by Tim Bonyhady
Paul’s brother Gustav, who was his partner in the family leather business, had little chance of escaping in 1938 because he was severely injured when knocked down by a motorcycle. He left Vienna in the spring of 1939, but he got only as far as Czechoslovakia, which by then was all Nazi territory, and by 1941 he was back in Vienna. He was there that September, when all Jews over the age of six were compelled to wear yellow Stars of David, which the Nazis forced them to buy. He was there that October, when the Nazis began the mass deportation of Vienna’s remaining Jews to the east. He was there in April 1942, when these deportations reduced Vienna’s Jewish population to twenty-two thousand, one-tenth of its size before the Anschluss. Then he, too, was deported, on May 6.
This convoy traveled through the former Czechoslovakia and Poland to Maly Trostinec in Belarus, a journey that usually took three days. The train carrying Gustav reached Koydanov, near Maly Trostinec, on the afternoon of May 9. But then it stopped for forty-two hours because May 9 was a Saturday and senior Nazi officials did not want the policemen and SS waiting for the deportees at Maly Trostinec to have to work on weekends. When the train finally arrived at Maly Trostinec on Monday morning, a few of the deportees were selected for farmwork. All the others, including sixty-two-year-old Gustav, were forced to take off their clothes, were stripped of their valuables, and then were shot in front of open trenches.
Many of Anne’s other relatives had good reason to wonder at their lot. Guido Hamburger Jr., the older son of Hermine’s brother Guido, was particularly lucky—despite having to escape twice, like many men and women of Jewish origin from the Sudetenland. They began, following the Munich Agreement in September 1938, by fleeing to what remained of Czechoslovakia, which should have been easy because they had a right to go there, but in fact was very difficult because the Czech government was loath to take them and the Sudetenland’s new Nazi rulers assaulted some, imprisoned others, and seized most of their property. When the Germans occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, they had to flee again.
Guido Junior found romance in the queue. While he was at the British embassy in Prague one day, the woman in front of him excited his interest. As twenty-nine-year-old Guido and twenty-eight-year-old Anna Schauer waited for visas over the next few months, he took her home to meet his parents, who had also fled to Prague, and she introduced him to hers. Guido and Anna also enjoyed the occasional slice of ordinary summer life in Prague, swimming downstream in the Moldau and then returning upstream by barge. By mid-August they had their permits, enabling them to reach England a fortnight before the war started. They married a few years later.
Guido’s younger brother, Friedrich, who remained in Prague, had very different luck. In mid-1942, he and his wife, Helene, and nine-month-old daughter, Jana, were sent to Theresienstadt, a walled fortress town to the northwest of Prague that the Nazis turned into a ghetto. It was in some ways a benign place of incarceration—a “model” settlement under the direction of a Jewish Council of Elders, with lectures, concerts, and schools. Yet food, clothing, blankets, medicines, and heating were as scarce as disease was rife. Overcrowding was also extreme. Home to eight thousand people before the war, Theresienstadt came to hold almost sixty thousand at any one time, even though the Nazis were quick to send many of its inmates to their immediate deaths in extermination camps to the east.
Friedrich, Helene, and Jana were relatively safe for two years as the ghetto’s Jewish leaders did all they could to protect adults with young children. Rather than select them for the transports that went east, they kept them in Theresienstadt, where just 80 children under the age of ten died compared to 15,000 men and women over seventy. But when the Nazis sent most of the inmates of Theresienstadt to Auschwitz in 1944, men were often selected without their wives and children, almost all those with tuberculosis were transported, and no one enjoyed special protection. Of the 141,000 inmates of Theresienstadt, only 19,000 survived, including just 150 of 15,000 children. While Friedrich was selected to be transported because he had tuberculosis, a woman without family volunteered to take his place so he could remain with Helene and Jana. When Theresienstadt was liberated in 1945, they all were still alive, a rare nuclear family of concentration-camp survivors.
