PEPI
I’ve yet to find the answer to a key question. I reread Hansi’s notes, listen to an interview he did with a historian in the late 1980s, ask my grandmother, my aunt, and all relatives Hansi and Pepi spent a lot of time with—but just how Josef Feldner, whom everyone called Pepi, and the Bustin family met and became friends remains a mystery. I’ve only found one potential connection: from 1921 to 1938, Pepi worked as a doctor in Viennese middle schools and other so-called special schools, including the high school on Radetzkystrasse, in the third district, where my ten-year-old grandfather Hansi took classes for a brief nine months before dropping out in May 1936.
Josef Feldner was born in Vienna in 1887 and came from a liberal, Catholic family of merchants. He studied medicine and worked on the special education ward of the University Children’s Hospital, where he spent a lot of time observing “mentally abnormal” children and discussing their cases. He also worked as a school doctor, treating children and adolescents of all different social classes. Pepi believed children with abnormal behavior were somehow developmentally “stuck,” and could heal themselves if they were asked the right questions and adequately listened to.
I suspect Hansi and Pepi met at school. Perhaps Hansi was a challenging case? Records clearly show he was a reluctant, imbalanced student but also intelligent and full of energy. Perhaps Pepi paid Hansi a house call, met his parents and younger brother, advised them as they discussed switching schools, and then followed up on the boy’s progress. This would seem to fit with Pepi’s routine approach to the job, as later described by the well-known pediatrician Hans Asperger on the occasion of Pepi’s seventy-fifth birthday in 1962: “He understands countless children’s personalities in the most intimate detail, having followed them through the years, attended conferences on a regular basis, worked in middle schools to advocate for such children, and having often found a way when cases were considered hopeless.” Asperger went on to say he “tirelessly pursues his cases, year after year, doing research within the family (for those who know to pose questions as he does, all doors open). He follows the lads on their respective paths, sometimes into the darkest realms …”
Pepi had four brothers and two sisters. Between the two world wars he, his siblings, and both Jewish and non-Jewish friends formed an intellectual circle. All agreed: they were against Hitler and the Nazis. In the first months of World War II, as the situation for Jews in Vienna rapidly deteriorated, Pepi hid potatoes in his briefcase to give to Jewish acquaintances he visited, says Hansi. He also saw the Bustins. By then, merely being friends with Jews was punishable by several months’ imprisonment at a concentration camp.
In 1941 Vienna’s Jewish families gradually began disappearing on transports to the “eastern territories.” Hansi’s was one of the last families left. As an educator employed by the city, most recently at an orphanage, my great-grandfather was considered “indispensable,” and his deportation was repeatedly postponed—until mid-1942, when the orphans were deported. That September, the family received the notorious yellow postcard. I searched through the papers Hansi and Helga kept, but never found that card. Consulting the curator of an exhibition on the transit camps where one such card is on display, I’m told very few exist anymore. They were sent from the Central Office for Jewish Emigration: “You are to report on ____ at ____ with your relatives ____ and luggage (max. weight 50 kg per person) to Vienna’s second district school, Kleine Sperlgasse 2a. No-shows subject to arrest.”
Was there a way out? All their attempts to emigrate had failed. Since the United States had entered the war in December 1941, they had no more hope of being selected by lottery for a spot within the quota. They’d had no news of Frieda, Rosa’s twin, who had been living in the United States since November 1939, nor of her older sister, Sophie, who had been deported to Minsk a few weeks prior. That’s the situation Pepi found the family in.
Had Pepi already considered it beforehand, or did he spontaneously decide to make the offer? Did he like Hansi because he saw him as a kindred spirit, or was it just sheer coincidence he made the proposal to Hansi’s parents and not some other Jewish family? The war couldn’t last much longer, Pepi told my great-grandparents. He had been listening to British radio in secret and knew that the Wehrmacht had suffered its first defeats in the Soviet Union that winter, and that the Royal Air Force was bombing German cities. He proposed that the parents report for the summons, but he would take in the two boys, fourteen and sixteen at the time. Pepi was unmarried and had room in his apartment on Neubaugasse, in the seventh district of Vienna. In just a few months, it would all be over and they’d be together again.
