CHILDHOOD IN VIENNA: HELGA

For my grandmother Helga, remembering has become a sport—a race against oblivion, in which every detail that comes to mind puts her in the lead. Listening to her rewards you with detailed reports, like the fact that, in the years before she began school, she would sneak into her parents’ bedroom each morning and crawl into bed with her mother. Her father was already at work. The maid served them breakfast in bed, after having gone to the dairy to refill the milk can.

Or that she often spent mornings with her mother, Hertha, in Alois Drasche Park, in the fourth district. It was one of Hertha’s preferred spots because it was just a few blocks from their apartment in the public housing complex on the Margaretengürtel, and almost let her feel as if she lived in one of the magnificent houses overlooking the green.

Helga also recalls her mother dressing her in white shoes and stockings, which she detested because the stockings were attached to her bodice by a ribbon. Hertha herself was elegant and always well-kept. She set little Helga’s light-brown hair into curls and made sure her daughter received the appropriate training for young ladies even before school began: piano and voice lessons, dance, English, gymnastics, swimming. Hertha was the daughter of a Protestant aristocratic father and a baptized Jewish mother, and she had a strict upbringing. Until the age of eighteen, she attended a boarding school specifically for officers’ daughters, where all the girls had to remain covered up even when showering, wore brown or gray wool uniforms with white aprons, and spoke only French during meals. She was “always a bit prissy,” Helga says—her mother came from a well-respected household and hadn’t been raised for a life in which she was mostly on her own and had to make her own decisions.

They were proud bourgeois living in public housing, an acquaintance of mine remarks when I describe my grandmother’s childhood. There is no such thing anymore. Their most prized possession lay in the dining room: a Persian rug, near the piano which they were still paying off in installments. Two of the apartment’s rooms doubled as an office for Hertha’s father, a pulmonologist. The waiting room was often so overcrowded on the afternoons he saw patients that the line wound into the staircase. Word had gotten out that he offered free treatment for those who couldn’t afford it.

My great-grandfather Paul had attended German language secondary school in Brno and went on to study medicine in Vienna. He worked mornings as a police doctor at two different Viennese inspectorates. The police liked him— especially lower-ranking police, because he always showed sympathy for underdogs.

Her father was a curiously Austrian blend, says Helga: a socialist loyal to the emperor who was also patriotic and interpreted his Judaism liberally. During World War I he had fought for the Habsburg army in Italy and was awarded the Golden Cross of Merit. A wartime lung injury had left him with a slightly curved spine. He regularly sent money to his mother and three siblings back in Moravia. In his Viennese neighborhood, the less distinguished part of the fifth district, he was widely known and well liked.

My great-grandmother Hertha, born in 1905, was baptized at birth, just as her Jewish mother had been. Her father, an officer in the Imperial-Royal Army, came from a respected, albeit impoverished, noble family. As a young officer he had taken a hot air balloon ride, and during a practice maneuver, the balloon caught fire and crashed. He fractured his femur, which subsequently grew infected, and his right leg had to be amputated. Although he was now considered a war hero and received a desk post, the incident put a sudden and unexpected end to his ambitious plans and rankled him for the rest of his life. He became depressed and distant. In 1918, when Hertha was thirteen, her parents divorced. Her mother worked as a nurse; her father soon remarried and spent most of his time at his summer house on an island in part of present-day Croatia, which back then was Italy. He paid his daughter little heed. When Hertha wasn’t at boarding school, she lived with her mother.

When Hertha was eighteen, her mother fell ill with uterine cancer. Only now did Hertha—who used to sing scornful songs along with all the other children, Jud, Jud, spuck in Hut, sag der Mama, das tut gut! (“Jew, Jew, spit in your hat, tell your Mama it’s good, that’s that.”)—learn of her own Jewish background. By then she had finished school and found work as a secretary at a local cleaning services company, a job she didn’t like. While at her mother’s bedside in Archduke Rainer Hospital, she met a Jewish assistant doctor. Paul Pollak was thirteen years her elder, promised to take care of her, and said he’d like to start a family. With him, she would never be alone again. They married in 1925, just a few months after Hertha’s mother died.

My grandmother Helga was born on February 14, 1929; the previous year, her parents’ first child had died shortly after birth, of a heart defect. As a result, Helga was all the more spoiled. Although money was always tight, she was given only the best—private lessons, beautiful clothes, lots of attention. It deeply shaped her character. I believe she developed a self-confidence in those formative years that later made her seem unshakable. As far as I can recall, I never saw her doubt herself. Criticism bounces right off her, which sometimes drives us grandchildren mad. We often asked her to knock before entering our room. To no avail.

Throughout Helga’s childhood, poverty loomed on the horizon. Their maid, Minna, for example, lived in a tiny, cordoned-off corner of the kitchen, unimaginable by today’s standards. My grandmother remains convinced that such an arrangement was not only common back then, but that Minna was extremely grateful to have work, receive regular payment, and even accommodation. The consequences of the Great Depression ultimately grew noticeable. When Helga began elementary school in 1935, about one-fifth of Vienna’s entire population was still unemployed.

Helga and her parents, Hertha and Paul Pollak, circa 1933.

In 1931 Hertha—who, according to Jewish law, was considered Jewish because her mother was—officially decided to join the Jewish community. So that her child would know where she belonged, she later explained. Each Christmas they still had a Christmas tree and presents, and each Hanukkah they lit the menorah.

At elementary school Helga caught chickenpox. Every day her mother treated her itchy blisters with a white tincture. Helga had noticed for some time that Hertha, whose figure had always been full, now had a huge belly. After taking care of Helga’s skin one morning, Hertha explained that she had to go pick up the baby the stork was bringing them. Six-year-old Helga disapproved: “I said, ‘Just leave it there, I’m so sick!’ She said, ‘Well then, we won’t get one at all, we’ll lose our chance.’ I said, ‘Then take the next one.’” Helga lost the argument. On April 16, 1936, she got a little sister, Liese.