THE PHOTOGRAPHER
One of the 170,000 Viennese Jews trying desperately to extricate herself from the country in the summer of 1938 was Helene Katz. Since the Anschluss in March, the hatred in her country toward her and the country’s other Jews had boiled over. Tens of thousands of Jewish-owned businesses and apartments across Vienna were confiscated, their inhabitants forced out on short notice. Assets held by the country’s Jews were confiscated, often after severe beatings and killings. In the countryside, Jews were pushed into Vienna, where they could be kept under watch until the government devised the next plan of action. Those Jews with the means and the courage left at the first opportunity, by any means available. Many desperate Jews committed suicide.
To better organize the forced emigration, a new office was set up in Vienna. It was the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration, and it opened its doors the third week of August 1938. Its head was Adolf Eichmann, a bland, narrow-faced, and thoroughly unattractive man. He was also a bureaucrat who cared about doing a good job, who worked hard at it, who showed initiative, zeal, and excessive loyalty, and who was anything but the banal deskbound numbers counter some would later call him. His office, with its staff workers and secretaries and filing cabinets filled with names and numbers and statistics, would now fully organize and bureaucratize the theft that was underway.
What a researcher or interested party can learn about Katz’s life today, what scant details can be gathered to fill in her biography, would not fill a 3×5 card. Born in Lemberg, Poland (today the city of Lviv in Ukraine) on September 20, 1899, she moved to Austria with her family in 1915. It is likely that the Katz family left Lemberg that year because of general unrest, the deeply rooted anti-Semitism, and of course the landscape-altering turmoil of the Great War. Her father’s name was Joachim Katz; her mother’s name seems to have been lost to history. Her mother died while Katz was still a young woman, perhaps a teenager; her father was dead by 1925, when his daughter was in her mid-twenties and just beginning to come into her own as a Vienna portrait photographer.
That summer of 1938, as Eichmann was organizing his new office, Katz was a month shy of her thirty-ninth birthday—single, worldly, a woman of the arts, no doubt very well read, and the owner of a photography studio at Stubenring 18, in the heart of Vienna’s tourist and hotel area. She also had an apartment in Vienna, at Zinckgasse 18. Katz signed her letters and her striking gelatin silver portrait photographs “Hella.” Some examples of her photography can still be found for sale at Vienna-based art galleries— their provenance is something of a mystery. Her work centered on portraits of men and women in the rarefied worlds of theater and music, such as Thea von Uyy, a ballet and cabaret dancer who performed in Vienna and Berlin, and the composer Franz Lehar, who wrote the popular operetta Die lustige Witwe, The Merry Widow. Both portraits were taken in the late 1920s.
The name “Helene Katz” was found in a series of letters in a box in the Shirer collection at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Like so much of Shirer’s personal papers—from manuscripts to newspaper clippings to thoughts jotted down on scraps of paper—he saved his correspondence with Katz. In doing so, in his very small way, he kept her name alive for someone going through his papers decades later. They stand out in a large archive—a few letters in just one box, stacked carefully on a shelf containing dozens of other boxes of Shirer’s personal records—because of all the questions they do not answer. There are just a few of them—short, pleading letters, to Bill and Tess Shirer; from Shirer back to Hella; from Shirer to his friends John and Frances Gunther; and from the Gunthers to Hella.
Hella’s first letter is addressed, “With great regard, Mr. Shirer and dear Mrs. Shirer.” It is dated August 18, 1938, the week Eichmann opened his office in Vienna to facilitate the robbing and forced emigration of Jews out of Austria. The letter is written on her stationery, the top of which reads: “Helene Katz, photographisches Atelier, Wien 1, Stubenring 18, Tel. R-21-8-40.” In fountain pen ink, she wrote, in German:
Please don’t be angry if my letter bothers you. However, these doubtful times have given me the courage to ask. I must leave Germany in 4 weeks at the latest. I’m being kicked out of my flat and I have no idea where on earth I can go. It may be inappropriate for me to turn to you, but maybe you could help me immigrate somewhere.
Pardon me, but when someone is in distress, it is difficult to know what is appropriate to do. Please dear Mr. Shirer perhaps you know something. I am very hardworking and good at my work. I could find success anywhere.
Perhaps my S.O.S. will reach you. Please call and there is still help for me.