The parents were undecided. Two relatives had been arrested a few months before, for attempting to go into hiding as Aryans. They were deported then and there, and no one had heard from them since. They’d certainly face harsh punishment if discovered, a bleak fate they didn’t want their sons to share. But then what fate awaited in Theresienstadt? “Censored postcards from the camp had reached Vienna— why, you could even send parcels to Theresienstadt. Things couldn’t be all that bad there,” Hansi noted. “The situation in Vienna was already so grim that people thought going anywhere else could only be an improvement.” Would the authorities go looking for the boys if their parents reported to the transit camp without them? And how would Pepi take care of two teenage boys?
Even Hansi can only speculate about the thoughts that must have swirled through his parents’ minds back then. They never discussed it with him, and he never learned how they came to their decision, which he calls a Solomonic solution: they took the younger son with them, and the older one stayed behind. “Nobody knew which of us would walk the more dangerous path.” Perhaps they thought he was more apt to successfully face the challenges of living in hiding. After all, he never had been one to follow the rules.
By ten o’clock in the morning on September 28, 1942, the apartment on Konradgasse, in Vienna’s second district, was empty and silent. Seventeen people had shared its three and a half rooms; one after the other, they had all been deported. The only things in the room were Moritz, Rosa, and Herbert’s packed suitcases, labeled in white oil paint with their name and address. A few days before, Hansi had brought his belongings and the few remaining family objects—photos, some of his brother’s drawings—to Pepi’s apartment. “We were all too wound up to bid one another a heartfelt farewell. I didn’t know what to expect at Pepi’s, and my parents were trying to deal with their suitcases and impending departure into an unknown future. At the very last moment, everything happened so fast. We only had time for a short hug, a quick good luck wish, and then I was out on the street.” Hansi paused in the doorway to take off his jacket pocket with the yellow star. Then he turned the corner onto Taborstrasse, hopped on the tram, and headed to Pepi’s.
*
As I read the diary of Anne Frank, I compared what I knew about Hansi’s time in hiding with her situation—a German girl hidden for two years in an apartment in the rear courtyard of a building in Amsterdam. A revolving bookshelf provided the only access to Anne’s hideout; in order to get to Hansi, all you had to do was ring the bell of a nineteenth-century apartment building on Neubaugasse. Pepi’s place was on the third floor. Anne never left her narrow rooms, but Hansi was constantly out and about. What did the word “normal” mean to Jews living in hiding?
In Austria, about a thousand people survived for more than a year in hiding during the war; in Germany there were about five thousand. Their accounts indicate that the degree of confinement Anne Frank and her family stuck to was rare. It was more common for people to change their identity, which is why many survived thanks to false papers and other counterfeit IDs. Many people had to move rather often because staying in one place for too long was dangerous. One survivor reported having sheltered in twenty-two different places over the course of two years; another referred to over sixty different spots, including abandoned suburban train cars and empty basements. Seventeen-year-old Hansi was one of the rare exceptions: he stayed on Neubaugasse for so long he settled into a daily routine.
Each morning, he would get up late, prepare some Kramperltee—an herbal tea made with dried apple skins and herbs—and then go to the apartment door and just listen. He was lucky when it came to the other tenants. The building superintendent was old and had failing eyesight, rarely left her apartment, and always kept the curtains drawn on the lookout window commonly found in buildings of that era. One or two neighbors were Nazi party members, but they weren’t fanatics. Pepi was friends with the owner of the little grocery shop on the ground floor. Even so, Hansi avoided others as much as possible and ventured out of the apartment only when no one could be heard in the stairwell. If he happened to run into neighbors or visitors, he’d scurry past without saying a word. In the big city, that wasn’t unusual. The war, food shortages, and concern for fighters on the front kept everyone preoccupied, writes Hansi, so virtually no one greeted anyone they passed.
He spent his late mornings in a lending library on Burggasse. Pepi rarely read novels, writes Hansi, hence he couldn’t expect any recommendations there. So he ended up reading German nationalist “blood and soil” books, novels we’d now call chick-lit, Friedrich Schiller, and Wild West stories. I wish I could ask him if he liked those books. His answer would probably resemble my grandmother’s: I had no choice.
