Voices from the Holocaust

by Jon E. Lewis

  (3) The affairs of religious associations are not affected.

  (4) The conditions of service of teachers in Jewish public schools remain unchanged until the issuance of new regulations for the Jewish school system.

  § 5 (1) A Jew is anyone descended from at least three grandparents who are fully Jewish as regards race. § 2, Paragraph 2, Sentence 2 applies.

  (2) Also deemed a Jew is a Jewish Mischling subject who is descended from two fully Jewish grandparents and

  a. who belonged to the Jewish religious community when the law was issued or has subsequently been admitted to it;

  b. who was married to a Jew when the law was issued or has subsequently married one;

  c. who is the offspring of a marriage concluded by a Jew, within the meaning of Paragraph 1, after the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour of 15 September 1935 (RGBI. I, p.1146) took effect;

  d. who is the offspring of extramarital intercourse with a Jew, within the meaning of Paragraph 1, and will have been born out of wedlock after 31 July 1936.

  § 6 (1) Requirements regarding purity of blood exceeding those in § 5 that are set in Reich laws or in directives of the National Socialist German Workers Party and its units remain unaffected.

  (2) Other requirements regarding purity of blood that exceed those in § 5 may be set only with the consent of the Reich Minister of the Interior and the Deputy of the Führer. Insofar as requirements of this kind already exist, they will become void as of 1 January 1936, unless approved by the Reich Minister of the Interior in agreement with the Deputy of the Führer. Application for approval is to be made to the Reich Minister of the Interior.

  § 7 The Führer and Reich Chancellor may grant exemptions from provisions of the implementation decree.

  These Nuremberg Laws legitimized anti-Semitism, defined Jewishness with a pedantic exactitude – including the status of Mischling, or part-Jews – and made ‘Aryan blood’ a legal concept. What tattered and few legal rights the Jews had retained were formally at an end.

  Effectively, Jews were now isolated from the general population of Germany. As if to underline the point, placards appeared at the entrance to hundreds of towns and villages, declaring ‘Jews not wanted’. Thousands of Jews emigrated from Germany. Meanwhile, the anti-Semitic successes of the Nazis in Germany emboldened their fellow-travellers in neighbouring countries.

  ‘Litigious politics entered the classroom’: A Jewish Childhood in Vienna, 1933–8

  GEORGE WEIDENFELD

  Born in 1919, George Weidenfeld belonged to Vienna’s large upper class. His ‘sunny youth’ was rudely interrupted by the growing confidence of Austria’s Nazis following Hitler’s accession to power in Germany in 1933.

  From our windows overlooking the main road leading from the centre of Vienna to the suburbs, we were able to gauge any political demonstration – Left, Right or centre – as there were assembly points on little squares near our house. On that particular day I suddenly heard unfamiliar staccato noises and well-rehearsed choruses. Leaning from the balcony, I saw serried ranks of brown-shirted youths in tight black trousers and jackboots, led by officers. No military band, just choruses: ‘Germany awake, Judah perish.’ The leader of each platoon would cup his hands to his mouth and shout ‘Heil Adolf’ in a long drawl, and the followers would complete the slogan with a clipped ‘Hit-ler’. The leader would continue, legato, with ‘Germany’, and the crowd would answer: ‘Awake’. The leader would resume with ‘Judah’, the crowd with ‘Perish’. And so it went on, slogan after slogan.

  After the first thousand or so uniformed and disciplined crack formations had passed our house, an even more frightening sensation was in store. Huge bands of white-shirted and white-stockinged novices of the Nazi Party, who clearly had neither the money nor, as yet, the status to wear the appropriate uniforms and insignia, marched in seemingly endless rows, shaking their fists at passers-by, stopping at corners, jostling and nudging stunned onlookers and singing in growling tones the early songs of the ‘Heroic Age’ of the Hitler movement: the Horst-Wessel song, ‘Volk ans Gewehr’ (‘People to the Rifle’) and others. Their performance was not as well rehearsed as that of the Brown Shirts, but its effect was all the more menacing and primeval. Later, as a specialist in German propaganda at the BBC during the war, I made a closer study of Nazi Party music, but even then I was intuitively aware of the two radically different strands of music that reflected the two poles of the Hitler movement: the nihilistic, destructive, expressionist beat of metal heels on urban pavements, and the romantic, lilting, folkloristic sounds of the countryside, the melancholy ballad, the green forest, the wind, the snow and the sea.

