Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.
From Hilda’s diary on her 8th birthday:
I hate my birthday. I wish I were never born. Grandmother wishes it too. She says that I killed my mother. How could I kill my mother? I didn’t even know my mother. Grandmother is always telling me I should be grateful to her for bringing me to her house and forgiving me for killing my mother, and for not putting me into an orphan asylum. I know the Orphan Asylum; we go past it sometimes on the streetcar. It is a big gray house. Sometimes the children are playing in the yard, and they are gray too. Their dresses are grey and they are all the same, and the little girls have no hair ribbons. I love hair ribbons. Grandmother says that if it wasn’t for her, that is where I would be. Or else, my father would get married again and I would have a very cruel stepmother who would beat me, and starve me, and make me do all the hard work, and only buy pretty clothes for just her own children, like the one in Cinderella. She says that as long as she lives, that I must remember how good she was to me, and be grateful to her.
Growing up, the names Tillie and Hilda meant little to me. I knew they were important to my mother’s and uncle’s escape from Austria. Tillie’s name was always mentioned with an aura of awe and fear – she was a force to be reckoned with. Hilda’s diary sheds a light on some of these family dynamics – or helps me imagine them.
Poor little Hilda was raised by her strict grandparents and aunt, never knew her mother and was made to feel responsible for her death. No wonder she felt such kindness and kinship for her second cousins Robert and Paul Zerzawy, who lost both their mother and step-mother while young boys.
When Eva and Harry left their parents behind in Vienna and came to the U.S., Harry lived with Hilda and Nathan Firestone. Later in life, Harry expressed regret that he hadn’t properly appreciated their hospitality – he felt that he was being “given” to the Firestones to be the child they never had. He resented the idea of these surrogate parents, knowing that his own parents were alive in Vienna and hopefully coming soon to San Francisco. As I imagine the hospitality through Hilda’s eyes, she was trying to provide a warm and welcoming home for a boy who was missing his mother, because she knew how hard it was to be in that situation.