“EMIGRATE? YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING!”

Pleased at having found the “emigration forms” Hansi’s family filled out, I ask the staff of the Jewish community archives in Vienna whether they have those of Helga’s family. They check, but don’t find any. I decide to ask Helga the next time I see her. The weekly dinner hosted by my aunt is a good opportunity: every Monday the family gathers there, and now that I’m back in Vienna I do my best not to miss it. Grandma Helga doesn’t eat much for dinner, but she likes to come down from her apartment on the second floor to join us.

I ask whether she knew if her father completed an “emigration form” in the early summer of 1938. She looks at me. “You’ve got to be kidding!” she replies, sounding indignant and sad at the same time. In the first few months after the Anschluss, no one in her family had even mentioned the idea of emigrating.

Shortly after the Anschluss, her father, Paul, had been suspended from his job as a doctor in the police department and then forced to retire, even though he was only forty-six. Almost everywhere else, Jews were simply fired. Retirement was therefore a special concession his superiors had made, allowing him to receive a pension. It didn’t seem all that bad, says Helga. Her father was convinced he’d be able to find another job under the new regime. That’s just how he was, Helga adds, always looking on the bright side. Now that he was down and out, he expected or hoped others would offer him the same solidarity he’d always shown those weaker than himself.

A little later his family, just like two thousand other Jewish tenants in Vienna’s public housing, received an eviction notice. Vienna’s social democratic city government had built 66,000 public housing units since the end of World War I—a lot, but not enough to contain the booming population. When the German Reich began moving political and military personnel to Vienna, living quarters grew even scarcer. The eviction of “non-Aryans” was officially sanctioned. They were to clear the premises by July 1, 1938.

A scan of the eviction notice is preserved in the Archives of the Austrian Resistance. I look at the form, filled out by hand. The illegible scrawl next to the preprinted “reason for eviction” probably reads “Jew” or “non-Aryan.” Several documents are attached to the main form, which is how I discover that my great-grandfather filed an objection within a week of receiving the notice. On May 30, 1938, he fed a sheet into his typewriter and replied: “Since I will only be able to secure another apartment in August and, as a war veteran injured on the front lines—I am a doctor for the police department (currently on leave)—I have not yet been informed of the exact details concerning the pension to which I am entitled, and hence cannot yet know what living arrangements I will be able to afford, I ask that I be granted an extension to stay in public housing until the month of August. I vow to vacate the apartment by the August deadline.” The city housing authority’s response came twelve days later and is also archived: No extensions permitted.

Might my great-grandfather have started to harbor some doubts by then? I wonder whether he and his wife might have had some disagreements. Was my great-grandmother Hertha as feisty back then as she later became, once she was on her own? Hurry up, fill out the “emigration form” and look for relatives or acquaintances who can send an affidavit or otherwise help get you out of the country, I want to implore them through the years. I know how this will end.

But no. On June 30, 1938, Paul had to fill out a four-page form, “Jewish Property Inventory.” He had 100 Reichsmarks in a passbook, his gold pocket watch and the silverware were worth 200 Reichsmarks, and he possessed 200 Reichsmarks worth of medical instruments and books. He estimated the value of his life insurance policy at 1,200 Reichsmarks. He didn’t yet know how much his pension would be worth. If the information he gave is correct, the family had virtually no savings, and certainly not enough to cover the costly emigration of four people. So maybe Paul didn’t even try because he was well aware they stood no chance. All around him, tens of thousands of Jews were desperately trying to leave the country. Surely he’d heard how expensive, difficult, and therefore often hopeless it was.

Couldn’t you find someone, anyone to borrow money from? I want to beg him. “Papa had a bit of a blind spot,” says Helga. As always, when it comes to her father, she speaks with a little more hesitation than usual. She doesn’t want to judge him for his decisions. At the time, they seemed reasonable.

The family moved into a new apartment in mid-June 1938, on Margaretenstrasse in the fifth district, and it was nicer and bigger than the one they’d had in public housing, Helga recalls. Even though a Jewish doctor and his wife were already living there—and they were trying to emigrate to the United States—there was still enough space; the building even had several balconies and an exercise room. And it was the first time Helga lived in an apartment with a private bathroom. Before that, she had always had to take sponge baths in her bedroom, with water warmed on the stove and poured into a little tub.

It also boasted a basic doctor’s office, and Paul continued to receive patients. Like all Jewish physicians, his license and national health insurance certification had been revoked, but as a “Jewish healthcare provider” he was one of the few still permitted to treat Jewish patients. Because Jews were now only allowed to see Aryan doctors if their lives were in imminent danger, patients came to his practice from far and wide. Before the Anschluss, he had charged many patients little or nothing if they couldn’t afford it. Now Jews from all walks of life were coming to him. Business was good, and Paul was earning more than before. His confidence in Austria had been restored, and the inconveniences of the regime change seemed to have blown over.

