Ellie Grasse was born on March 13, 1929 in Bad Vöslau, Austria to Leopoldine and Karl Hacker. There were not many Jews in her town, and her family was not particularly observant, so Ellie was not aware they were Jewish until incidents of antisemitism began affecting her at school in the early 1930s.

Antisemitic threats drove Ellie and her family from Bad Vöslau to Vienna; but following Hitler’s Anschluss, they fled Austria altogether as conditions for Jews worsened. The family eventually made their way to Shanghai.

You can read Ellie’s full story in the article below, entitled, Not Monte Carlo: Ellie Grasse’s Journey from Bad Vöslau to Shanghai and Beyond, written by Professor Kevin Ostoyich.

 

 

Left: Ellie Grasse with Danny Spungen, reviewing her photo albums. February 15, 2019.

 

[Note: Our website is a work in progress. More photos and artifacts of Ellie’s will be added to this page. In the meantime, if you have any questions about Ellie or the following article, please send an email to Mikayla Hoppe at: mikayla@spungenfoundation.org]