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STUDENT IN THE NEWS:
Art of the Past

Lauren PresslerCollege usually is an exploration of the world around us, but for Willamette University junior Lauren Pressler, it’s also an exploration of her family’s history. In the new exhibit “Ludwig Salzer: Man of Letters,” now in the Willamette Art Building, Pressler has taken a bittersweet journey into her grandfather’s little-known past. It’s a journey touched with the horror of the Holocaust and the heartbreak of lost love, lost family and a lost world, a life soured by bitterness, compromise and fear.

“It’s not your usual exhibit about the Holocaust,” she said. “It’s not a story about a hero. It’s bittersweet. What he suffered was projected on his children and me, in a sense.”

Uncovering a Life in Turmoil
Pressler’s grandfather, born into a wealthy, educated and large Viennese family, fled Austria to Shanghai, China, in 1939 after the Anschluss — the annexation of Austria by Hitler and amid increasing persecution of Jews. Salzer later immigrated to Australia and then the U.S., working in various jobs, remarrying and fathering two children.

The fate of his six brothers is unknown; his father died of typhoid in a Polish ghetto; his mother’s fate is unknown; his grandmother died at Auschwitz; and his younger sister, Ilse, escaped to England.

With the drama and turmoil of his life, including leaving behind a gentile girlfriend, Salzer repressed his past and even hid his Jewishness, avoiding contact even with his sister. He did once take his family to Austria, but Pressler remembers that he didn’t linger over the places where he and his family had lived.

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