For the past 13 summers, Erica Ausch has led hour-long water aerobics classes for fellow residents at the Oceans Condominiums on Atlantic Avenue. “Raise hands, bring them over your head, then down to your sides,” Ausch calls out. “Kick right side, arms out, then left, 10 times.”
“We call her ‘the world’s best teacher’,” says Evelyn Dowdy.
“She works your arms and legs, all your joints,” adds Dowdy’s sister Anne Holcombe. “As we get older, it’s what we need to do.”
For Ausch, it’s the latest chapter in a life that began in Kittsee, Austria, where in 1938 at age 2, her family hid out on a marooned barge on the Danube River with dozens of other Jews, relying on food from strangers to survive the coming Nazi invasion. “We were lucky,” she recalls. “We had relatives in Norfolk and were able to obtain affidavits to leave.”
Once here, “my father, who had run a tavern in Austria, took odd jobs at Hofheimer’s and Stein Furniture, before saving enough money to buy the Newport Delicatessen on 35th Street,” says Ausch.
He would change its name to his own, Reisner’s, and bring Ausch and her husband Eddie into the business, which became one of the first tenants in Janaf Shopping Center in 1964. “We sold a lot of sandwiches and wine until retiring in 1996,” she says.
Linda Ausch, one of their three daughters, took over and moved it to Great Neck Road before closing. Today it’s a Jimmy John’s.
Linda, who works in development part time for United Jewish Federation of Tidewater, lives with her mom at the Oceans (Eddie, Ausch’s soulmate for 60 years, died in 2013). “My mother’s amazing,” she says. “So healthy that her cardiologist recently said, ‘come back in a year instead of six months;’ maybe it’s because of her lifestyle.”
At 90, Holocaust Survivor Erica Ausch shows no signs of slowing down