Both remained avid readers for the rest of their lives. The shelves of their apartment are crammed to the ceiling with a broad range of books, with classics of German literature next to tattered detective novels, medical reference books next to twentieth-century war histories. Hansi’s nightstand was always piled high with books and magazines, a stack that was sometimes several feet deep.
For lunch, Hansi and Pepi would meet in one of the nearby taverns. Because Hansi had no ration cards, he ate the so-called Stammgerichte. Since 1939, by law, Viennese eateries had to include a nonrationed dish on the menu; it was usually meager—a thin soup, root vegetables, or potatoes in an herb sauce—but if he ate at several places in a row, he could partially sate his hunger. The two then went home and had an afternoon nap. Keeping the apartment tidy was Hansi’s job, which he did in the afternoons. He washed his clothes in a large pot on the gas stove and rinsed them out in the bathtub. Darning his socks was virtually part of his daily routine since the yarn was weak and quickly tore.
How did Hansi get new garb without a clothing ration card? Did he suffer from vitamin deficiencies because of his poor diet? Was he ever seriously ill? The poverty they experienced is never directly apparent in Hansi’s notes. Instead, he remarks that almost everyone suffered such hardships.
Each afternoon, Hansi brewed another pot of Kramperltee and sat down with Pepi at the dining table. Hansi notes that he could talk to him like no one else. Pepi never spoke much. Instead, he would ask the right questions and then attentively listen, looking at the young man across the table with his intense eyes.
They discussed religion, for example. Pepi had spent six months at seminary as a twenty-two year-old, much to the surprise of his Catholic but not especially observant family. The idea had just come to him; later on, he couldn’t really say what had fascinated him about it. But celibacy, among other things, wasn’t for him. Many evenings, he would slip out to rendezvous with women, using safety pins inside his coat to hide his cassock. When Pepi’s clandestine visits with prostitutes in Vienna’s Prater park were discovered, he left the seminary.
Pepi became an atheist and encouraged Hansi to think about what religion meant to him: “During our first few discussions, as I rummaged through my various unformulated thoughts on the topic, Pepi never laughed at my naïveté. Pepi wasn’t one to dismiss anyone as stupid or ignorant.” Hansi’s family had celebrated the main Jewish and Christian holidays, and wasn’t very devout, but also didn’t question tradition. With the Anschluss, Judaism had become something they were persecuted for; in the subsequent struggle for existence, rituals lost their meaning. By the time Hansi turned thirteen, in October 1938, organizing a bar mitzvah was out of the question.
Is there a god? “My childish worldview—in which God was still an elderly, dignified gentleman with a long, curly white beard, holding his generous and protective hand over the devout believers who prayed to him—was gradually replaced with a more rigorous, scientific, deterministic framework in which prayers and rites assumed the importance of meditative, relaxing exercises for simple minds.” Hansi later writes that, for him, Judaism became the “gene pool” that had apparently supplied most of his genetic makeup. “The fact that many people from this gene pool still cling to the fiction of a Jewish God does not mean I have a commitment to do the same.”
Hansi loved it when Pepi would tell him about what went on in the military hospital. Pepi had volunteered for the Wehrmacht in 1941, and during the war, he had worked in two different hospitals, treating wounded soldiers who were no longer in critical condition. What did Pepi—a staunch pacifist and Nazi opponent—want with the Wehrmacht? It was considered a good place for dissidents because, as long as you didn’t want to climb the career ladder, your politics didn’t matter. Pepi was popular with his colleagues and provided his services there each morning without attracting undue attention. While working on the ward, he also managed to get his hands on an empty paybook, which he knew could be useful as a false ID for Hansi. The police were constantly on the lookout for deserters, so Hansi was particularly vulnerable as a young, visibly healthy man; hardly anyone suspected there were any Jews in Vienna anymore.
Pepi and Hansi didn’t manage to fill the paybook with the right stamps, but Hansi always kept it in his breast pocket anyway. He had sprinkled pepper between the pages—an attempt at self-defense I find quite touching; using pepper as a weapon feels symbolic of the unfair fight the two of them were waging against the regime.
