Edith London didn’t live to see the check from Austriathat nation’s attempt toward restitution for what it stole from her family before World War II.
The payment of $54,792.87 is far too little, and too late.
London, a longtime Denverite, was born Edith Frydmann von Prawy in 1917 to Austro-Hungarian Jewish nobility. Her parents split not long after her birth.
The mother, raising Edith and her older brother, Marcel, in Salzburg, killed herself when the children were very young. The father took in his boy in Vienna but sent Edith — whose paternity was in question — to live with strangers.
Then came the Anschluss and World War II, during which father and son fled the country. Edith avoided death camps because her biological father may have been a Christian. As a young woman, she was drafted into wartime service as an accountant.
Fast forward to the war’s end, when, hospitalized for trauma, she met and married Hans Strassers, who had lost his family in German camps and changed his name to John London. The coupled immigrated to the U.S. in 1952 and decided not to have children because, they told friends, the world could be so cruel.
They settled into a quiet life in Denver where he worked as an engineer for General Motors and she as an accountant for a sugar beet company. They spent as much time as they could exploring Rocky Mountain National Park, which reminded them of home. They took pictures of wildlife, hiked in the autumn leaves and picnicked on the shores of Sprague Lake, Edith’s favorite spot.
When John died in 2002, she spread his ashes in the shadow of Mount Evans. Then she contacted the Rocky Mountain Nature Association, the nonprofit supporting the park, to donate his photography equipment. She scolded the group’s director, Curt Buchholtz, for calling her “Edith” rather than “Mrs. London” over the phone.
“She was very icy during that conversation and reminded me over the years about my lack of formality,” he says.
“She was actually kind of a gruff and stern old lady,” adds Rick Whipple, executor of London’s estate.
Edith died in 2007 at age 89 and surprised the association by bequeathing $3.2 million, the bulk of what she owned, to its fund supporting programs for young people. It pays college students to work on trails and for internships in conservation. It was her gift to the kids she never had.
Buchholtz eulogized his friend and benefactor at her small funeral. He spread her ashes, like those of her husband, at Mount Evans. But it wasn’t until after her death that he came to know more about her. In Edith’s papers he found letters from her brother, Marcel Prawy, who had moved back to Austria and became that country’s best-known opera and theater critic.
Prawy had tried over the years to reunite with his sister and rebuild ties tattered by war and betrayal. It was obvious from his letters that Edith — who kept quiet about the details of her youth — was reluctant to reconcile.
“It’s hard to know all the reasons. But it was clear she felt left behind,” Buchholtz says.
Before Prawy’s death in 2003, he had applied for restitution for the property Austria took from his family. Of nearly 100,000 claims made on the $210 million fund, his was among the 20,000 granted for a portion of what they were actually worth. The payments are tokens of that country’s “moral responsibility for losses and damages,” reads a May 12 letter from Vienna.
Prawy left much of his estate, including his restitution claim, to his sister. In the name of reconciliation, the $54,792.87 will fund youth programs in the park where, far from Edith’s homeland, she felt most at home.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
