By the time Gretl Hitchman was born in Vienna in 1914, her father, Eduard Hitschmann (the name was later anglicized), had already become a productive contributor to the young field of psychoanalysis. She remembers from early childhood the gradual transformation of her father's consulting rooms—in the Old World tradition, they adjoined the family residence—from those of a successful internist to those of a pioneering psychoanalyst. A couch and Persian rugs appeared. The lights were dimmed and the doors closed, lending an air of secrecy and exclusion. Her father's meetings and social occasions brought her near those central to this new science. When Gretl Hitchman describes Freud's kindness, Ferenczi's loud voice and laughter that carried through the house, Richard Sterba's friendliness when he arrived for his analytic hour, or the special table settings for entertaining the Hartmanns, it is with a richness of detail that brings the era alive.
In 1932 at the age of 18, Gretl entered medical school at the University of Vienna, where her father's work was met with skepticism and at times ridicule. Six years later, the Anschluss brought her studies to an abrupt halt. On March 13, 1938, Gretl left her post as a psychiatrist-in-training at the psychiatric clinic of the University of Vienna Hospital, made her way home through fighting in the streets, and informed her parents that she was leaving for England with the intention of immigrating to the United States. Later that day she boarded a train for Basel, alone, and at the age of 23 left Vienna. Gretl Hitchman arrived in New York City in November of that year. There she completed her psychiatric residency and received psychoanalytic training at the New York Institute, with special emphasis in child analysis. In 1941 she married fellow analyst Sydney Margolin. In 1955 they moved their young family to Denver, where she became affiliated with the University of Colorado Medical School and the Division of Child Psychiatry, from which she ventured enthusiastically into the community and the schools to meet the children where they were. Often these children were the disadvantaged ones who might otherwise never have dreamed of receiving her help, as she kept alive in the shadow of the Rockies the pioneering, humanitarian legacy of those early days in Vienna.