Walter fled Nazi-occupied Vienna and later joined the United States Army, where he served as a Ritchie Boy, part of an elite group of Jewish, German-speaking intelligence officers, and was stationed in Germany as a Counterintelligence Agent during World War II. Lillian was a Holocaust Survivor who lived through the Hungarian ghetto, Auschwitz, Bremen, and a death march, before being liberated from Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945.

After the war, Walter was appointed to oversee displaced persons in Frankfurt, where he met Lillian during her second year of medical school at the University of Frankfurt. They married and immigrated to the United States in 1947. They built a life defined not by what was taken from them, but by their contributions, work ethic, charitable efforts, and their values which shaped the next generation. Their journey was documented in Lillian’s memoir entitled “And The Month Was May” and in her Shoah Foundation interview.