by Erich Hackl
The previous year Pepe had already transferred from the Socialist Workers’ Youth to the Communist Youth Association and it is clear that Gisela made the same decision, for in the biographical sketch it says that it was when distributing leaflets that the two of them “came into conflict with the police for the first time” (in Villach, presumably after the prohibition of the Austrian Communist Party in May thirty-three). It is pointless to ask who persuaded whom to switch from the Social Democratic to the Communist Party—even without each other, they would probably, out of longing and insight, have come to the same conclusion; in any case it is difficult to see Gisela taking the step out of a sense of duty or submissiveness to her friend. Even if she did, then it is more likely to have come about the way Hermann thinks it did, namely that his Uncle Andi carried Pepe, who was the same age, along with him politically; that is also suggested by what the historian August Walzl says in his 1944 book Gegen den Nationalsozialismus. Widerstand gegen die NS-Herrschaft in Kärnten, Slovenien und Friaul (Against National Socialism: Resistance to Nazi Rule in Carinthia, Slovenia and Friuli), that in Villach it was above all Josef Tschofenig, Gisela Taurer and her brother Andreas who had tried to build up a group of the Communist Youth Association. In any case, the Taurer family very early on felt a sense of belonging to the Austrian Communist Party which is why they immediately made contact with communist circles when Karl Taurer, under suspicion of being politically unreliable was transferred from Villach to Linz, so that the family moved there in 1935—at first to 1 Memhardstrasse, then after May 1936 to 30 Untergaumberg, in the municipality of Leonding. It is not known what occupation Gisela had in the first year after she finished school, whether she found work straight away. She missed her beloved mountains of Carinthia, it says in the biographical note.
SOME LIGHT—or perhaps a shadow—is cast on Pepe’s circumstances by the official documents, of which there are copies in the Archive of Austrian Resistance: born on September 3, 1913, in Pontafel (today Pontebba, Udine Province) as the son of a railroad worker. Three brothers and one sister: Albin, Franz, Hans and Hilde. After high school he attended a technical college for mechanical engineering, was a trainee metalworker for a short time, then in the State Labor Service as an unskilled construction worker (wages two schillings a day). According to a certificate of July 4, 1953, from the Villach police, between October 1932 and February 1937 Josef Tschofenig was ‘taken into police custody here’ eight times for, among other things, lying under oath, causing malicious damage and communist activity. He was also twice detained in the prison of the Klagenfurt district court for the crime of high treason and presumed participation in the February uprising of 1934. On the advice of the Villach police, on April 12, 1934, the Director of Security for the State of Carinthia issued an instruction that “in order to prevent disturbances of public order, tranquillity and security” Tschofenig was to be detained in Wöllersdorf internment camp from July 14, 1934, to September 1, 1935. “The person in question is well-known as a radical member of the Communist Party and, despite the current ban, was the ‘political head’ of the Communist Party in Villach and the surrounding area.”
In July 1935 Pepe was released early after he had, “of his own free will,” made a written declaration, “that after my release from custody I will refrain from any activity hostile to the state on behalf of a party forbidden in Austria, in particular the Social Democratic or Communist Party, and will strictly and loyally observe the laws and regulations in force in Austria” (observe instead of obey: a slip of the pen or an ironic play on words, unfortunately of no practical effect). At the end of February 1937 Pepe was once again to be locked up in Wöllersdorf, as ever “in order to prevent disturbances of the public order, tranquillity and security” and because “on the basis of the testimony of reliable informants and of his journey to and his time spent in the Czechoslovak Republic, about the purpose of which he refuses to give any information, as well as of his well-known radical political attitude to the Communist Party, which is banned from any activity in Austria, he is to be deemed one of those persons who willfully promote endeavors hostile to the state and the government.” But he clearly disappeared in order to escape imprisonment, for in a short biography written between 1951 and 1955, which can be consulted in the Central Archives of the Austrian Communist Party, it says that Tschofenig went underground in 1937 in order to avoid a lengthy period in Wöllersdorf. He was, it goes on, then active in the Spain Task Force and as an instructor in the provincial commission for the Western federal states.
