Vienna Dolorosa

Vienna, the 1930s.

The Anschluss of 1938 unleashed a demon spirit on the Jews of Vienna, one that had been shackled but was now free to express its sadism in all of its evil. Omi, my grandmother, was still in Vienna and witnessed much of it. On the streets of Leopoldstadt where she lived, religious men were forced to cut each other’s beards while the crowds taunted them. Women were spat upon. Jewish shops were labeled Saujude, “Jewish pig,” and warnings were posted not to buy there. Boys were pursued and forced to take down their pants and then kicked and punched if they were circumcised.

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Omi died in 1975 in a New York hospital. She was ninety-three and passed away as much from plain acceptance that her time had come as from the sudden appearance of an inoperable cancer. She was the last of my childhood family. Only our maid Nilda in BA and I in the US were left to carry the memories of my parents, of my home, and of my early years.

I was twenty-six that year, shortly before receiving my PhD at Harvard. I spent Omi’s last few weeks visiting from Cambridge and holding her hand. I tried to deal with her passing in a less stoic fashion than the way I had dealt with my parents’ deaths. Maybe I could have a good cry. It had been a few years since I had spent time with Friedman, my shrink from Albany. I was no longer feeling guilty for Dad’s death, but the stoicism had not lifted. Uncle Jack, in contrast to Dad, cried openly and freely as he faced the loss of his mother. I, however, could still feel the frozen walls come up inside, damming me once more. My soul was still unhealed. I sat with Omi and talked to her with an urgency that comes from watching the end’s approach. Her tales went into more detail, especially the darker sides of Mom’s Viennese dreams.

I had known Mom in BA for the ten years we were together. These were my childhood years and my memories were those of a child. From Uncle Jack, Omi, and from Mom’s friends in BA I gathered a lot of facts. But I didn't yet understand that it is not facts alone that make up a life. I heard about Mom’s escape from the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria into a greater Germany. I heard about Mom’s arrival in BA, her meeting Dad, and other details. But the bare facts didn’t tell me who she was: I was still too young then to hear the untold stories in everyone's silences. Omi’s deathbed stories gave some voice to the silences.

Omi awakened me to the other side of Mom’s beloved Vienna; she told me about “Vienna Dolorosa.” The city had a dark side. Its darkness was as much part of Jewish life as Strauss waltzes and Apfel Strudel. Vienna Dolorosa is what Professor Berkley, the author of Vienna and its Jews, calls the city's hatefulness. Mom never talked about it, but during my visits with Omi, it came pouring out of my uncle and my grandmother.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire was dissolved in 1918, at the end of the First War. My family of Galizianers, who had lived through the war in Leopoldstadt, was poor. A bartering system developed between city folk and farmers. Omi used to travel daily to the countryside and came back with eggs and milk in exchange for mended or washed clothes. Given the sudden loss of empire and wealth, the Austrian Government started printing so much money that a severe inflation developed. The currency lost value and Uncle Jack told me that the money was printed on only one side so that, after it was worth less than a sheet of paper, he could use the other side to write on. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, the Jews were blamed for the economic breakdowns and accused of everything from profiteering to ritual murder. They were labeled as the refuse of humanity and warned of the day of reckoning, when all of them would finally be expelled. Trigger-happy paramilitaries ran daily around the streets of Leopoldstadt, shouting anti-Jewish slogans.

In the 1930s, when Hitler was agitating about his planned Anschluss, Mom married her first husband, Walter. She never told me of him; I heard of Walter only after her death. In early 1938 Hitler did annex Austria. I know very little of what happened next, other than Mom and Walter left before the onslaught.  On March 12 of that year, the Wehrmacht marched into Vienna, and Austria became part of the Third Reich.

For several weeks ahead of March 12, 1938,  Mom and Walter had been trying for immigration papers from any number of countries, but with no luck. Roosevelt’s State Department was a hotbed of antisemites, so no chance with America. When the pair heard that the Argentine consulate was issuing visas, they stood in line for several hours and, after using up some of their meager savings to override regrets of the consul, put their passports and documents in order. It is thanks to that easily bribed consul that I was even born, and in BA. On the very night of the Anschluss, my mother and Walter caught a train out of Vienna's Südbanhof to Venice, from there to Trieste, and then a boat to Buenos Aires.

It is remarkable to think that Mom passed through Trieste on her way to BA. During my visit to Trieste in 1971, I had learned from Aunt Carola of Dad’s family living in Italy. Mom’s future sisters-in-law Carola and Clara had moved to Trieste from Samos in the early 1930s in search of Jewish husbands. Listening in 1975 to Omi’s tale of Mom and Walter’s passage through Trieste felt like a magical turn of fate. Of course, when Mom stopped in Trieste in 1938 she could not have known that the place was by then the home of her eventual in-laws. Mom learned of them later in BA, during the years she was married to Dad, but she never met them.