The first time Helga tells me her family’s situation improved after the Anschluss, I’m sure I’ve misunderstood her. Since I’ve begun looking into my family history, I’ve been reading about many people’s differing destinies. But never have I heard a sentence like that. So I’m compelled to ask: “After the Anschluss things got better for the family?” Absolutely—financially things were going well, and that was important because her father still had to support his mother and siblings in Brno. So not only did the idea of emigrating strike her father as dishonorable—after all, he was a decorated World War I veteran—it would have been irresponsible. Their rights were limited under the new regime, but they’d just have to learn to make do.

*

“It was October 19, 1938,” says Helga. When she came home from school that day, a Wednesday, her father was gone. In the photos the secret state police—the Gestapo—took after his arrest, he wears a jacket with a pocket handkerchief, a white shirt, and a patterned necktie. His side-parted hair is precisely cut and neatly combed. He looks as if he’s headed to an important meeting. Did he think it was all a misunderstanding and that he would soon be released?

The Gestapo locked him up in solitary at the police detention center of the Rossauer Barracks, a massive reddish-brown building on the banks of the Danube Canal. Compared to the many Gestapo detainees who were tortured and didn’t survive detention, things went rather well for Paul. Clearly his former police department coworkers campaigned for him, because he’d been popular; although he was now imprisoned, he was allowed to write to his wife every Sunday. He was given ruled paper, which he folded once, so that his letters were about the size of a postcard. Using a pencil, he filled the narrow lines with a steady cursive I can barely read. “Stapo detainee cell 26,” he scribbled along the edge. Helga saved all her parents’ correspondence.

“I had imagined celebrating our wedding anniversary rather differently,” Paul writes four days after his arrest, on October 23, 1938. “You cannot imagine what receiving your note meant to me in my desolate solitude, so I beg of you, write me often, because the thought of you is the only thing that can give me some will to live.” My great-grandmother Hertha obliged, writing several letters and postcards every week. She delivered many of them in person, because she was allowed to take her husband’s clothes home to wash. “I’m always happy when I’ve got your dirty laundry in hand, although I’m also glad there’s not too much of it,” she writes. She wasn’t allowed to actually see or speak to Paul.

He wrote telling her not to inform his family in Brno about his arrest. He didn’t want to upset them, so he told her to say he had a broken arm and couldn’t write. “As far as Franziska Alice is concerned,” he goes on, “she should cling to Uncle Gustav, so as not to suddenly find herself in Aunt Valerie’s situation; Gustav, with his rich and influential relatives, could do a lot.” He’d now begun writing his letters in a code of sorts, encrypting names. Franziska Alice is none other than Hertha herself. Aunt Valerie’s husband, a Christian Socialist, was deported to Dachau. Who Uncle Gustav might have been, Helga no longer knows. “I’m sure Franziska’s fate won’t be the same as Valerie’s,” my great-grandmother replied a few days later.

“Since, luckily, there’s nobody around to laugh at me, I read all your notes countless times, day and night,” Paul confesses on November 5. “Just imagine, I have to think, now Helga’s going to school, now our two curly heads are in their little beds, and who knows when I’ll get to see all that again?” Who could know? Back home Hertha, now suddenly solely responsible for her family, used her meticulous handwriting to send letter after letter to her husband’s friends, acquaintances, and former colleagues, asking them to stand up for Paul. Writing in code, she tells him about it: “You need to know, this much is certain: regarding the condition of Chayela’s eldest boy, you needn’t worry too much. The child is strong. Of course, it will take some time for him to fully recuperate.”

From his letters, I can sense that Paul finally realized how dangerous the regime was for him too. He didn’t know why the Gestapo arrested him, nor did he know if or when he would be released. He writes Hertha that she should contact a friend in Zurich and ask him to look into emigration options there. Paul was desperate, insecure, and lonely. “Please don’t leave me, and write to me often,” he begs. “I assure you: the lines of your letters are the axis upon which my whole life revolves, from which I gain strength and renewed courage, though I find it very difficult.” The words “very difficult” are written in all caps and underlined.

I’m moved by these letters. Although my great-grandfather now realized he’d have to leave the country, he still had no idea what other people would prove capable of. He complained of insomnia, nervousness, and boredom. The letters often mention laundry. Did he know how good he had it compared to other Gestapo prisoners? At least you have enough to eat, I want to tell my great-grandfather, and nobody’s beating you. Of course I’m being unfair; I have the advantage of twenty-twenty hindsight. And no matter how bearable the conditions might have been, Paul was still wrongfully imprisoned, with no prospect of being put on trial or released.

He was probably also cut off from news of current events. It isn’t clear from my great-grandparents’ correspondence whether Paul had heard about the pogroms that took place the night of November 9, 1938, for example. I’m unable to understand the hints my great-grandmother Hertha included in her letters until her daughter Helga points them out to me: “We haven’t seen much of our friends in the last few days, everyone’s staying home as much as possible. I haven’t sent Helga to school since Wednesday, she’s so happy to stay home,” Hertha wrote two days after Kristallnacht, which took place on a Wednesday. She promised Helga would diligently continue practicing piano. Paul didn’t write to ask why his eldest daughter, who had always loved going to school, had suddenly changed her mind. Might he have suspected Helga was staying home for fear of further uprisings? It wasn’t until the following weekend, on November 20, that Paul remarked how he missed Hertha’s “usual optimism.” In her reply, she assured him it had nothing to do with her situation: “The general bad mood among our friends and relatives got the upper hand over me too.”

