Three Tearless Histories

by Erich Hackl

  The journey ended in Saint-Cyprien camp, right on the Mediterranean, quite close to the Spanish border. Pepe doesn’t appear in Meisel’s memories after that; but notes written from memory by their comrade Gerhard-Paul Herrnstadt in 1965 tell us that Pepe managed to escape from Saint-Cyprien and, together with him, Meisel and other Austrian communists hid in a mill near Dufourt in the department of Haute-Garonne until the autumn of 1940. One possibility is that he decided to return to the Reich and was arrested by German military police at the demarcation line between the occupied zone and the free zone of France. However it happened, not much later he was in the custody of the Klagenfurt Gestapo, for in a letter of November 25, 1940, from the Secret State Police, State Police Office Klagenfurt, “Fräulein Gisela Taurer,” of Linz-Upper Danube, was informed, in reply to her letter of the 19th of that month, “that for reasons of state security the release of Tschofenig during the war is out of the question.”

  Gisela’s return journey from Antwerp is almost completely substantiated by six documents—her application for a laissez-passer, the issuing of one by the German Army Garrison HQ 675, her request for support from the Belgian section of the NSDAP Women’s Organization, permission to use military vehicles granted by the Brussels military police, permission to continue her journey granted by the Aachen-Cologne NS Women’s Organization, and entitlement to travel by rail from the German Army Transport Manager’s Office in Brussels. She arrived in Linz on June 13, 1940. She was three months pregnant and there is no record of any official action against her. In the afore-mentioned biographical sketch there is a brief excerpt from her diary, which has been lost.

  At the end of July I felt the baby’s first movements… On December 19 Mother and I went to our new apartment (Füchselstrasse): no light, no heating, ice-cold. I slept together with Mother, wrapped up to the tip of my nose. In the morning I could feel pains in my lower abdomen. In the evening before midnight Mother went to fetch the midwife. They only arrived at 12:15. The contractions were already very strong, but I didn’t want to cry out loud as Father and Andi were asleep in the other room and had no idea what was happening… The midwife calmed me down with the confident way she went about it. The circumstances were anything but normal: the beds had been pulled apart, no light, Mother had to stand at the foot with a candle… At 1 a.m. the baby emerged with a cry. When the midwife said, it’s a boy, I looked down: my son was lying there, small but full of life—I lay back, happy and contented…

  In that same month, December nineteen-forty, Pepe was transferred from Karlau Detention Center near Graz to Dachau Concentration Camp where, as foreman of the X-ray department, he gained the reputation of a brave, selfless, incorruptible Kapo—a prisoner with supervisory duties. Ferdinand Hackl from Vienna, who had fought in Spain and was sent to Dachau six months later, remembers two meetings with Pepe. The first was after Hackl had got someone to give him a fever-inducing injection in the Kottern satellite camp. Being ill, he managed to get himself transferred to the main camp, where he intended to report irregularities in the satellite camp to the illegal prisoners’ organization. When Pepe learnt that the fever had been artificially induced, he accused Hackl of self-mutilation. The second memory concerns a meeting a few weeks before the liberation, when Pepe was in the sickbay with typhus fever and, despite his weak condition, greeted Hackl, who wanted to encourage him, with a clenched fist. Fritz Zahradka, another Viennese who had fought in Spain, also worked in the X-ray department. According to his widow, the friendship between Pepe and Fritz, which had started there, lasted until he died. “I would describe Tschof,” Gretl Zahradka said, “as this kind of man: if there’s a piece of bread lying there and he’s hungry, he wouldn’t touch the bread.”

  AND WHAT IF she’d done nothing at all. If between Hermann’s birth and her wedding three and a half years later nothing worth mentioning had actually happened, as is suggested by the chronological table in the biographical sketch that only notes three longish visits for Gisela and Hermann to Villach, Bischofshofen and Selztal, the first to stay with Pepe’s mother from May to September forty-two, the two others, in August and September forty-three and in March forty-four with Gisela’s brother Albert who, as traffic superintendent for the Reich railroad, led a nomadic life.