Hermine’s youngest brother, Paul Hamburger, was less vulnerable because his wife, Fely, was Aryan. The Nazis’ policy was that if the wives of men of Jewish origin such as Paul stuck with them, and they had children whom they were not raising as Jews, the men would not be sent to concentration camps. But the Nazis put intense pressure on women in this situation to abandon their marriages and, if they did, their former husbands were ripe for deportation. While most of these mixed marriages survived, it was still an act of defiance for women such as Fely to ignore the Nazis’ threats and blandishments. Because Fely resisted, she had to move with Paul to a Judenhaus in Vienna’s Second District, where the Nazis forced almost all men and women of Jewish origin to live. She saw how even Paul’s closest friends, such as Carl Moll, severed all contact with him. Still Fely remained true to Paul. Along with their daughter, Lizzi, they were the only family members to live out the war in Vienna. Although the Gallias had denigrated Fely for more than twenty years as a poor girl set on marrying up, Paul owed his survival to her.
Hermine’s oldest brother, Otto Hamburger, also benefited from the unintended consequences of his actions more than twenty years before, when his affair with Dagmar led to the birth of Gudrun and Hermine insisted he marry Dagmar to make good his immorality. Because Dagmar was Aryan, Otto was able to stay with her in Bruntal in relative safety after it became part of Germany in 1938. When she died in 1940, the Nazis allowed him to take her remains to Denmark for burial in Copenhagen, though he soon collapsed and, in 1941, died in a mental asylum.
Guido Hamburger Sr. had almost no chance because his wife, Nelly, was another convert from Judaism, and Guido and Nelly were also too old to get visas. They were still in Prague in October 1941, when their granddaughter Jana was born, and Nelly became Jana’s godmother. A few days later they were among the first five thousand men, women, and children transported from Prague. Their destination was the Polish city of Lodz, the site of another ghetto established by the Nazis. The conditions in Lodz were far worse than in Theresienstadt, and the new Czech arrivals died particularly quickly. While Nelly survived the winter, she was gassed that spring in Chelmno, the Nazis’ first mass extermination camp, where 400,000 Jews were killed in mobile gas vans. There is no record of what happened to Guido.
Age also shaped the fate of Ludwig, or Louis, Gallia, the only son of Moriz’s brother Wilhelm, former legal partner of Moriz’s brother Adolf and occasional lawyer to the Wiener Werkstätte. When Louis wrote in February 1939 to his favorite niece, Liesl, he was still in Vienna, while thirty-five-year-old Liesl was en route to Melbourne with her forty-two-year-old husband, Erich. Louis, who was sixty-one, stressed that he longed to see Liesl again but did not expect to do so.
Three weeks later, Louis drafted a document that he titled “My Last Will,” in which he distributed his remaining property and gave his instructions and apologies to the living. Louis began: “I am to be cremated. No one is to be present at the interment. My ashes are to be taken from the urn and buried in the earth. No stone or other form of memorial is to be erected. No notice of my death is to be published.” He continued by addressing his younger sister Friedl, his only surviving sibling, who was sharing his Viennese apartment. “Friedl is to go to England as quickly as possible,” he instructed, without explaining how she might get a visa. Louis went on to send his greetings and kisses to all his nephews and nieces. He concluded with a plea to those most important to him. “Friedl and Liesl,” he implored, “are not to be angry with me.”
Veronal—a product of the German pharmaceutical company Bayer that went on sale in the early 1900s—was the first commercially available barbiturate. While generally taken as a sleeping tablet, it was used as a suicide pill by thousands of German and Austrian Jews,
who turned to it out of anxiety and depression and to escape being humiliated, assaulted, and sent to concentration camps. It allowed them to control the occasion of their deaths and die with dignity.
Louis Gallia became one of them after completing his will and going to bed on the night of March 3. By the time he was found the following morning and taken by ambulance to Vienna’s Rothschild Hospital, which remained open long after the Nazis closed most other Jewish institutions in the city, its doctors could do nothing for him. When another family member, Arthur Kary, wrote a few hours later to Liesl’s brother, Peter Langer, who had already reached Australia, he began: “My news will cause you great sorrow but you must accept it with courage. Your good uncle Olu”—as the family called Louis—“could and would no longer bear this life and is from today no longer.”