With sincere greetings for you both,
Hella Katz
How did the Shirers know her? An easy guess is that she crossed paths with Bill Shirer when he lived and worked in Vienna. He and Tess loved music and theater, so perhaps he met her at a concert or an opening. All three moved in the same arty circles. Tess was an amateur photographer, and it is clear from records in Vienna that Hella taught photography and had students of her own. Tess might have been one of them.
A second letter in the Coe College file shows Shirer writing to Frances Gunther. It is dated August 13, 1938, which suggests that Katz had written a letter before the one she dated August 18, or perhaps Shirer typed the wrong date on his letter and the “3” in “13” is really an “8.” In the letter, addressed “Dear Frances,” Shirer says:
You will not have forgotten Hella Katz, who taught you and Tess some of the tricks of photography in Vienna once. As you may well imagine she is now in a bad way and would like to come to America. When I saw her the other day in Vienna she wondered if you could help. What she would like to do is to go into business with some American in America. Could you find someone who is interested? She thinks the Nazis will let her take her cameras and paraphanalia [sic] with her to N.Y. though I think she is kidding herself.
This letter suggests that Hella had met Tess before she met Bill when she taught Tess and Frances Gunther how to take photographs. That could have been years earlier when the Shirers and Gunthers were both living in Vienna. The letter also shows that Shirer had run into her in Vienna in mid-August 1938 and that she had asked him for his help—more likely begged him for help—mentioning the name of Frances Gunther as a possible sponsor, which Hella would need in order to get a visa to travel and remain in the United States. Hella’s mind would have been racing, groping for any lead that might get her out of the country. While he surely had a great deal of empathy for Hella, Shirer could in no way have fully imagined what lay ahead for her and for Austria’s Jews if they remained in the country.
In the Coe file is a letter from Frances Gunther to Bill. It is not dated, but it must have been sent right after she received his letter. The return address is Chestnut Hill, Norwalk, Connecticut. She addresses it “Dear Bill”:
Certainly I remember Hella Katz and her picture of Johnny is always up front. We are moving into New York next month (after Oct. 1 at 300 Central Park West), and I will see what can be done about interesting someone in getting her over and will write you again. How is Tessie?
She goes on to ask about the baby, Eileen, and to inquire why Tess has not written her back. “Why doesn’t Tessie answer my letters? Doesn’t she love me anymore? Well, it doesn’t matter, I love her just the same … . John’s working on his next book—as usual. Yours, Frances.”
John Gunther died in 1970. His papers are in the library of the University of Chicago and contain two letters that he wrote to Hella. The first was written October 17, 1938, in which Gunther opens by saying, “My wife and I were heartbroken to get your terribly tragic letter. Believe me we will do everything we can for you.” He tells her he has written the US consulate in Vienna and provided an affidavit on her behalf that she would have an American sponsor. He suggests that if she can’t get a visa, she should apply for a visitor’s visa. “I am sure you can get this type of visa at once,” Gunther tells her. In the second letter, written November 14, days after the rampages of Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), he tells her he has cabled the consulate with an urgent appeal on her behalf that she be given a visa to emigrate to the United States. He closes by saying, “I know how particularly awful things must be following this last week of turmoil. Please keep in touch and we will do everything we can.”
Shirer’s letters show that he was as involved in helping Hella as John Gunther. Shirer, though, traveled extensively, while Gunther wrote from home. Shirer had less time to put into the effort to help her but wrote when he could. On September 1, 1938, two weeks after seeing Hella in Vienna and after receiving her letter to him, Shirer wrote back to her. “Dear Miss Katz:”
Excuse me for not writing sooner but I have been away in Czechoslovakia and Germany and only found your letter on my return here this week. Last month I learned that the Gunthers had returned to New York from China and on August 13 I wrote Mrs. Gunther asking if she could find somebody there who would be interested in going into business with you in America. I expect a reply from Mrs. Gunther very soon … . Have you been in to see the American Consular General, Mr. Wiley, about your American visa? I wrote Mrs. Wiley about you. As they are good friends of mine and are leaving in a few days for a new appointment in Riga, I would urge you to see him at once. Just mention my name. I do hope something comes out of this and don’t fail to let me know.