  Little is known in detail about her underground activity, on the one hand because Gisela was never taken to court and there is therefore no indictment listing her actual or presumed illegal actions, on the other because none of the men with whom she worked survived the Nazi period. At the end of April forty-five, one week before the liberation of the concentration camp, they were murdered on the order of Gauleiter Eigruber in Mauthausen. For example the fitter Sepp Teufl, head of the Austrian Communist Party since 1933, for whom Gisela typed leaflet appeals or articles for an illegal Party newspaper and is also said to have worked as a courier. Through that she was in contact with the welder Franz Haselmeier, who must have given away her identity under torture. At least later on, in Kaplanhof Women’s Prison, she told her friend Resi Reindl that during an interrogation she was suddenly confronted with Haselmeier, who begged her to admit everything, telling her that the Gestapo had already been informed about her activities anyway.

  Greti Gröblinger was the first of her women friends to be arrested by the Gestapo. Together they had made contact with Frenchmen working as forced labor in the Hermann Goering Works. At that time Greti was married to Alfred Müller, a colleague from the transport services who, as a soldier in the Wehrmacht, was reported missing after the Battle of Stalingrad. In February 1942 she took up a post as an engineering draftswoman in the Linz board of works. It was there in 1943 that she was reported by a colleague for “remarks detrimental to the state that reveal her communist attitude,” arrested, tried in a police court and sentenced to four years in prison. When Gisela was then arrested, Greti was already doing hard labor in the Kolbermoor munition store near Rosenheim.

  Before all this, however, Gisela had been given permission to marry Pepe in the register office of Dachau Concentration Camp, which was otherwise only used to register deaths. Presumably she had made several requests about this since Hermann was born until, on May 5, 1944, she was eventually informed by the registrar that all the necessary documents had arrived. “Your bridegroom has set June 3, 1944, as the date for the marriage ceremony. You are therefore requested to attend at the Dachau II register office at 8 a.m. that day. On showing this letter at the main guardhouse of the Camp you will be given a visitor’s pass and taken to the register office. Two witnesses are required. Should you not be in a position to obtain any, I will see to it.”

  It may seem strange that the wedding in the concentration camp was sanctioned. It is a fact, though, that Gisela’s request was in line with the National Socialist family policy of legalizing intimate relationships wherever possible—one purpose of the wedding was to give Hermann the status of a legitimate child (and, indeed, Gisela was informed as early as July 6 by the Linz/Donau district court that this had been agreed). Of the ceremony itself nothing has come down to us except one wedding photo. It is known that Karl Taurer and Theresia Tschofenig accompanied Gisela to Dachau as witnesses. Also accompanying them was Pepe’s sister Hilde, a girl of eleven or thirteen at the time, today an old woman who absolutely refuses to release her memories of the event or any of those of her brother and sister-in-law. “Who’s interested in that nowadays,” she says over the phone, repeats the sentence without waiting for an answer, mentions the lack of discipline of present-day youth, also the fact that the memorial plaque for the victims of Nazi terror in Villach, where she lives, has repeatedly been smeared or smashed, then says twice in quick succession, “Not interested. Thank you,” and hangs up.

  At least there’s the photo from Dachau, of Gisela, still as slender as she was as a girl and with a slightly embarrassed smile, and Pepe with a skeptical expression on his face. She in a white blouse under her dark jacket, he with short cropped hair, suit and tie from the SS store of prisoners’
civilian clothes. Near the bottom of the picture: Gisela’s slim hand, diagonally across it a posy of white carnations. What is surprising is the warm tone of the letter from the registrar, who sent Gisela that and other, no longer traceable photos ten days after the wedding, “Dear Frau Tschofenig, Enclosed I am sending you the wedding pictures, I trust they will give you much pleasure. The photos have turned out really nicely. I hope the time will soon come when your happiness is complete. That is the wish of the Registrar. With kindest regards,…”