Many accounts stress how ordinary suicide became in this period. The British journalist G. E. R. Gedye claimed that “Jewish friends spoke to one of their intention to commit suicide, with no more emotion than they had formerly talked of making an hour’s journey by train.” Yet Louis’s family and friends in Vienna were shocked by his death, because he had given no hint of what he was contemplating. He spent his last day working as usual as a lawyer and went to bed showing no emotion. “No one noticed anything extraordinary,” Kary informed Peter Langer. “No one was prepared for it.”
The state of his legal practice was a factor. The Nazis began by preventing Jewish lawyers from representing Aryan clients, then barred them from practicing altogether except for one hundred allowed to act as “consultants” to Jews. While Louis was among this relatively fortunate group, he knew this status would not last. Kary observed: “No wonder Olu had had enough. For doctors it is equally horrible; and what about merchants, industrialists … it gets more cruel day by day.” Louis also knew his prospects were bleak even if he managed to escape. Australia was the one country where he thought he had a chance of continuing to work as a lawyer, little realizing that his qualifications would not be recognized there. Kary wrote: “It is too terrible what we have to endure. It is almost impossible to start a new profession at the age of sixty-one. No one really knows how many people commit suicide. For old people there is hardly a more rational choice.”
Carl Moll did the same in very different circumstances. Along with his daughter, Maria, and son-in-law, Richard Eberstaller, he was among the few Austrians to commit suicide when the Soviet army entered Vienna in 1945. By one account, the suicide of Moll and the Eberstallers on the night of April 12 was a consequence of events earlier that day, when the eighty-four-year-old Moll reputedly was wounded by Russian soldiers as he tried to stop them from raping Maria. Yet Moll had written a suicide note on April 10 in which he expressed his belief that he had experienced “all the beautiful things life has to offer” and “would fall asleep without remorse.” Richard Eberstaller knew that he had “the worst to expect” because of his work as vice president of the Regional Criminal Court in Vienna. All three saw the fall of the Nazi regime as a catastrophe they did not want to endure.
When my mother wrote her story, she recorded which members of the family were killed by the Nazis but did not explain where, when, or how they died. I wanted to know more. When I read that Gustav and Franz Herschmann “were eventually taken to concentration camps where they died,” in what proved to be the final draft of her memoir, I vainly annotated it, “Do you know which?” I began to find out while Googling for material for this book. After discovering Gustav and Franz in lists of unclaimed insurance policies and dormant bank accounts, I came across the Jewish Memorial Center Web site, where I found “Herschmann, Franz, 26.3.88 Vienna—14.9.42 Auschwitz.”
It was one of those moments that changed my place in the world. Franz was still the vaguest of men to me. I did not know what he looked like. I knew nothing about his passions, beliefs, tastes, or habits. But in a click I went from feeling barely touched by the Holocaust, because my closest relatives had all survived, to having a direct connection with its most notorious manifestation. That Franz had been one of my great-uncles—the same relation to me as Erni, a key figure in my childhood—brought his death even closer. While I had not been satisfied with my mother’s vagueness, I did not expect that to know more could be so shocking.
The material I discovered about Louis Gallia, who at first was just as remote from me, was similarly confronting. His one brief appearance in Anne’s story was as the executor of Ida’s will. He committed sacrilege in Gretl’s eyes when he cleaned out Ida’s apartment on the Stubenring and emptied silver frames of their photographs, including a portrait of Moriz. As Anne described it, Gretl “had loved her father and as far as she was concerned his photo was to remain framed. Frames were not just objects for reuse or sale.” In characteristic fashion, Gretl never forgave Louis, and Anne inherited her antipathy. In her story, she did not record when or how Louis died.
My connection with Louis began when one of Melanie Gallia’s descendants showed me Louis’s last letter to his niece Liesl and Arthur Kary’s letter describing his death. These letters brought me nearer to Louis than to many other members of the family to whom I was much more closely related. Yet when a Viennese genealogist sent me an e-mail including the wills of Adolf, Ida, and Louis, I started with Adolf and Ida because they remained much more central to this book and I thought Louis’s will would be of no interest. When I finally opened it, I was expecting a conventional distribution of property. Instead, I found his suicide note.
