Published: 4 September 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
CAROLINE WELLBERY’S FATHER, the late German literary scholar Egon Schwarz, fled Austria with his family after the Nazis annexed the country in 1938, when he was 15. Schwarz ended up studying in the United States and then teaching at Harvard and Washington University in St. Louis.
His escape was “a deeply life-changing event for him, and it permeated our household for the entirety of our lives,” said Wellbery, a physician and medical educator at the Georgetown University School of Medicine who lives in Maryland.
Schwarz didn’t feel animosity toward the nation that had ousted him, Wellbery said. Still, he always had a desire to reconnect with his ancestral roots.
Now Wellbery, who turns 67 this month, is trying to do that for him by applying for Austrian citizenship under a new amendment to the country’s citizenship law that goes into effect Tuesday.
“It seems like there was a wish to bring the story to some kind of closure, and that is part of why I am interested in pursuing this,” she said.
Wellbery is among thousands of Jews around the world expected to apply.
FULL STORY ‘This will completely change Jewish life in Austria’ (JTA)
Photo: Clockwise, from top left: Daniel Gros, a Jewish attorney in Vienna advising Jews on how to apply for Austrian citizenship; and Elana Dunn-Rennert, Paul Burg and Caroline Wellbery, who are all applying (Courtesy of Gros, Dunn-Rennert, Burg and Wellbery)
