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Photograph by Daniel Sato

Phyllis Mattson

WWII orphan is sharing her story for Holocaust Remembrance

By JASON GOLDMAN-HALL

While most Holocaust stories are full of divided families, painful loss and tales of survival against all odds, Cupertino resident Phyllis Mattson's also includes two oceans, three continents and more than 250 personal letters.

"I think it's a little bit of history that needs to be told," Mattson said.

That story will be told throughout the country on April 25--Holocaust Remembrance Day. Leading up to the day of remembrance, Mattson has been promoting her book War Orphan in San Francisco, a collection of the letters she and her family wrote during their time apart.

After being driven out of their home in Vienna, Austria, Mattson's family found itself swept up in events that dispersed its members across the globe. Mattson herself joined almost 1,000 other Jewish children on a boat bound for San Francisco. Her father fled to England and ended up as a prisoner of war, and her mother was imprisoned in German slave camps.

The English interned her father after the Nazis attacked because he was Austrian, much as the United States interned Japanese-Americans--out of fear of the enemy.

After a failed attempt to move the English prisoners to Canada, he ended up in Australia. Her mother never left Europe and died in 1942. All the while, Mattson was in the Bay Area, in foster homes and orphanages. She and her father were later reunited, and she ended up raising a family in the Bay Area, working as a community college teacher in the South Bay.