My Grandmother Escapes

West New York, the 1970s.

A few years ago,  while wandering online, I found my grandmother’s UK Internment Tribunal papers, dated November 24, 1939. She was fifty-five that year. The papers say that she became the Domestic Servant for a certain Dr. Harris who had his consulting office at 53 Victoria Street, in Blackpool. Her card primly describes her as a “Female Enemy Alien – Exempt from Internment,” in that she is a “Jewish Refugee from Nazi Oppression.”

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Omi was the last of my family to leave Vienna. How she managed to do it is another one of her wondrous tales. After the Anschluss, the English government had made available to Austrian Jews a limited number of entry visas. These were for domestic servants, such as maids or cooks. Grandma applied, but in order to get a visa, she had to prove to the British Consul that she could cook. She told me that she baked the very best Sacher Torte she had ever made. (I guess no beet borscht for the Brits.) She took the Torte to the consulate, where it was tasted along with the dishes and desserts brought by all the other Jewish ladies. Never mind that the Nazis were running around the streets beating up Jews. Rules were rules, the Brits were hosting a bake-off, and a cake had to be prepared. Apparently the consul liked the dishes, because Grandma and all the other contestants received entry permits. She promptly signed over her meager possessions to the Gestapo, caught the next train to Genoa and from there a ship to England.

She settled in Blackpool, a seaside resort on the Irish Sea. There she became the housekeeper of Dr. Harris and his family, ran his consulting office, and cared for his children.  In the fall of 1944, on her way to the US, she stopped in London. In the subway tunnels, together with other terrorized Londoners, she survived the first V-1 attacks. She told me with a twinkle in her eye that there were a lot of desperate couplings on the crowded Tube platforms during those nights of bombs and terror. And she didn’t mean by subway cars. She finally crossed the Atlantic in a Canadian shipping convoy, the last one before the sea lanes were closed because of the U-boats. She remembered being very scared during the crossing. After the war ended, she commuted between New York and Buenos Aires every few years. She was in Argentina when I was born in 1949 and she was at Mom’s bedside in 1961, the morning my mother died.

It was 1975 when Omi passed away in New York. I was twenty-six that year. I spent hours by her deathbed hearing her tales. She talked slowly, stopping occasionally to eat or to doze off. Grandma repeated the stories of her birth and life in the shtetl; how poor she had been; how she had lost her husband Jacob before her son was born; how she had moved to Vienna with her two children; how she had bartered during the Austrian depression; how the Nazis had come; and how the family had run to different corners of the world, her daughter and first son-in-law to South America, her son to New York, and she to Blackpool. She remembered how scared she had been of the V-1 bombs in London and the U-boats in the Atlantic; how heartbroken when her children didn't reunite after the war; how she had to travel back and forth between them; how she had heard of her beloved son-in-law Walter dying in BA; and then had even seen her daughter die; how tough the years had been when she had to live in BA with Dad, with whom she never got along; and how, in the end, she was happy to have seen me come to the US so she could be close to me.

I was awed by her resilience in the face of so much migration, misfortune, and misery. She was Berthold Brecht’s Mother Courage. 

I asked her two questions. The first one was, “Omi, of all of these many things that happened to you, what was your happiest period?”

She didn’t have to think much. “It was the few years when I was in Blackpool during the War. Jack and Riqui were safe, my fear of Cossacks in Poland and Nazis in Vienna, and all our poverty were behind me. I was in charge of that nice doctor’s office and he needed me. After that, my troubles started again . . . with the U-boats and Walter’s and then your mother’s deaths. I didn't know it then but I know it now. Those Blackpool years were the best.”

I was taken aback. Of all of your ninety plus years, I thought, it came down to a meager three or four? And in the backwaters of Blackpool, of all places? I guess that Blackpool felt to Omi like a slow bend in a river that had been nothing but rapids before and would be nothing but rapids after. She did not recognize that the lazy floating in the slow current would, when her life was said and done, be the calmest the river ever got. That day she gave me the wisdom of the ages: remember that you may never know where in the river you are. Enjoy the slow meandering, because you can bet the rapids will be back. Carpe Diem, as they say in Latin.

My second question was, “Omi, do you believe in God?”

She paused and smiled ironically. “I did once,” she replied, “when I was young, but no longer.” She let that linger and, still with a smile, added, “Not anymore.”

That was my beloved Omi: lovable, warm, tough as nails, funny. (Remember, she thought that I was at Harvard to become a butcher.) And she died an atheist.

It is hard to think about the Imperial Vienna that Mom loved so much, the city that was always in her dreams while, at the same time thinking of Vienna Dolorosa. The Vienna of trucks full of armed brownshirts and political assassinations, of the steady drumbeat of hate-filled anti-Semitic rhetoric, and of the sadism that occurred after the Anschluss.

