A lot of contemporaries talk about the changes in 1938. From the moment the National Socialists took power they experienced violence, hunger, discrimination, persecution, deportation and murder. Antisemitism was rampant in Austria before 1938.
Gundl Herrnstadt-Steinmetz remembers the following episode:
You already read Gundl Herrnstadt-Steinmetz’s biography. Her sister Selma was part of the communist resistance movement, first in Austria and from 1937 onwards in France. Years after World War II she became the first librarian of the Dokumentationsarchivs des österreichischen Widerstands (Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance).