United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Helen Otley (1911-2003) was born Helen Schlesinger, the daughter of Moritz (1880-1956) and Helene (1891-1975, née von Schelken) Schlesinger in Vienna on 13 October 1911. Her father was a civil servant, and the family lived in the working class district of Rudolfsheim, and also included a brother, Otto (1925-1944). As a child, her father was posted to Zagreb during World War I, and Helen and her mother joined him there until the end of the war, when they returned to Vienna. Helen attended the University of Vienna from 1930-1937, studying mathematics and science hoping to become a teacher. Due to her political activism with the Social Democratic Party, this career path was closed to her after the right-wing coup of 1934. Instead, earned a doctoral degree in 1937. Although unemployed for some time, following the annexation of Austria by Germany, she applied for a job as a research physicist for a firm in Berlin-Köpenick, and moved there in 1939. In 1940, she accepted a job with Zeiss-Ikon in Dresden, and in early 1942 took another position with Siemens, and returned to Berlin. Just before a planned return to Vienna in September 1942, she was arrested by the Gestapo, due to her contact over the years with a circle of friends in Berlin who were communists and Social Democrats. In November 1942, she was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Although one of her grandparents was Jewish, because his birth certificates and other documents had been lost, she denied being Jewish, and at Auschwitz was housed with other foreign and political prisoners, as a forced laborer. In March 1943, she was taken from Auschwitz back to Berlin, and was placed on trial for treason, for her previous association with communists. She was convicted and given a sentence of two and a half years, including time already served, and sent to a prison in Leipzig, and worked as a forced laborer in a factory and in agricultural work. She was released in March 1945 and returned to Vienna prior to the end of the war. Her parents still lived there, but her brother, who had been conscripted into the Wehrmacht, was killed on the Eastern Front in 1944. She worked as a physicist, and married a colleague, Karl Beck, in 1951. After Beck's death from cancer in 1960, she renewed her acquaintance with an old friend who had immigrated to the United States, Kurt Otley, and the two married in 1962 and she moved to Rockville, Maryland, where she lived the remainder of her life. She died on 13 January 2003.
folder 1
Memoir, typescript, 78 pages, titled"Meine Lebensgeschichte bis Ende des Krieges im Jahr 1945" by Helen Otley, as well as an English translation of the same, titled"The Story of My Life" as well as copies of documents relating to her imprisonment at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and two newspaper articles about her life story, from 1994. The memoir describes her childhood in Vienna and Zagreb, her family's history, Vienna during the 1930s, her political activism as a Social Democrat during her university years, her search for work in Germany following the annexation of Austria, and her employment in Berlin and Dresden until her arrest in 1942, as well as her years as a prisoner in Auschwitz and Leipzig, and her post-war life.
Helen Otley collection