“Beloved, dearest wife! I’m leaving tomorrow, I’m feeling hardy and brave, as should you—be strong. Farewell, and give everyone a kiss for me, your faithful Paul.” He underlined the words “I’m feeling hardy and brave.” The postcard reached my great-grandmother on December 3, 1938. What they had long feared had now happened: Paul had been sent to a concentration camp. The Nazis had been deporting German and Austrian Jews to Buchenwald—the camp near the German city of Weimar—for some time already, forcing them to emigrate. Those who had entry visas from another country, plus the approval of the Reich’s Main Security Office and the Gestapo, were allowed out again.

Again, Hertha sat down and wrote to anyone and everyone who might be able to help. A letter an acquaintance wrote on her behalf got all the way to Prussian Field Marshal August von Mackensen, another went directly to the Gestapo in Berlin; she enclosed thank-you letters written by “prominent Aryans” expressing praise for Paul, as well as a character witness statement from their maid, Minna, who they’d since had to dismiss. My grandmother also saved her mother’s correspondence with various consulates in Vienna: Hertha had spoken to the British and American embassies without success, but the Chinese embassy finally confirmed that the family would be permitted to enter Shanghai. Which meant that Paul would soon be released.

Hertha closed out Paul’s savings account and life insurance, and bought a steamer ticket for her husband. She and their daughters would follow later on—they weren’t in immediate danger, and they kept hearing how Jewish detainees were particularly harassed at Buchenwald. But then, with no explanation, Paul wasn’t released. Hertha returned the ticket and paid the cancellation fee. Because the market of furnishings that desperate Jews were trying to sell was saturated, she sold their Persian rug far below its value and bought a new ticket. Paul’s release was delayed once more, and the family never learned why. Once again Hertha returned the ticket, replacing the diamond on her wedding ring with a less expensive stone. The proceeds were just enough for one ticket. Hertha then returned the piano Helga had been practicing on, as she could no longer pay the installments.

When I ask Helga what her experience of this particular period was like—her father’s imprisonment, her mother’s attempts to arrange for their emigration—she mentions how depressed the mood was at home, her mother’s fear, their slide toward poverty. They often ran out of money well before the end of the month. Hertha then went to the Dorotheum, the pawnshop, and pawned the few silver objects she had left. The small loan helped her get by until her husband’s pension, which the family relied on, arrived a few days later—and then she’d reclaim the silver again.

On June 10, 1939, Paul was released. He was allowed to stay in Vienna for two days before moving on to Genoa, from where his ship would depart. He hadn’t seen ten-year-old Helga for nine months. And he had changed. His face was emaciated, his front teeth had been knocked out in Buchenwald, and his scalp was shaved. He was trembling, nervous, and anxious. When a gust of wind blew the hat off his head on the way to the station, he ran after it crying.

Helga doesn’t dwell on such episodes. She prefers to talk about the people who helped her during this time—her maternal grandfather in particular, who resumed a major role in her life. Hertha’s father, a retired officer of the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Army, spent most of the year at his home in Lussinpiccolo, now known as Mali Lošinj, on the Croatian island of Lošinj. Once, when she was five or six, Helga had visited with her mother, and she remembers a terrarium in her grandfather’s garden with a reptile she describes as a little alligator. A few months after the Anschluss, the lieutenant colonel abandoned his summer house and returned to Vienna with his second wife, Gabriela, whom everyone called Ella. Did they move so he could support his daughter, who was now on her own? Or because it was too expensive to run two households? Or for political reasons? “I don’t know,” says Helga. Her grandfather spoke with his former comrades, some of whom were now in the upper echelons of the Nazi party, and helped support the family with a little money and food.

There were also others who stood by them: Ella’s brother, a stormtrooper, spoke up for them; their former maid, Minna, who continued to visit, and her husband, also a Nazi party member, remained loyal to the family; a former colleague of Helga’s father; a Czech relative; the list goes on. They’re all important, Helga says. “He’s definitely part of the story,” I often hear her say. I nod but can barely keep track. I’m not writing a phone book, I say to myself, and immediately feel disrespectful. Of course these people were important. They made Helga feel her world was still halfway decent.

In mid-June 1939 Helga’s family got some news from Genoa. Paul discovered they’d been cheated; the steamer she’d bought him a ticket on didn’t exist. He’d gone there with a six-month tourist visa, and foreign Jews in Italy weren’t granted a longer residence permit. Nor could the Italian authorities deport him to the German Reich, because he wouldn’t have been admitted. He was stuck.