Hanny Hieger (neé Spiegl) was born in 1923, in Vienna. Her parents Rudolf and Josefine owned a soda-water factory in Zurndorf, inherited from her grandfather. Besides this her father also dealt with agricultural machinery. Hanny grew up in a house where only the main Jewish festivities were celebrated, Rosh Hashana and Jom Kippur. Like her brother Fritz and other children from Zurndorf, she visited the evangelical primary school, from where her parents then took her out due to anti-semitic discrimination, and brought her to relatives in Vienna. On the very day of Austria's "Anschluss", the incorporation of Austria into the "Third German Reich", her father was arrested and held in a provisional concentration camp in Frauenkirchen and later transferred to Vienna. The soda-water factory was seized, their mother had to hand over all their personal belongings to the Nazis and was forced to leave Zurndorf. The Spiegl family found refuge at their mother's sister in Vienna. Their father was released in the summer of 1938, in the night of pogroms from 9/10th November 1938 their father was arrested again, but released soon after. Hanny's father was keen to go to Hungary and wait for further developments, but her mother was determined to leave the country. She was successful in getting her children Fritz and Hanny onto a Kindertransport to London, organised by the Worship-community. In February of 1939, Hanny left Austria and her family in the direction of London. Her parents were able to flee in time to Bolivia. Hanny was taken in by the Jones and later by the Townsend family in North England. After the beginning of the war she was put into a childrens' home. She began working as a seamstress in a factory, where British army uniforms were made. During this time she joined the Youth movement "Young Austria" and came into contact with communists living in English exile. In 1942 she got married, in 1944 her daughter was born, she got divorced however soon after her return to Vienna in 1945. In 1951 she moved in with her daughter to her parents who had in the meantime left Bolivia for Montevideo. Her mother died soon afterwards. Hanny Hieger married for the second time and stayed in South America. She worked in various different countries of South America as translator in firms and with development projects of the United Nations. In 1970 she returned to Austria. She found employment at the Foreign Ministry and was sent to the Embassy in Columbia. In 1976 she applied to be transferred to the Austrian Embassy in East Germany, where she worked until she retired.