CENTER TWP - Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, or what Melitta Garbuny calls Yom HaShoah.

She has only recently begun talking about her experiences as a Jew in Austria in the lead up to the Holocaust.

In fact, Garbuny's children never heard most of the stories she told a crowd of 400 in November, when she spoke at her childhood school in Vienna.

"If we don't reveal it, it will repeat itself," said Garbuny, 85, of Center Township. "It's important that people know those things really did happen."

Garbuny was 14 years old in 1938 and living in Vienna with her parents, brother and sister when suddenly things changed.

"Everything changed with the Anschluss," she said. "The Nazis took over Austria, and marched into Vienna. I stood on the sidewalk and watched the goose-stepping Nazi soldiers, the armored tanks and the German warplanes flying overhead."

Synagogues were vandalized, and the Jewish people lost their citizenship.

"You got the rug pulled out from under you," she said.

Her parents had to disappear.

"One day my parents were there; the next day they weren't," she said. Still today she doesn't know where they went. She and her siblings were left in the care of an aunt.

"Soon after they departed, there was a terrible pounding on the door. Thugs in brown shirts with swastika armband on their sleeves demanded that I fetch a pail of water and a toothbrush," she said in the speech. "I cannot describe the humiliation of being 14 years old and forced to scrub the sidewalk."

Her parents had left to avoid the roundups of adults. They went somewhere to hide for a few weeks until things calmed down, Garbuny said.

Her parents thought ahead enough to pack up belongings and ship them to New York. Garbuny said her father had no idea the family would eventually immigrate there, but he thought it was a safe place.

That move saved most of the family heirlooms. Garbuny has one of the family area rugs in her living room and glass in the china cabinet.

Meanwhile, people on the street were treating her differently and her school was declared a "Jew School."

Her family reunited, and her father, through connections in France, was able to get the family safely to Paris in 1938, where she spent about a year.

Going to school there was not a problem, she said, because she was brought up bilingual. When it was time to leave the City of Lights, her family debated between moving to Palestine, London or New York.

Garbuny and her brother went to their parents and begged to go to New York.

"It was the land of golden opportunity," she said.

It was the best choice for the family, she said, because her mother couldn't practice medicine in Palestine and her father was wary of staying in Europe as Wold War II approached.

When they hit Ellis Island, the family split up, and Garbuny and her family went to public schools to learn English, and she and her brother were sent off to Vermont for summer camps.

She finished high school, went to college and then on to graduate school. She took her turn as Rosie the Riveter, and even spent some time working as a statistician in the Surgeon General's office.

She married a Pittsburgh man, moved there, and raised her two daughters. After the children started school she started teaching math at private high schools.

She then moved on with her life. However, she returned to Vienna often. Her brother moved back permanently after the war, and she visited him every few years.

Fast forward to May 2008 when Garbuny got an invitation to return to the school she left behind. She was excited, said her daughter Ellen Garbuny. She agreed to attend the ceremony in honor of the 70th anniversary of the Anschluss and even give a speech.

Garbuny and 14 of her closest family members children, their spouses and grandchildren made it a vacation of sorts.

The Austrian president spoke and offered up an apology to those directly affected and their families. That meant a lot, Ellen Garbuny said. Next, Garbuny's speech brought the audience to tears, her daughter said.

During a reception afterward, the children's choir there took a moment to sing "Happy Birthday" to Garbuny on turning 85.

Ellen Garbuny said she hadn't heard the stories her mother told before. The family all knew their mother had been exiled from Vienna, but it wasn't something to talk about. Now, her sister Carole Vogel works to chronicle family history.

Garbuny didn't want to be portrayed as a victim.

"We were lucky," she said.

She knows many of her classmates and family members "didn't make it." And, she doesn't want them forgotten.

To read Garbuny's story in her own words, visit www.recogitionscience.com/personal/austriaweb.