  By the time the last few thousand white shirts with the swastika armlets had marched by, dusk had fallen, torches had been lit, voices, hoarse from all the shouting, had become even more threatening until at last, as I stretched my neck to the left in the direction of the suburbs, the crowds seemed to be thinning out. The rearguard was a regiment, again, of uniformed, well-disciplined Brown Shirts and four rows of drummers wearing black jackets over their brown shirts – the SS, the newly created elite formation of Hitler’s bodyguard regiment ...

  During these years, litigious politics entered the classroom. The fifty or so boys of my class in the Piaristen-Gymnasium were neatly divided into three camps. Nazis and Catholics were equal in number and accounted for 90 per cent. The rest were Socialists, but since my fellow pupils’ background was largely professional and upper-middle-class, practically all the remaining five to seven boys who had Socialist sympathies were Jews. We had a class parliament, an obligatory institution in all Viennese schools, and I represented the Socialist Jewish minority, which held the balance between the Nazis and the Catholic patriots. I was spokesman for my group, so from an early age I learned, often the hard way, how to operate between two evils – by playing off the Blacks against the Browns I was able to get concessions for my diminutive flock. We had a voice in determining the programmes of the twice-yearly concerts, which were politically charged. Nationalist marches or Verdi choruses predominated, whilst The Magic Flute was vetoed by the Nazis as Freemason propaganda.

  Even skiing or other excursions arranged by the school during the holidays had subtle political undertones. The winter outings have for ever dampened my enthusiasm for skiing. I remember one ordeal which started on the endless train journey to a Tyrolean mountain resort. Ten of us were crammed into one compartment: eight Nazis, another Jewish boy and myself. Feeling free and unfettered, our eight companions played with a miniature football which intermittently landed on my face. They sang nursery songs with improvised texts, of which the most harmless went: ‘Jew, Jew, spit in your hat and tell your mummy I like that.’ As the journey progressed, the verses became less innocent. References to knifing, shooting, the gallows and the guillotine crept in. Once we had arrived at our godforsaken destination, hardly had the Nazi contingent gulped down a supper consisting of hot lard, potatoes and coarse black bread than they rushed off parading swastikas and singing raucous songs. The Catholic Conservative element imitated these displays with a rather feeble ‘patriotic’ camp fire, singing old regimental songs and lewd barrack-room ditties from Habsburg days. Our little band of Jews and Socialists, which was one and the same thing, huddled together, praying for the time to pass more swiftly.

  I had my revenge when it came to nominating the First Eleven for the school soccer cup. The Nazi head boy came up to me and declared, ‘We won’t have a Jew in the team this year.’ At the same time he insisted that we refrain from voting for a Catholic majority, warning, ‘There’ll be trouble for you if you do.’

  I stood my ground. ‘You won’t only have to have one, you’ll have to have two Jews on the team, or there’ll be trouble for you.’

  ‘Lick my arse. Take it or leave it, you can only have one Jew!’

  ‘Have it your way, but we’ll vote for an all-Catholic team and give up our place to the loyal supporters of the Government.�
��

  Silence.

  ‘All right, two Jews it will be.’

  We ended up with a ‘grand coalition’ of Nazis, Catholics and two Jews, one of whom – not myself, I need hardly say – scored the decisive goal in the final ...