Hansi was interested in the medical cases, especially since Pepi explained them in lay terms he could understand. Pepi took him seriously, and Hansi learned without even noticing. As he later described it, “Pepi was a fount of knowledge, pouring information from a wide range of fields into my head … He was always teaching me, but in a subtle, completely unobtrusive way. I had had almost no formal education. The meaning of every foreign word, whether of Latin or Greek origin, was dissected and explained. My intellectual life began on Neubaugasse, with Pepi.”
At some point, it seems, he hit a wall. They had run out of visual material, and Pepi sensed that Hansi had to see things for himself, in a hospital. What could he do? Right then and there, Pepi took Hansi along, introduced him to his colleagues as his medical assistant, had him accompany him on his rounds, and even let him help out. “Take his pulse, please,” Pepi would say to Hansi, addressing him formally, as he would a professional peer. He did it all with such calm self-assurance that no one suspected who the hospital’s young new arrival actually was.
For a while Hansi even went to psychology lectures at the University of Vienna. Pepi knew the professor and trusted him. How long Hansi attended, what excuse he had arranged in case someone asked for his student ID, whether he enjoyed it—Hansi’s notes don’t answer such questions.
*
Why did this man save me? For the rest of his life, Hansi tried to answer that question. Hansi’s autobiographical jottings don’t give a conclusive answer but do offer a few hints. For example, Pepi was often able to ignore imminent danger. After completing his medical studies in 1915, he was sent off to the Italian front. The lice infestation he and his comrades suffered got so bad that he decided to prepare a steaming bath—while under continuous enemy fire. Later on, when he was awarded a medal for his bravery, he joked he’d received it for a hot soak in the tub.
Josef Feldner, 1930s.
Pepi’s work was always more important to him than his income or reputation. Viennese physician Hans Asperger, who later became famous worldwide for his work on the developmental disorder named after him, described Pepi as a significant teacher, whose appearance and demeanor impressed him: Pepi was over six feet tall, lean, and had a narrow face whose bright eyes emitted a “piercing gaze.” “In 1931, I was a young medical assistant working at the infirmary of the Children’s Hospital when I saw him for the first time,” Asperger wrote on Pepi’s seventy-fifth birthday. “A child was admitted who had stuck dozens of needles into his own skin; they were discovered almost by accident during a checkup. Feldner came to see the child.” Asperger had already prepared a statement on the case, hoping to impress Pepi. “But all my preconceived notions fell away after he posed just a few questions to the boy (I was amazed how he phrased his questions, so instructively, quite the opposite of the stereotypical psychiatric formulations I’d been taught). After making a few keen observations about the boy’s appearance and behavior, he left. And he always left me thinking.”
Although Pepi participated in the weekly roundtables at the Children’s Hospital, where special cases were discussed, he was never a full-time employee—he was there as a volunteer. He lived mainly on his poorly paid job as a school doctor. He didn’t mind wearing threadbare clothes and, when money was tight, eating nothing but cornmeal for weeks on end. He had a high pain threshold and could ignore discomfort for a long time. He once walked around for days with a nail protruding into his shoe, but he only tended to it once the cut it made on his foot became an open wound.
Over the course of decades, Pepi took detailed notes on about 20,000 patients he’d studied, but he published little and never became a renowned scientist. His only book, Pediatric Developmental Psychiatry: The Construction and Disintegration of Personality, wasn’t published until 1955. A purple plastic laundry basket in the bottom of a wardrobe in my grandparents’ apartment, filled to the brim with brittle paper folders, contains Pepi’s life’s work. I take it out, dust it off, and crack open the first file on top. It contains case histories of children and adolescents he looked after, most of whom must be very old or no longer alive today. For a moment, I think about trying to track down some of his former patients and see what became of them. Did they remember Pepi? But then I dismiss the idea out of hand. In his will, he expressly stated that his papers were to remain confidential, protected under physician-patient privilege.
When Pepi finally established his own medical practice, he had less and less time for keeping his cherished records. What did he do in order to have more time? He faked graffiti on his doorsign that read “Incompetent Doctor.” This anecdote, recounted to me by a relative, fits my gradually emerging picture of Pepi. He was a quiet, shy loner who remained unmarried his entire life. He liked to share a bed with the women who constantly circled him, but none of his affairs ever turned into serious relationships.
