older, she became even more determined to ensure that the Holocaust should not be forgotten, and regularly gave talks, especially to young people, while her family archive was deposited in the Wiener Holocaust Library.
Erica was a chairwoman of the Isle of Wight NSPCC, and served on the committee of the Isle of Wight branch of the National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts, editing and contributing to its newsletter until her death. She was also a regular host of a book club whose members read books in their original languages.
On her last day she was deliberating over which forthcoming opera performances to attend, organising a talk to mark Holocaust Memorial Day in January and planning a holiday in Aachen in July.
She died in her sleep after watching a performance of Tosca from Theater an der Wien on television.
In 1952 Erica married Wolfgang “John” Prean, who was chairman of the English Table Tennis Association from 1986-91. He predeceased her in 2013 and she is survived by their two sons, Carl, a former table tennis international and Olympian, and Duncan, a former naval officer and director of Brighton Fringe.