  The Austrian Nazi Party gathered self-confidence, the Nazis in my school scented victory, and the school masters began to profess colour more overtly. More than half of them sided with Hitler. Quite a few of them, my favourite history teacher among them, were genuinely anti-Nazi, but the majority vacillated. There is a typically Austrian verb of Gallic provenance – ‘lavieren’ – which means moving in an undulating way, avoiding commitment, bending to the wind. Well, there was plenty of lavieren among the Piarist masters. Yet the attitude to Jews was complex. For instance, a Nazi master who taught German literature continued to treat me as his favourite up to the end. On the other hand, a semi-fascist, anti-Nazi Catholic persecuted me for my alien influence on the spirit of the class. I fell into a trap when, in a mood of reckless impudence, I once exposed him to derision. Professor H. liked to play a game. He used to challenge the class to offer famous quotations for which he would then give us the source – and vice versa. When my turn came, I recited a two-line verse in the style of a classical elegiac distich:

  Just as the rosy dawn appeared on the distant horizon,

  Xerxes reached for his luminous chalice.

  Professor H. hesitated and frowned, uncertain as to what to say. Stunned silence reigned in the class. The tension grew until an embarrassed Professor H. finally declared himself defeated, muttering, ‘I fear I don’t know.’

  I replied demurely, ‘Weidenfeld’s Collected Works.’

  He fulminated, ‘This is not just an impertinence, it’s typical of your race. You will leave the classroom and spend the rest of the day in the “dungeon”’ – a form of solitary confinement in an outhouse of the school building.

  Weidenfeld’s reaction to Nazism had been to become ‘more pronouncedly and consciously Jewish’, and as a teenager he joined the Zionist cause. By one of the contradictions of Nazism, Zionist Jews were preferred to assimilationist Jews, because the former generally wanted to leave Germany for Palestine and so accorded with the Nazi desire for Entjudung (de-Jewification) and Judenrein (a society and economy ‘cleansed of Jews’).

  * * *

  1938 was the year of the watershed, or perhaps more accurately the bloodshed, in Germany’s treatment of the Jews. Scenting the opportunity for an expansionist war, the Nazi regime ramped up its economic measures against them, obliging Jewish businesses to be ‘voluntarily’ transferred to ‘Aryan’ owners at the rate of more than 200 a month. In addition, tens of thousands of Jewish actors, musicians and journalists were removed from their jobs. The result was widespread impoverishment: by 1938 about 20 per cent of Germany’s Jews were in need. On 23 July all Jews were brought under the complete control of the police by a decree forcing them to carry identification cards. Three weeks later all male Jews were required to add the name of Israel to their given name on all legal documents, and all female Jews the name of Sarah. Ominously, the concentration camps at Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen were enlarged and arrangements made to exploit inmates’ labour. At Dachau prisoners were ordered to sew the Star of David on to uniforms; mass incarceration of Jews duly followed throughout the summer.

  This was also the year in which Austria was annexed by Germany – the Anschluss as it became known. Jews there were immediately deprived of civil rights and subjected to public humiliation. Jews in Germany proper had been subjected to Nazi anti-Semitic measures piecemeal; Jews in Austria had no chance for gradual acclimatization. Under Obersturmführer Adolf Eichmann, the SS Security Forces in Vienna operated so brutally – with arbitrary incarcerations in Mauthausen, beatings, the forced cleaning of public latrines and so on – that 500 Jews committed suicide in the four weeks following Anschluss. Within six months of Anschluss 45,000 Austrian Jews – mostly from Vienna, where they formed one-sixth of the population – chose to emigrate. George Weidenfeld was among them.

  Departure: A Young Student Leaves Vienna, July 1938

  GEORGE WEIDENFELD

  A group of friends and I banded together ‘consulate-hopping’ in search of a final safe haven. The United States had a rigid quota system and Austria could only lay claim to a tiny share. Britain was highly selective and Palestine was virtually closed to Jewish immigrants. Adolf Eichmann had taken up his post at the Rossauerlaender police station, seat of the Vienna Gestapo, and the first Zionist transports of illegal emigrants began to form. Many of my friends applied. The official Zionist organization in Jerusalem sent emissaries to make arrangements, among them the young, blue-eyed, blond Teddy Kollek, and the chubby, suave Ehud Avriel, both Viennese by birth and both kibbutz youth leaders in Palestine who were later to become commanding figures in the State of Israel, and intimate friends. The revisionist Zionists (one of whose underground leaders was the young Menachem Begin) organized their own transport. With the tacit help of the Gestapo, these illegal emigrants would assemble at dawn at the Danube quay and travel all the way down to the Black Sea and thence by unseaworthy boats to the shores of Palestine. My mother would not let me join any of these transports. She wanted me to hang on until my father’s release, and never gave up hope that we would depart as one family – uncles, grandmothers and all.