In Hansi’s notes, I read that Pepi had a curious relationship to risk-taking. He liked to gamble, but years would go by between casino visits. When the mood struck, he would go every day, playing high-stakes games at several tables simultaneously, excitedly bustling back and forth. At times he would forget what he had bet where, and the croupiers would remind him. His visits were usually short, and he seldom stayed longer than half an hour. One time he went to the casino because he needed money to pay for ham he’d bought on the black market. It cost him three months’ salary, about 600 Reichsmarks. He had promised to pay the next day, so with his remaining cash, 100 Reichsmarks, he had gone to the casino in Baden, just south of Vienna. Shortly thereafter he’d won 600 Reichsmarks, and he went home. “I have a particularly vivid memory of it, because it fit perfectly into the extended, lucky winning streak we enjoyed over the years,” Hansi writes. “I can’t say what Pepi would’ve done if he had lost that bet.”
Hansi also mentions Pepi’s unwavering, apparently contagious optimism. Several times a day they listened to the German-language BBC station. Pressing their ears to the radio speaker, they followed the news from the front lines, listened to Thomas Mann’s voice, and heard about the resistance in the occupied territories. Pepi never doubted what he had said to Hansi’s father back in the summer of 1942: within two months, the war would be over.
Pepi had no enemies, writes Hansi, and no one wished him ill. His effect on others was positive: his restrained, self-deprecating nature and attentive listening skills meant even strangers ended up entrusting him with the most intimate details of their lives. Many responded much like the boy from the children’s hospital with the needles under his skin, and they opened right up.
Pepi made no secret of the fact that he rejected Hitler and his ideologies. Hansi writes that about a hundred people from Pepi’s social circle knew about the doctor hiding him. I marvel upon hearing such a high number. Historians estimate that, on average, for every single Jew who was saved, seven people were involved. Pepi couldn’t have saved Hansi all by himself. Family, friends, and acquaintances who disapproved of the regime—but didn’t dare endanger themselves directly—supported him with food, little gifts, and, above all, their silence: they were grateful he made it possible for them to calm their own consciences.
One couple Pepi was friends with lived in an attic apartment near the Naschmarkt, in Vienna’s sixth district. The man had supported the Christian government, and when the Nazis seized power, he was sentenced to a year in prison—a year he spent befriending his Jewish cellmates. After his release, he worked as a bookkeeper in a hardware store. The couple’s only son was drafted into the Wehrmacht, and he was reported missing soon after. Several times a month, Hansi and Pepi visited the couple, who gave them rationed goods they could exchange on the black market. They sometimes stayed until so late at night that their hosts had even given them a house key, so the couple wouldn’t have to go downstairs to lock the door behind them.
The owner of the little ground floor grocery shop in their building on Neubaugasse was also a friend. After the Allies landed in Normandy in the summer of 1944, Pepi decided to prepare a feast. He waltzed into the shop and excitedly shouted: “The English radio said …” whereupon the owner’s steely gaze and everyone else’s sudden silence shut him right up. You could be sent to prison for listening to enemy radio stations, and spreading such news could warrant the death penalty. But nobody turned Pepi in.
Pepi might have been a loner, but he wasn’t lonely. He was close with his siblings. Their father had run a wholesale business, and they had all endured his severe temper. As children, they were often banished from the dinner table for negligible infractions of his house rules—all seven of them could often be found in the kitchen, eating with the help. By the time Hansi met Pepi, his father had already died, and his mother had moved to Langenzersdorf, on Vienna’s northern outskirts. The siblings gathered there each week for Sunday tea. Pepi invited Hansi along, so he could meet his family. Hansi liked the visits, which reminded him of his own childhood. Not just that, but sometimes they even had real coffee, brewed from freshly ground beans. Such a rare delicacy was savored one tiny sip at a time. After refreshments, the siblings filled a backpack with food they had bought on the black market for Pepi and Hansi.