Six weeks later, on October 18, Shirer again wrote Frances Gunther. He refers to “Gauleiter Chamberlain,” a reference to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and “shameful” events that had recently unfolded in Germany and Czechoslovakia. He begins his letter:
Here is another pitiful letter from Hella Katz which I found on my return this week from covering Czecho and Germany during the recent sad and shameful mess. I do wish we could do something for the poor girl. The only practical thing is to get her name advanced on the quota list and I am trying to get John Wiley, who is now in Riga, to see if he can swing that. If you know anyone in Washington—you know Messersmith, don’t you?—it might help to work from that end. Unless we can get her name put up towards the front of the list, she will have to wait years for an American visa.
The rest of the correspondence related to Katz amounts to four letters that, collectively, beg the question: What happened to her? On October 19, Shirer, from his home in Geneva, wrote two letters. The first was to Hella, the second to John Wiley in Latvia. In that letter, Shirer tells his friend he has been playing golf on “two lovely courses” in Geneva. He speaks of Czechoslovakia and doing 151 broadcasts for CBS, “an all time record.” He ends the letter with a personal plea for Hella:
Is there any way that you know of by which we can advance that Viennese photographer lady, Hella Katz, about whom I wrote you and Irene, on the list for an American visa? I’d like to help her. The Gunthers are providing her with an affidavit.
In the letter to Hella, Shirer informed her of his letter to Wiley, and he wondered if perhaps she could get to Latvia. It was a letter meant to allay her fears, and he closed it by saying, “In the meantime, don’t despair, Cordially yours, William Shirer.”
Hella’s letter to Shirer, written in her best but poor English, is also dated October 19. She tells him that the Gunthers have provided an affidavit of support so that she could apply in Vienna for an American visa.
I take the liberty to give many thanks to you who has helped me in such a fine manner. Now I see still yet one difficulty and this is a protection to come to the consul of Vienna for getting the permission to start to America outside the quotation. Could you help me with your influence to this? I am already very obliged to you and I hope that I shall find occasion once in my life to proof my thankfulness. I hope that Mrs. Shirer and the baby are in the best healthness which I wish with my whole heart.
John Wiley wrote to Shirer on October 27 and says he was “utterly delighted” to get Shirer’s “cheerful” letter in which he referred to playing golf in Geneva. Before he closes his letter, Wiley writes: “I am writing to the Consul General in Vienna with regard to Hella Katz. I am sure that he will do anything that is possible and proper.”
A month later, on November 22, Shirer wrote to “Miss Katz:”
Mr. Wiley writes that he has written the Consul General in Vienna about you. I therefore suggest that you go and see the Consul General as soon as possible. Mrs. Shirer is now in America, and I hope that you will be able to get there fairly soon.
As much as had happened in Hella’s life since March, November brought more terror on a far wider, more organized scale. Her panic level by the time she opened Shirer’s letter must have been overwhelming, her need for some kind of answer to her plight having reached the point of desperation. Earlier that month, over the course of two nights, November 9 and 10, the state had turned its violent hand on the Jews of Germany and Austria in what became known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Crystal—the Night of Broken Glass. The thin veneer of an excuse that the Nazi leaders in Berlin needed to unleash a wave of violence against the Jews came when Ernst von Rath, a secretary in the German Embassy in Paris, was shot dead by Herschel Grynszpan, a Polish Jew then still in his teens. The death in Paris coincided with a major event in the Nazi calendar—November 9, 1923, when the so-called Beer Hall Putsch to topple the government came to an ignominious end in the streets of Munich with the shooting deaths of Nazi punks. Those who had been in the streets that night met each anniversary with Hitler to remember their martyrs. Now, fifteen years later, they had the death in Paris to talk about. Throughout Germany and in Austria, mobs looted synagogues and shops and set them ablaze.
Where was Hella at this time? Her studio would not have survived; any photography equipment she might have left in her studio would likely have been stolen, the premises ransacked. She escaped arrest, even as thousands of other Jews in Vienna were picked up by the Gestapo and sent to camps. It is not difficult to imagine how she felt when she saw the November 22 letter from Shirer telling her to venture out into the open and make her way through the city’s streets to the American embassy to meet the consul general.
Shirer’s published diaries for the month of November—and the voluminous correspondence that he saved over the years—shed no light on Hella’s fate. In fact, his diary entries for November do not mention Kristallnacht at all. His entry for November 6 shows he was in Geneva enjoying terrific fall weather, playing golf, and battling what he called “the worst mental and spiritual depression of my life.” He also writes of starting a play he called “Foreign Correspondent.” On November 11, he was in Warsaw for a broadcast commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the establishment of the Polish Republic; on November 20, he was in Brussels for a radio conference; on November 26 Belgrade; and on November 29 in Rome to set up coverage of the pope’s critical illness.
