Helene was a precocious and voracious reader and an aspiring writer from an early age. She hung around her father’s print shop and wanted to write for his weekly newspaper, the Biela-Zeitung. After coming to the United States, Helene wrote down some of her childhood memories.

Helene was the youngest of a large family and seems to have been her father’s pet. Her sister Ida was much older and her eldest son Paul was born when Helene was 9. Although her nephews were closer to siblings in age to her, Helene thought of them throughout their lives as contemporaries of her own children (who were decades younger than their cousins!). Three of her nephews were soldiers in World War I and wrote many letters home to their family, even as prisoners of war. By then, Helene was living in Vienna.