IV
ANNE
1
1939
The refugees who fled to Sydney and Melbourne after Kristallnacht went from one apocalyptic landscape to another, exchanging cities still burning for another fiery environment, because of the effects of a terrible El Niño. A week after Gretl, Kathe, and Annelore landed, the “Black Friday” bushfires of January 13, 1939 devastated 1.4 million hectares in Victoria, killing seventy-one people. In outback New South Wales the extreme temperatures lasted for weeks, resulting in over a hundred deaths from heatstroke. The conditions in Sydney were milder, but it was still over 90 degrees Fahrenheit at ten o’clock at night on Black Friday, while the next day was even worse, as the temperature reached a record 113 degrees.
Many other aspects of Sydney made it a wonderful place to be. Like most refugees, Anne discovered the glory of the city’s beaches. After her fears of attack in Vienna, she relished the city’s safety, which meant Gretl, Käthe, and she could keep their doors unlocked and walk alone at night without anxiety. Yet even more aspects of Australia were alien to the new arrivals, including the flora and fauna, architecture and urban design, food and clothes. As in most countries to which refugees fled in the late 1930s, the pressure to conform was also intense. The “reffos,” as the new arrivals were dubbed when they were not “bloody reffos” or “reffo bastards,” immediately learned that they were expected to do “their utmost to acquire a local accent and local mannerisms,” become “good Australians,” and adopt “the Australian way of life.”
Many refugees responded by Anglicizing their names or adopting new ones to mask their origins and to avoid the annoyance of having their names repeatedly misspelled and mispronounced. The Annelore Herschmann-Gallia who appeared in the Brisbane Telegraph disappeared almost immediately. Her given name was simple. Just as Käthe became Kathe, so Annelore became Anne. Her change of surname was more unusual because Gretl reverted to Gallia, which was how Gretl thought of herself—though it did nothing to disguise the fact that Anne and she were foreigners in Anglo-Celtic Australia. Gretl’s speed was exceptional. While refugees generally took months to alter their surnames, Gretl made this change within a week.
Anne’s identity changed again when she resumed her schooling a few weeks later at St. Vincent’s College, run by the Sisters of Charity in the inner suburb of Potts Point. While no other member of the family had been so devout since the Gallias and Hamburgers began converting at the start of the century, Anne did not fit in at St. Vincent’s
because the nuns assumed all their pupils would be born Catholic. When Gretl filled out the school’s Register of Admissions, she did not reveal Anne’s Jewish origins but gave Anne a complete Catholic identity to satisfy the nuns’ expectations and to help Anne escape further prejudice. Gretl recorded that Anne’s first Communion was in 1930, when Anne was still a member of Vienna’s Israelitische Kultusgemeinde. Gretl gave Anne’s confirmation as 1938, when she should have left this column blank.
The prospect of more Viennese culture was immediately before her. The day after Anne landed, the Sydney Morning Herald carried a story headed “The Vienna Boys’ Choir—Coming Next June.” In fact, Sydney was to be visited by the Mozart Boys’ Choir, founded in 1936 by Dr. Georg Gruber, a former choirmaster with the Vienna Boys’ Choir, after he fell out with Rektor Schnitt. Far from giving the Mozart Boys a new identity, Gruber mimicked the Vienna Boys so he could exploit their reputation when he further emulated them by taking his choir abroad. In 1937, Schnitt accused Gruber of damaging the Vienna Boys’ standing, defrauding them, and being a Nazi when the party was illegal. After the Anschluss, Gruber retaliated by ousting Schnitt and briefly imposing himself as the Vienna Boys’ director while maintaining control of the Mozart Boys. When the Mozart Boys’ Choir arrived, Anne would have to decide whether to patronize an organization that was the closest copy of her favorite Viennese musical institution, even though it was linked to the Nazi regime.