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What happened to Hella Katz?
The Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names maintained by Yad Vashem, the museum and research facility in Jerusalem, shows that a woman named Helene Katz was deported from Vienna on March 5, 1941. Records in Vienna kept by the Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance show that the March 5 transport left from Vienna’s Aspang Station with 999 Jews crammed into cars. On that day, nearly one thousand men, women, and children stood on a train platform in a major European city clutching whatever belongings they could carry, leaving behind their lives, and waiting on the orders of armed and uniformed men who now controlled their fate. There was nothing secret being done in Vienna on that winter day. Jews weren’t mysteriously disappearing, their neighbors wondering in the morning what happened to them. They were being removed as government policy and, in this case, shipped into German-occupied Poland. Prior to being deported, the Jews still in Austria had been moved into severely cramped housing in Vienna’s second district in preparation for deportation.
Another of the 999 was a man with the same address as Helene Katz. His name was Daniel Katz; they might have been brother and sister as no marriage records exist for them. The information collected by Yad Vashem reads: “Helene Katz was born in 1885. During the war was in Wien [Vienna], Austria. Deported with transport from Wien to Modliborzyce. Helene perished in the Shoah.”
1885? This Helene Katz was not the photographer who had begged Shirer and the Gunthers for help. This was a different Viennese woman of the same name—one of millions lost to history except for a few lines in an archive.
The last correspondence exchanged between the photographer Helene Katz and Shirer came on November 22, 1938. After that, there is nothing in the Shirer files. It may be that he believed he had done all he could—writing his American government friend Wiley hoping to get her a visa to the United States, asking the Gunthers in New York if they could find a sponsor for her, urging Hella not to give up and to keep trying. He may have been told, and never written it down anywhere—certainly odd for a man who wrote down so much—that Hella was safe. What more could he have done? What were his responsibilities as an American journalist to a person who desperately needed his help?
A researcher in Vienna, Katja Maria Chladek, found a reference in the city’s archives stating that Hella Katz, the photographer, had emigrated in March 1939. She got away. More of her slim biography began to come out, through Chladek’s work and the research of others, including the Austrian journalist Anton Holzer. According to Holzer’s research, Hella became a well-known photography teacher and drew students such as Hans Popper and Elly Niebuhr, whom Holzer interviewed for a biography he wrote of her. Holzer wrote: “Only a bit later, in March 1939, Hella Katz, Elly’s master teacher, left Vienna. Under the oppression of anti-Semitism, the photographer closed her studio, deregistered on March 20, 1939 from her home address, Zinckgasse 13, and shortly thereafter left the country in the direction of England. Here all trace of her disappears.”
The state archives in Austria shows that a Nazi bureaucrat named Franz Jungwirth, in charge of disposing of Jewish-owned property, had inventoried Hella’s belongings and written a report on them, dated July 1, 1939. The report starts: “Report on wealth, liquidation plan, and simultaneously Final Report No. 12. Regarding: KATZ Helene, Photo Studio, Vienna 1, Stubenring 18 1V.” The English translation reads:
Helene Katz long after November 1938 possessed approval from a party office to distribute photographs and related items to emigrating Jews. For this reason she was free from surveillance and was also able to dispose freely of her possessions. She terminated her lease as primary tenant for her studio on April 30, 1939, and cleaned it out according to the rules. She turned it over to the landlord without arrears. Fraulein Katz owned one or two cameras, accessories, and only the most necessary furnishings of minimal worth.
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Hella Katz did reach England. In April 1939 she registered with the Jewish Refugee Committee in London. A short file contains this information:
Name—Helene Katz
Born—20 September 1899, Lemberg, Poland
Arrival in Britain—21 March 1939
Nationality—Austrian
Home address—Vienna 5, Zinckgasse 18
British address—c/o: Mrs. Lloyd, Oaksend, Oxshott, Surrey
Profession—Photographer
The committee’s records further state that Hella held an affidavit for America and on May 3, 1939, soon after arriving in England, asked the Committee for help finding a company that would forward her luggage—to where exactly, the records don’t state.