The Spain Task Force—that means the transport organization that supported Austrian Volunteers in their efforts to get to Spain clandestinely in order to fight for the Republic in the civil war. There was a need for people to assist them in Tyrol and Vorarlberg, for concealed contact points for them to report to in Switzerland, and for the money to allow the volunteers to travel on by train, at least to Paris, where they were looked after by a committee and sent on to the Spanish border. In the middle of March thirty-seven the Austrian police managed to break up the illegal office of the transport organization, though that only interrupted its activity for two months. Pepe was not one of those caught up in the wave of arrests.
It is not that easy to associate the photo from 1933, the one of the ski outing on the Oisternig, with the images that arise when looking through the confirmations of arrest, court decisions and official notifications. Or when imagining Pepe’s life on the run, with forged papers. Years of keeping to the strict rules of life underground, the tension at every check, the presence of mind necessary not to give oneself away with an abrupt movement, an evasive answer. The weight of responsibility, the accelerated maturity of a man just over twenty. The enforced renunciation of a permanent residence and regular work (or welfare, however little that was). The life of an itinerant preacher of the resistance, staying with comrades in Bludenz, Wörgl, Bischofshofen etc, but also in small, out-of-the-way towns with no factories or railway lines, where he is recognized as a stranger and looked upon with a suspicious eye, unable to stay more than one or at most two nights, giving talks in forest clearings or mountain huts, on lake shores, in dimly lit kitchens, workshops, back rooms, handing out instructions in the name of the Party, defending decisions that possibly don’t always make sense to him, distributing illegal pamphlets. Control, self-control and discipline.
In contrast to that, his smile in the skiing photo with Gisela.
Of course the two of them found ways and means of seeing each other at irregular intervals, even after the Taurer family had moved, and there is no record of any prison sentence for the whole of 1936; it’s possible that on his journeys to Czechoslovakia, to see the Party leadership in exile, Pepe sometimes passed through Linz, where they spent a few hours or a whole day together. Pfennigberg, Lichtenberg, Pöstlingberg, Gisela would indicate the local mountains, which were no mountains, just hills, hillocks, she said, perhaps tenderly stroking the hair off of his forehead with her other hand as he looked along her outstretched arm.
WITHOUT THE EXTENDED Gröblinger family, the memory of Gisela would have long since faded away. A dynasty of red rebels, the founder of which was a strike leader in the Great Dispute of 1911 in the Linz shipyard, for which he was fired by the management. How Alois Gröblinger managed to provide for his family during the next few years is unknown, perhaps there was a locksmith or heating engineer who took him on despite the warning that this Gröblinger was a dangerous agitator and rabble-rouser. It’s also possible that he was dependent on casual work for the rest of his life. In August 1914, shortly after the outbreak of war, Gröblinger was drafted into the army and sent to the east where, two or three months later, he is said to have fallen in or near Przemysl. He left a wife called Rosalia and six children: Alois, Mitzi, Resi, Rosi, Fritz and Greti. When he died, the eldest was just six, the youngest ten months old and although this did nothing to alleviate the tragedy of his early death, it was a great comfort to his widow that he’d been able to see littl
e Greti before his involuntary hero’s death.
Rosalie Gröblinger saw to it that the children followed in their father’s footsteps politically. They were convinced socialists, which meant that almost all of them, together with their partners, took part in the resistance campaign of the illegal Communist Party during the period of Austrian fascism in the mid-1930s. Fritz who, as a member of the Republican Schutzbund, had been arrested after the defeat of the February uprising, emigrated to the Soviet Union in September 1934, to Sverdlovsk, where he worked as a fitter. From there he went to Spain in June thirty-seven, to fight against Franco’s troops in the civil war. Wounded several times, he was sent to the Aragón front in spring thirty-eight as a tank driver. He was reported missing on March 12, 1938.