During one such Sunday gathering in the winter of 1942, one of Pepi’s four brothers told him some Gestapo officers had searched his home in Langenzersdorf. They suspected he was hiding a Jew. Who could have tipped them off? Would they continue their search and realize they had gone after the wrong brother? The situation was tense. Certainly Hansi and Pepi had discussed what they would do if the Gestapo came to the apartment on Neubaugasse. Did Hansi offer to take off and try to go it alone? Did Pepi look for potential hiding places in the attic or basement? It seems Pepi’s confidence prevailed once again: clearly the officers were incompetent, the whole thing would soon fall through the cracks. Hansi mentions this episode only briefly in his notes.
As a precaution, however, they decided Hansi wouldn’t come to the family gatherings for the time being. The journey had become too dangerous. A few weeks earlier, a military patrolman on the train had asked for Pepi and Hansi’s papers. Pepi pulled out his own ID and struck up a conversation, explaining that his absent-minded nephew had regrettably forgotten his papers at home today, but they didn’t want to miss the train, otherwise they’d be late for family dinner … the patrolman brushed it off with a wave of his hand—but encouraged the young gentleman to pay better attention next time. Heil Hitler.
Months passed, Hansi remained vigilant, the Gestapo didn’t come. Had no one ever suspected Pepi of anything? I call up his wartime district file in the Austrian State Archives, wherein local party officials recorded their political assessment of him. Such files were commonly kept on people working in public sector posts. In the spring of 1940, the National Insurance Institute had investigated Pepi. No cause for concern: he had always worked for the government and was especially kind to the needy. In April 1944 he applied for a position as medical officer with the fire department: although he had not actively worked for the party, no dissenting attitude had been observed, the anonymous reviewer wrote. From a political point of view, no cause for concern.
*
Over the years, Pepi and Hansi had two roommates in the apartment on Neubaugasse: when Hansi arrived in September 1942, Pepi’s nephew Franzl was already living there. Franzl was from Styria and was studying medicine in Vienna—while wearing his Wehrmacht uniform. In 1940 he had served in the Western campaign and was then ordered to complete medical training as quickly as possible. Franzl was everything but an impassioned soldier; he preferred to lie about reading philosophy, listening to Bruckner, and going to church every Sunday. According to Hansi’s notes, he was somber and “mystic-beatific.” His intellectual mien was ill suited to the times: “The war and current situation in the homeland called for skilled, sociable people who could quickly adapt to a variety of situations. Moral convictions and religious beliefs were a hindrance and could lead to difficulties with one’s military superiors. Franzl wasn’t chummy, could never be a suitable confidant, certainly couldn’t tell a dirty joke, and had most definitely never gone out and gotten drunk with anyone.”
Pepi, the atheist, noted his devout nephew’s earnest demeanor with a touch of irony. Hansi and Franzl didn’t have much in common, but they were just a few years apart in age and actually got along quite well. While the dutiful student went to class each morning, Hansi slept. Each evening, they would meet up again at home, have long conversations, and share Franzl’s food rations.
After graduation, Franzl was sent straight back to the front. Shortly before the end of the war, he was supposedly captured by the Red Army near St. Pölten. “We never heard from him again,” Hansi writes.
Pepi’s mother, Hela, also lived on Neubaugasse for a while. By 1943 she had become too frail to continue living all alone in Langenzersdorf, so the family decided to move her. At Pepi’s there was always someone who could take care of her, so his apartment was where the entire family started gathering for Sunday tea. Pepi’s younger brother, a physician at a spa resort in Baden, often stopped by. He wasn’t much interested in politics, but in 1938, when he was advised to join the party if he wanted to keep his job, he did. “Just imagine,” Hansi wrote, “an officer of the German Wehrmacht—and an official Nazi party member, to boot—visited his mom, who was living with an eighteen-year-old Jew in hiding.” After about ten months, the situation became too risky for Pepi’s brother; if anyone found out he’d been in close contact with an underground Jew, he’d be sent to the front, or worse. So their mother moved into his place in Baden where, just over a year later, she died.
The apartment was rather small for four people, but I never found a trace of any fights or disagreements. No conflict whatsoever is ever mentioned in Hansi’s notes either.