Mom and Walter’s train the evening of the Anschluss was the last one to leave Vienna without inspection. From the following day onward, Jews were allowed to leave only if they had received proper exit permits. This meant a long day of lines and abuse at Gestapo headquarters in the Hotel Metropol. Departing Jews were forced to sign over all of their possessions to the Reich and emerged with nothing to their name but a paper allowing them to leave. This centralized processing had been the brainchild of SS Obersturmführer Adolf Eichmann, the head of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. Mom barely avoided the Gestapo in 1938, but her life crossed Eichmann’s again in 1960 when the Mossad announced that they had caught the murdering son of a bitch about twenty minutes away from our home in Buenos Aires.

Omi filled in the story of Mom’s and Walter’s arrival in BA.  Walter died of cancer in the early 1940s. He is buried in the Tablada Jewish Cemetery, not too far from Mom’s grave. Mom started a millinery in BA, where she made fancy hats for other émigrés from Austro-Hungary. Apparently her shop was more a salon for conversation than a workshop. The existence of the millinery explained the hat boxes I found as I was up on that ladder in my late parents’ bedroom, rummaging through their closet in 1968. It is painful to admit, but the feathered hats that I found ended up in the trash. In the late 1940s the millinery ran into trouble, as women stopped wearing fancy hats. Dad, who was an accountant and bookkeeper, was introduced to Mom during those years, as someone who could help her wind down the business. “That’s how they met,” said Omi.

Uncle Jack was still in Vienna on March 15, 1938, three days after the Anschluss, when Hitler came to the city and gave a triumphant speech welcoming the Austrians to the Reich. Jack described the crowds in and around the Heldenplatz, the Square of Heroes, where close to two hundred thousand of his delirious compatriots celebrated the arrival of the Nazi savior. Everyone was a Nazi then, and the screams of “Sieg Heil!” with upraised arms resonated throughout the city. Jack was there, watching the proceedings from the top of a lamppost. Every now and then, when I look at films of that day, I try and find the lamp-hanging members of the crowd, above the wall-to-wall carpet of humanity stretching from one end to the other of the wide avenues. It is impossible to find anyone on a lamppost, never mind my uncle.

Jack told me the story of a young employee in the office where they had both worked as clerks before the Anschluss. The boss wanted to fire this man for ineptitude, yet Jack intervened to save his job. The man quit after the Anschluss and, shortly after that, showed up late one night at Jack’s and Omi's home in Leopoldstadt dressed in a brown shirt with cap and swastika. He advised them to leave as soon as possible, as the local Nazis were planning a pogrom. He added that this was the only and last time he would come. The next day, Uncle Jack and his best friend left Vienna on their way to the German border, which they crossed without much trouble. The border guards didn't suspect that Jews would be coming into, instead of leaving, Germany. The two escapees found the atmosphere in Germany less hostile than in Austria and quickly crossed into France. There they were detained as stateless persons and put into a detention camp. Eventually they obtained support from relatives living in the US. My uncle arrived in New York in time to work as a bus boy in the World’s Fair of 1939.

Uncle Jack didn't see Mom again for twenty years. I heard from Aunt Bertha that back in Vienna, Jack and Mom had had some differences. Apparently Jack resented being left out of my mother’s circle of sophisticated friends. There had also been some sort of money grudge between them; and it lasted a bit too long. After Mom’s first husband Walter died in BA, she could have moved to the US to be close to her mother and brother. But she did not; she stayed in BA. Whatever happened between the siblings, it is a family secret forever buried.

In 1959 Uncle Jack finally made a trip to BA to see Mom and to meet her Argentine family. This was the only time he saw his sister again. She died two years later. It was also the first time I met Jack, this wonderful uncle who would later play such a loving role in my life. In contrast to my silent and withdrawn Dad, Jack was a garrulous joker and raconteur. He was physical in ways I did not know a man could be, forever hugging and tickling me.

Mom and Walter escaped Vienna in the nick of time, and Uncle Jack a few weeks later. Omi remained behind for a while longer. How she got out of there and then crossed the Atlantic while avoiding the German U-boats, is worth a separate blog, my next one: Omi Escapes.

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While still in Vienna, Omi witnessed the fiendish spirits of anti-Semitism. She saw the Nazis running around beating up Jews.  She told me that the offenders were not just members of the German SS or Austrian Brownshirts. Photos of the time show regular Viennese burghers and their laughing children as they forced their Jewish neighbors and classmates to clean the sidewalks with brushes.