Greti wanted to get to Spain as well and that together with her friend Gisela. The two women were young, single and adventurous, without steady jobs moreover, and their idea was that as nursing auxiliaries in the International Medical Corps they would be doing something useful, pursuing their political ideals and seeing something of the world into the bargain. Presumably Pepe had expressed the wish to go to Spain as a volunteer, but was prevented by his Party superiors because they still needed him for their illegal work in Austria. He could, of course, have ignored the Party instructions but he was too disciplined for that.
What is not known is why Greti and Gisela didn’t make it to Spain. They certainly traveled from Linz to Lyons in April 1937 and worked there for a year as nursemaids with French families. It is said that after that they weren’t allowed to cross the Spanish border. We do in fact know from reports by Swiss volunteers that women were already being refused entry six months after the outbreak of the war, above all those who had no nursing diploma. It could be that was the reason the two of them had to turn back without having achieved their goal. Moreover by this time Austria had been annexed by the German Reich, so perhaps they felt the urge to return home to make themselves available for the campaign against the National Socialist regime. While soon after that Greti was drafted as a streetcar driver, Gisela took a position in the ticket office at Linz Central Station. There’s a photo from the summer of thirty-eight, she’s standing there on the station forecourt, still slim and smiling, in a dark dress beside an unknown colleague, on the left a streetcar of line B, on the right the station façade with the swastika flags; in a second photo from the same year she’s holding the black kitten, Mungi, up in front of her face. As well as Greti, she was also a close friend of her sister Resi, married name Reindl, and of Anna Huber who had married Alois Gröblinger in 1938 and lived in the same neighborhood as the Taurers in Untergaumberg. Resi had a son called Herbert, Anna and Alois a daughter, Margit, who was born on New Year’s Day 1937, married the journalist Franz Kain twenty-four years later and, after his death, made it her business to make Gisela’s memory public. As a child she had been very fond of the young woman, like an aunt who was particularly affectionate toward children. She remembers one Christmas Eve, it must have been in Leni’s apartment and during the war, in 1943; the tree had been decorated with wrapped-up pieces of sugar, she recalls, and she’d pricked up her ears when, late in the evening, her mother and Gisela had talked a little mockingly about their absent husbands’ moods.
But the first person to gather together material about Gisela was the historian of the working class, Peter Kammerstätter. A metal worker, communist, prisoner in Buchenwald, Party official, he had early on made it his business to compile collections of material on topics from the contemporary history of Upper Austria, in particular on the antifascist resistance, and make them available to younger researchers. In the eighties he had several interviews with Resi Reindl, rambling dialogues through time and place, with diverse ramifications, that kept coming back to Gisela’s fate. Without these tapes we would only pick up her story in scattered fragments, as one among many, that go in one ear and out of the other.
PEPE HAD FLED to Prague immediately after the German invasion. In the same year he settled in Antwerp, having been given the task of setting up a contact point of the Austrian Communist Party the purpose of which was to obtain material assistance for the many Austrian refugees in Belgium as well as organizing the transport of communist pamphlets and copies of the Party newspaper, Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag) produced in Brussels, back to what used to be called Austria. For that, there were specially devised suitcases that Belgians took across the border, often making detours via Holland or Switzerland or even by ship, and handed over to contacts in Vienna. Another task was to collect money for the Spanish refugees who were living in France with no means of subsistence.
After the beginning of 1939 Pepe was assisted in his work by two men who had fought in Spain, Josef Meisel and Zalel Schwager. As Meisel recalls in his record of conversations published in 1985: “Jetzt haben wir Ihnen, Meisel!” Kampf, Widerstand und Verfolgung des österreichischen Antifaschisten Josef Meisel (“Now we’ve got you, Meisel!” The Struggle, Resistance and Persecution of the Austrian Antifascist Josef Meisel), the three of them shared a four-room apartment in the suburb of Berchem, “for us almost posh,” and were supported by a Jewish committee with which Pepe was in close contact. “Although he wasn’t a Jew, he was accepted by that committee, and could get a lot out of it. Through the Jewish sports club JASK, Joodse Arbeiders Sportklub, we were able to organize legal events in order to give Jewish refugees particular things they could do. We did a lot of political instruction. There were groups that sympathized with us and for them we did systematic instruction. Above all we went through Stalin’s Short Course, which at that time was more or less obligatory as a basis for instruction. We also organized public events, I spoke at some of them.”