  The signature is illegible, as it is on the other documents from the registrar. His identity was only revealed to me by Albert Knoll, the archivist at the Dachau Memorial Museum, after he’d asked his colleague, Andreas Bräunling of the Dachau Town Archives: the man was called Hans Mursch, was an SS Oberscharführer, head of the camp’s own registry office from May forty-one and enjoyed an excellent reputation among prisoners; one of them, Reimund Schnabel, described him in his 1966 report Die Frommen in der Hölle. Geistliche in Dachau (The Devout in Hell. Priests in Dachau), as “very soft.” Mursch, he said, once refused to beat a prisoner and as a result was transferred to the clothes store in punishment, where he had a friendly, encouraging word for every new inmate. “At the arrival of a convoy of particularly run-down, starving and ragged gypsies from Hungary in 1944 Mursch wept tears of shame and shock out there on the country road and was arrested by his superiors. Since, however, they were afraid he might know too much about their black-market dealings, Mursch got away with close arrest and disciplinary transfer to a subordinate position, where he no longer came into contact with prisoners. It was matter of course that after the liberation this man was publicly rehabilitated by the prisoners.”

  IMMEDIATELY after her return from Dachau, Gisela had written a letter to the Central Security Department of the Reich in Berlin requesting “the release of my husband Josef Tschofenig, b. 3.9.13, prisoner no. 22,139—Dachau K3 Concentration Camp,” and in the reasons she gives, she manages to adopt the way of thinking of the National Socialist authorities: “During his four years in prison my husband has certainly shown himself worthy of this kindness through his good behavior in the camp and honest execution of the tasks assigned to him. It would be very desirable to establish a family after the wedding in Dachau, also my husband has not seen his son since he was born, as he was sent to the concentration camp before that. Establishing a family would mean that the number of children would rise from year to year, because my husband and I are particularly fond of children. I therefore most sincerely beg you to accede to this request and give back her husband to a woman who has a great love of children and wants to fulfill the duty of a German woman. In anticipation of a favorable outcome, I conclude my letter with Heil Hitler!” A letter of rejection from Berlin cannot be found, perhaps Gisela’s arrest meant it was no longer necessary.

  Resi was also meant to be arrested in September forty-four. Two men from the Gestapo were already in her kitchen, when suddenly there was an air-raid warning, at which the Gestapo dashed off to get to the safety of an air-raid shelter. They didn’t come back to fetch Resi until two weeks later. While she was worried about her husband Karl, who was the only one of Sepp Teufl’s resistance group still at liberty, she was cautiously confident as far as her own fate was concerned. She knew that her contact, Max Grüll, hadn’t revealed her activity before he died under torture, otherwise the Gestapo would have taken her with them the first time they came. While she was in Kaplanhof Women’s Prison, she ran into Gisela in a trench during an air-raid and her friend, who by then had been interrogated in Mauthausen, told her about the conditions there: the equipment in the interrogation room, the cruel tricks of the Gestapo officers and the differences between them. She warned Resi to make sure she always kept her back to the wall. She herself, she said, had received such a violent blow, she’d been flung right across the room and straight into the waste-paper bin. The confrontation with Haselmeier, his insistence she come out with what she knew, not continue to remain silent: “They know everything already anyway.” And then the worst of all, the casual remark of her torturer, “You’ll not see your child ever again.”

  But in Gisela’s messages to her mother, on postcards and in two letters that were smuggled out, the only fear she expressed was about her son Hermann’s health, about the air-raids, during which the Taurers, living in the building right next to the railroad track, were in particular danger, about her brothers and sister, about Pepe in Dachau. Leni had had a son, Peter, in March forty-three and Gisela was also concerned about whether the two boys, whom she once sketched from memory, got on well together. Hardly a word about the constant hunger, nothing about the plague of lice, the icy cold, the grim female guards who beat up the prisoners at the least excuse. Her last card from Cell 12, Kaplanhof, was written on March 28, 1945:

