Evelyn Torton was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria. Max Torton, her father, came originally from Buchach, a small town which at that time would have been regarded as Polish. (Since 1944 it has been in Western Ukraine.) Her mother, born Irma Lichtmann, was from Vienna. Politics in Austria became increasingly polarised during the 1930s, and around the time of Evelyn's birth the country became a one-party dictatorship. The Austrian government came increasingly under German influence. Following Austria's integration into an enlarged Germany in March 1938 antisemitism became a mainstream element of government policy: in 1938 Max Torton was arrested and taken to the Dachau concentration camp. The rest of family were obliged to leave their Vienna apartment and move into a ghetto. Here they lived with other families in a multi-occupancy apartment. By 1939 Max Torton had been transferred to Buchenwald concentration camp, and then released under circumstances that never became clear. That year six year old Evelyn, together with her parents and her younger brother Edgar, fled to Italy where the family settled for a couple of months in Milan. It was only possible to obtain four visas, and they had to leave Evelyn's maternal grandmother, who had always lived with the family, behind in Vienna. She would later be deported by the Nazi authorities and murdered. By the time she reached New York with her parents in June 1940 she was seven. Her father told her that theirs had been the last emigrant ship permitted to leave Italy for the United States. Her younger brother Edgar had remained in Europe, but he would survive the Holocaust and emigrate to New York after the war.