Nothing is known about the circumstances surrounding Gisela’s visit to Belgium. Both variants are imaginable—crossing the border legally on some harmless pretext as well as an illegal crossing with the help of a guide who knew the area and met her in a restaurant in Aachen. Continuing on to Monschau in the afternoon. In Kalterherberg, right at the foot of the hills of the Hohes Venn, he would have sent her on her way alone, in the twilight. On the other side of the border Pepe would have been waiting for her, at the station in Eupen. That was in July 1939, one month before the German-Soviet non-aggression pact that surprised the Austrian communists as much as their Belgian comrades. “We very quickly,” said Meisel, “came to terms with the situation. The Soviet Union will know what it’s doing, the purpose is to thwart the plans of the Western imperialists, who are pushing Hitler toward confrontation with the Soviet Union. These arguments helped us to con ourselves into thinking the Soviet policy was right.”
Antwerp was a prosperous town. The Austrian writer Hans Mayer, alias Jean Amery, who had found refuge there six months before Gisela, had been surprised at its “obvious wealth.” Perhaps Gisela had also expected to be faced with “somewhere wet and gloomy, with taciturn people going about their business among domed fortresses and dockside sheds” and had difficulty associating the throbbing life on the Meir and the Keyserlei with this image, above all on summer evenings when people were sitting in the street cafés eating ices or warm waffles and chatting animatedly in Flemish, a minor disappointment for Gisela, who had assumed, thanks to the French she had acquired in Lyons, she would be able to follow the conversations at adjoining tables with ease. The high standard of living, the peaceful atmosphere, the opportunity, thanks to the support of Jewish organizations, to live cheaply—“We were able,” as Meisel says, “to make full use of that and almost felt as if we were in paradise.” This sense of unalloyed happiness may have been particularly the case for Gisela and Pepe, after all in Antwerp it was the first (and only) time they were able to live together as man and wife, lacking only a marriage certificate, and since their presence in Belgium was accepted by the authorities, they weren’t forced to avoid being seen in public. As well as Gisela’s identity card, valid until the end of 1940, and her ration card issued on February 8, 1940, there is also a photo extant, in which
the two of them are strolling along one of Antwerp’s shopping streets on March 31 of that year, in fine winter coats, Gisela with a jaunty little hat, Pepe wearing a white collar and tie; at that point they were unaware of their new happiness, Gisela’s pregnancy.
The German invasion of Belgium caught them unprepared, although three or four days beforehand instructions had come from Moscow for senior Party officials to go underground. “We didn’t get around to doing that,” Meisel said, “we didn’t take it that seriously.” In the very night of the invasion he and Pepe were taken from their beds by Belgian police and driven to the station. There they had to wait, together with other refugees, for a long special train to be put together. It’s difficult to say why Gisela wasn’t arrested as well. Perhaps her political activities had gone unnoticed, or women were as a rule exempt from deportation, or she had in fact done nothing at all to attract the attention of the authorities. According to Meisel it had earlier been agreed, again following instructions from Moscow, that any partners who were not directly threatened should return to Austria in order to do political work there. The agreement between Hitler and Stalin led them to believe that any who went back would have nothing to fear for the time being. According to Meisel, Gisela Taurer was among the comrades to whom this applied. “Together with Tschofenig and other Austrian comrades in Antwerp, I was part of a convoy of about 2000 Jews, mainly orthodox former Polish Jews with long beards. I mention that because attempts were made to use us on the journey to the south of France to stimulate a bellicose mood among the Belgian and French population. They wrote parachutistes on the cars. And the paradoxical thing about it was that we were bombarded with stones, even though old, bearded Jews were looking out of the windows.”