I do not expect Mom to have told me the gory details of this dark Vienna before she died. I was, after all, a child, and I am not surprised that she never mentioned such things. I would have expected, however, that the picture she presented would have been considerably less rosy. She might have said something like, "I was born and raised in Vienna and, sure, it was a beautiful place, but some day, when you grow up, I'll tell you the whole story." Or maybe, "Vienna? Oh, I don't want to talk about it." That’s not how it went. She loved to sing and dance to the waltzes of her youth, to talk glowingly of the Opera House, the Stephan’s Dom—St. Stephan's Cathedral—the Sacher Café, and the Heurigen, the wine locales of the Vienna woods. She might have simply remained quiet about it all instead of glowing. There is something unreal about her reaction, as though the pain of rejection by the city that she had loved had hurt her so much that she did not even want to mention its darkness.

There is one event that starkly contrasted the very different feelings about Vienna held by my mother—unrequited love—and by my grandmother—who did not wax so nostalgic. In the early 1970s, I went with Omi as well as Uncle Jack and his Viennese wife Bertha to a recital in New York. It was not just any recital, but a very special one. It was held in a theatre in Washington Heights, the Northwest neighborhood of Manhattan around 10th Ave in the upper 100s. It was a neighborhood that many exiled Austrian Jews had chosen after escaping from Europe. Up until the 1980s, Washington Heights was known as "Little Vienna," with konditoreis—pastry shops—Austrian newspapers, kosher butchers, and synagogues.

The recital was by a woman described to me as one of the great Austrian chanteuses from pre-War days. The theatre was full and we could only get seats in the back. The age of the audience was about sixty and higher. Everyone was dressed in proper Central European fashion, and Viennese slang could be heard throughout. It must have felt to all as though they were back in Vienna and that this was not a neighborhood theatre in New York but perhaps the Burgtheater. That it was not 1972 but 1932, and the man in power was not President Nixon but Austrian Chancellor Dolfuss. The lights went dark and the piano player came out to some applause, and then a middle-aged lady came out to more applause and much excitement. And her first song was, you guessed it, none other than Wien Wien nur du allein. Mom’s anthem.

The chanteuse had barely started a few off-tune chords when my dear little Grandma who was then in her late eighties, without so much as a second thought, yelled out, "VERBRENNT SOLLEN SIE ALLE…!" This translates roughly as, "They should all burn in Hell," but in Viennese patois it means more or less, "Fuck them all . . . !" I could have died of embarrassment and sank low in my seat. Her son and daughter-in-law looked aghast. But several members of the audience turned around and, instead of hushing her, nodded in smiling approval. The lady on stage must heard her because Omi didn't just whisper, she heckled. Yet the unperturbed chanteuse didn't miss a beat, finished her song, and went on to sing many more to much applause.

I think Mom too would have been embarrassed by Omi's impromptu outburst. My mother longed to be a Viennese, much more so than Omi. Omi remained the shtetl Galizianer until she was forced to march off to the next place, where she still remained the Galizianer. She had no illusions: she liked Vienna but also understood the city's darkness and was able to hate the city when appropriate. As shown in that photo of Mom as Marlene Dietrich, my mother on the other hand, wanted badly to be a sophisticated Viennese. The city's patina blinded her to its poisonous underside. Mom was not the only Jew who, after being hated by Vienna, longed for her. Professor Berkley, the author of Vienna and its Jews,  tells the stories of many such exiled Viennese Jews. He includes that of a woman who, when asked decades later about the Vienna from which she had been hounded, insisted, against all evidence, that before the Second War she had lived in a "paradise."

Berkley thinks that the Viennese have always had a remarkable ability to be two-sided, to say one thing and do the opposite. Their everyday pleasantness was able to hide the venom underneath. The anti-Semites could buy their shoes from a Jewish-owned store in Leopoldstadt, and converse politely about the latest soccer game or opera performance. Yet after the Anschluss, they would boycott the shop and demand that its owner give it up, turn over his money, and emigrate. And their virulence at doing so may have been enhanced by the insecurity of playing second fiddle to their well-to-do and efficient German cousins to the north. The Jews of Vienna, like the mythical frog sitting snuggly in warming water until he gets cooked, stayed on until it was almost too late or, for many, beyond hope.

Maybe Mom was able to overlook the Viennese venom, but Vienna did not fool Omi or my Uncle Jack. Neither of them ever visited the city again. I, however, did, and I will tell you about that in my next blog, Travel to Vienna.

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Omi was in Blackpool in September 1939 when the Second World War broke out. Since she was Austrian and Austria was now part of the Third Reich, she instantly became an enemy alien to the UK authorities. She was called in for an interview, which resulted in that card exempting her from internment as she was a refugee. I occasionally look at the card. I do so to remind myself that those few years in Blackpool were the best ones of my grandmother’s life.