“She described [the voyage to Shanghai] as a surreal vacation being on first class, especially after being treated so shabbily in Austria,” Vogel said.
In Shanghai, the Dollingers lived in the crowded and impoverished ghetto to which stateless refugees were restricted, and Gisela worked for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which was distributing clothing and other aid there.
In December 1948, exactly 10 years after leaving Austria, the Dollingers departed China for the nascent State of Israel.
After the hardships of the Shanghai ghetto and the typhoid bout, Dollinger and her husband were leery of life in a new and embattled country, even though most of Dollinger’s relatives were there, Vogel said. Since Bernard had sisters in the United States who urged them to come, the couple moved to New York in 1950.
They soon settled in a rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment in the East Village, where she would live more than 60 years. He painted houses, and she worked at an envelope factory. The couple frequently hosted friends for bridge games. When they received reparations money from Germany for a relative who had been killed in the Holocaust, they put the entire sum into a scholarship fund at an Israeli university. (Vogel was not sure which one.)
Despite their relatively modest circumstances, Dollinger, whose father had sold men’s and women’s clothing in Austria, was a sharp dresser, Vogel said.
“By touch she could tell a fabric and its quality,” she said. “She was a size 6 all her life except near the end, and all her clothes were absolutely, completely fitted.
“She was a very elegant lady, very concerned about the appearance she gave. She wasn’t vain, but she had just been taught that when you go out, or even when you’re at home, you get dressed and present your best foot forward.”
What was the secret to her extremely long life?
Vogel said Dollinger participated in an academic study on longevity among Ashkenazi Jews, and that aside from being blessed with good genes, her great-great aunt thought “maybe her purpose was to bring together the far-flung relatives.”
“She served as the uniter of the family — she had nieces and nephews in Argentina, Switzerland, England, Israel and Austria,” Vogel said. “She became the place where people connected and the purveyor of information. When she was too old to get out much, her currency became the stories people told her.”
Dollinger and her husband had postponed having their own children for various reasons — the war economy in Austria, the Nazis, the difficult life in wartime Shanghai — and by the time they reached the United States, where raising a child was possible, Dollinger was already in her late 40s.
“She had up until the end the most phenomenal memory — she knew if someone’s baby was due, if someone was up for a new job, if someone was on vacation — she always had this list of things in her head,” Vogel said. “Everyone who called, she knew what was going on in their life. She really cared.”
Dollinger kept up not just with her family’s news but with current events, making a point of voting in every election, Vogel said.
In his 2008 victory speech, President-elect Obama referenced a 106-year-old voter who had been profiled on CNN. Upon reading about it in The New York Times, Dollinger, who was the same age, apparently said, “They should’ve written about me, but I’m not a publicity hound.”
Although she died at Beth Israel on March 10, having checked in a few days before her death, Dollinger managed to remain in her home, with the help of caregivers, until the end.