  Dear Mother,

  Today on little Peter’s birthday a few words to all of you at home. What are the two little boys doing? I hope they’re well and happy and that my little boy remembers me, Peterle won’t remember me, will he? And it’s Hermann’s name day next Saturday—and Easter’s almost here, just to be able to be with all of you, that’s my only wish. Bring me a few photos of the two boys some time, won’t you, it’d be a real joy for me.—Thanks for Albert’s letter, he hasn’t forgotten me, then, is he in Salzburg already? Andi will be bored in prison without his harmonica, but you’ll be glad you’ve heard from him, won’t you Mother. Thanks to Papa for his best wishes and tell him to stay healthy and not be worried about me, I’m well. Now we have this lovely spring weather I’m sure that, despite his limited free time, Father will be proudly taking our two little ones for a walk, is that right? And you two, you and Leni, have the work and worries for all of us. Just good health and no ‘blessings dropping from above’ and we’ll all hold out until the happy day when we’re together again. If Leni has time to come, then as soon as possible, I urgently need a few things such as cotton wool, skin cream, bobby pins, combs, moreover I’d like to throw out my walking boots, please bring me some shoes and my black gym shorts, the last nightie you brought has had it, I’m throwing it out.—And now, my dears, I wish you a ‘quiet’ Easter, no dashing off to the air-raid shelter. My best wishes to you and all my loved ones, lots of kisses from his Mommy for my little Hermann. He’s to do lots of drawings for me, little Peter as well.

  THREE DAYS LATER American planes bombed the prison. In the late afternoon the dull throb of their engines coming closer and closer until it was right above them, then the release of the bombs, just as Resi, in Cell 10, was trying to reassure her fellow prisoners, “There’s nothing to worry about as long as they haven’t released their bombs—” immediately followed by the whine, a crash, a hole in the ceiling with a patch of blue sky visible through it, a bed with little flames licking up, the burst pipe over the cell door with water pouring out, the outside wall collapsing into the cell and Resi shouting, “Quick, let’s get out before we get burnt to death!” From her bed on the top bunk the women struggled out through the hole onto the roof of the hut, slid from there over a shutter down onto the ground. Dead and wounded women everywhere, flames and smoke, screams and shots, in the chaos Resi and Gisela managed to get together and run to a brick-built shed, where they thought they’d have more protection from the hail of bullets from the low-flying planes, then an SS officer, from Hungary or the Ukraine, was aiming his gun at them. Now he’s going to shoot us, Resi thought, and closed her eyes.

  A few days before this, Helene Taurer had received a letter from Dachau:

  Hi, After months—at last—I got your postcard of the III/6, dear Mom-in-law. Now I can tell myself, at least that’s something—for until now I was completely in the dark, no mail—& when something did come from Villach there was never any news about Gisela in it. You write that I don’t need to worry about Gisi, well, that’s easily said, it’s six months now & still nothing’s settled, & I shouldn’t feel concerned? Yes, I was delighted to hear that she’s in good health; the par
cels you’ve taken will do her good & are probably necessary. Actually everything’s back to front with the two of us—at our age (I’ve already got lots of white hair!) we’re still a burden on you!—I can imagine that our ‘little one’ is well looked after & you and your sprightly old man (how is he) are really spoiling him! What are the others doing, what’s Andi up to—hope I’ll soon hear more about Gisi from you.—From my scribble you can tell that I’ve been through something—but ‘weeds keep on coming back,’ and now everything, health included, is back to normal. So I’m looking forward to getting a reply soon and a more detailed letter. If it’s possible give Gisi my heartfelt wishes.

  Goodbye, dear Mother-in-law,

  Best wishes from Pepe

  THEN SOMEONE SHOUTED, “Don’t shoot!” A policeman, who’d been detailed to guard the prisoners, climbed out of the trench where he’d gone for safety with the female guards, covered in blood but clearly not seriously injured, ran toward the SS officer and shouted again, “Don’t shoot, they’re not gong to run away.” And Gisela and Resi hurried on, over to the trench, but suddenly there was a man there, on the canopy over the entrance out into the street, a good-looking young man, as Resi was to tell Peter Kammerstätter years later, a foreigner, presumably a forced laborer, perhaps even one of the French Gisela and Greti had been in contact with. “Come on,” he said, “I’ll help you up.” And Resi said, “Please, Gisela, see that you get away, let him help you, get over the wall and then run!” Because, Resi was to say, those words Gisela had heard the Gestapo officer in Mauthausen say were still going round in her head: you’ll never see your child again, and that’s for sure.