Sue and Claude Corty wrote autobiographies in the 1990s about their childhoods in the 1930s. They reflected on how the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany in 1933 and Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938 altered their lives. In addition, they reflected on emigrating with their parents in 1938 (Sue from Vienna; Claude from Cologne). With the autobiographies as a foundation, Carney researches the history of both families, exploring their experiences as middle-class Jews in interwar Austria and Germany, examining the circumstances under which they emigrated, and investigating their lives after coming to the US. Their stories are important because they represent the millions of Jews who were persecuted by the Nazis, the hundreds of thousands of Jews who emigrated, and the Jews who survived when members of their families were among the six million who died in the Holocaust. Telling their stories humanizes those statistics and transforms persecution from an abstract concept into a concrete example of the consequences of antisemitism.

Amy Carney is an Associate Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University, the Behrend College, where she teaches courses on modern European and German History as well as the History of Science. Her current project is a microhistory of the Corty and Pisko families. Both families were Jewish, and they emigrated from Nazi Germany prior to the Second World War and eventually settled in Brookline, Massachusetts, where Claude Corty and Sue Pisko met and got married. Amy’s focus while in Vienna is delving into the history of the Pisko family and the circumstances that led to their emigration. Also, as part of this project, Amy is co-editing a cookbook of Central European family recipes with Sue’s and Claude’s son, Eric Corty, and is enjoying the challenge of learning how to make an authentic Sacher Torte. In addition, she is co-authoring several articles about the Pisko family for the Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum’s History of the German-Jewish Diaspora project.