  My friends and I worked ceaselessly in search of an immigration target, exchanging news and information. Shanghai was a popular destination because it was fairly easy to get a visa, and the same was said to apply to various South American countries. But before long it became clear that some of the visas were ineffective, and we heard reports of immigrants being turned away at the border.

  I had a distant relative in London – the newly married wife of a doctor in Battersea. She had already done her best to bring her closest relations over and reluctantly sent me a carefully phrased letter stating that, once in England, she and her husband would look after me for a while so that I would not be a burden on the country. The letter was not strong enough to get me a British entry visa. We needed more British-born referees. I thought a few heavyweight names would help, so with two friends I went to the reading room of the British legation to consult Who’s Who. From there we copied addresses of those we thought to be eminent British Jews. There was no point, we agreed, in writing to legendary names like Rothschild, Montefiore, Bearsted, Reading or Samuel – we assumed that they must be flooded with requests – so we resolved instead to find less obvious candidates. We fell on the letter G and found the name of Viscount Greenwood. Feeling sure that this must be an Anglicized version of Gruenwald, I wrote him a long letter asking for support. He replied by return of post, coolly stating that he was unable to help and that, incidentally, he was a churchgoing Anglican. I also wrote to Lord Robert Cecil, because he was renowned for his humanitarian and staunch anti-Nazi views, and received a charming letter back in which he offered his support with the British passport authorities as well as help with my studies in England.

  Even this was not enough. But through the intervention of the Diplomatic Academy’s English tutor, the eccentric Welshman who wore summer suits throughout the year and looked like Ronald Colman in the role of a Foreign Legion officer, my mother and I obtained an interview with Captain Kendrick, the passport officer. Just as he was about to end the interview with a lugubrious mien and a shrug of his shoulders, my mother broke down and sobbed. Captain Kendrick relented and gave me the flimsiest of all visas – the right to enter England for a period of three months in transit to a final destination.

  I had a month to prepare for my departure. First I finished my exams, and then I embarked on a round of farewell visits. Those of us who were preparing to leave plunged into a febrile social season. Threatened with severance, old friendships and budding romances, deep love affairs and callous flirtations accelerated in pace, and marriages were impulsively arranged. There was a mood of intensity and reckless abandon in whi
ch conventional inhibitions suddenly disappeared. Countless bottle parties helped to drown the sense of sadness and despair whilst lubricating a sense of adventure enhanced by the lure of the unknown. The farewells were filled with black humour, ‘humour of the gallows’, as the German saying goes. We danced to the latest tunes and, when it was thought to be safe, sang biting parodies of the current Nazi anthems. The party given for me by one of my cousins and two female students at the academy ended to the strains of the hit of the moment, ‘The Lady is a Tramp’.

  A week before my departure I was allowed to see my father in prison. He shuffled to the interview grille, looking haggard and ashen-faced, his clothes smelling of prison detergents. The law prescribed that he sign a document ‘releasing me from parental authority’ to allow me to make proper business decisions. We spoke very little. On parting he held up his right hand, waving and bending it in some vague gesture of benediction. At that moment in the prison I felt I had formally come of age.

  One evening after a hot day at the end of July I left for the Western Railway Station with one suitcase, a postal order for sixteen shillings and sixpence in English money, an exam certificate from the Diplomatic Academy, a sheaf of curricula vitae of hapless friends wishing to join me in England and the blessings of many relatives and friends. My mother and grandmother, Uncle Kleinmann, the inveterate optimist, his wife and her spinster sister, my father’s secretary and two of his faithful card partners came to see me off. Even that little assembly was risky because the Gestapo especially discouraged Jewish farewell groups at railway stations.