POUGHKEEPSIE, NEW YORK, 1955
The photograph in my grandmother’s bedroom was taken on March 9, 1955. When the Saturnia—sailing via Genoa and Halifax—arrived in the port of New York, several reporters came aboard. A Jewish charity had informed them a young couple from Vienna with unique life experiences was on board. Hansi and Helga aren’t looking straight at the camera but gaze off to the left. The caption underneath reads: “Also aboard the Saturnia were Drs. Hans and Helga Feldner-Busztin [sic], who came from Vienna to intern at Poughkeepsie Hospital. Dr. Helga was liberated from Nazi concentration camp in 1945. Dr. Hans said his brother and parents perished in concentration camp but he escaped when a Christian doctor adopted him.” Pepi, the staunch atheist, a “Christian doctor?” Hansi didn’t like the article in the least: “The newspaper really annoyed me,” he writes Pepi a few days later. “The pictures show us smiling like idiots.” To me, their smiles look full of anticipation, but also uncertainty.
Three years earlier, the two had completed their medical studies. Helga was the only woman in their graduating class. Now they wanted additional training in their chosen specializations. Hansi was interested in neurology, Helga in internal medicine, but in Vienna, physicians in training were poorly paid. Helga worked as an intern, Hansi was on the waiting list for an apprenticeship, and in the meantime he served as a volunteer visiting physician at the university hospital’s neurological ward. Only for nighttime services did he receive even modest pay.
Beginning in 1949, both received a “restitution pension” from the state, 571 shillings a month. Helga was granted compensation as a victim of Nazi persecution, and Hansi because he was the survivor of a victim—his father. According to the second amendment to the Austrian Victims’ Benefits Act of 1947, people who had been imprisoned for at least six months in a concentration camp or spent a year in prison were entitled to such pay. In the first version of the law, only resistance fighters had been recognized as victims. In the Municipal and Provincial Archives of Vienna, I read along as Hansi fought for twenty years to be recognized and compensated. It all started with the restitution pension, which he only received until his twenty-fifth birthday, under the assumption that he would have completed his education by then. By 1950 he had not yet finished his studies so, year after year, he had to submit a renewal application. It was always granted. In 1952, the social security and welfare laws were amended again and, in addition to the current benefits, victims were now entitled to “detention compensation.” The sum Helga received was increased, and Hansi received some money for the months his parents had spent in concentration camps, but now he was hoping to obtain a separate victim’s ID card so that the two and a half years he had spent in hiding would be officially recognized as a “deprivation of liberty”—i.e., another type of imprisonment. His application was rejected, with the stipulation that “living in hiding” did not qualify as imprisonment “according to the victims’ benefits act.” Hansi objected and filed a petition: “Since I had no papers, no food ration cards, and no money, my life was excruciatingly impoverished. As a ‘full Jew’ and ‘star wearer,’ I was not to be seen on the street, and therefore could not carry out any employment; hence, until liberation in 1945, I was deprived of my freedom and lived like a prisoner, in the most meager conditions. Furthermore, because I was not allowed in the air raid shelter during bombardments, I was constantly put in mortal danger…. Living in a state of perpetual fear, deprivation, and confinement, my health and mental state suffered greatly. Given that, during this time, my life bore all the traits of imprisonment—I suffered greatly from deprivation of liberty, hunger, and social marginalization, and my existence as a prisoner was additionally burdened by the constant threat of bombardment or police harassment—and these inhumane life circumstances were caused by the general arrest warrant the state had issued against me, I consider this denial to acknowledge my status as prisoner a serious injustice, and one that the legislature could not possibly have intended to carry out in the spirit or letter of its law.”
This, too, was unsuccessful. “Strictly speaking, time spent living in hiding cannot be classified as imprisonment,” was the reasoning the Federal Ministry of Social Affairs offered in November 1956. “In order to qualify as imprisonment, it is essential: that one’s physical movement be restricted—either by a guard or other type of cordoning-off—to a room intended exclusively for detention; that the detainee be subject to the disciplinary authority of the detention center; that the detainee’s daily routine be entirely governed by the detention center; and that the detainee be prevented all contact with persons whose freedom is not limited.”
Helga and Hansi, 1950s.
One year later, Hansi was finally recognized as a victim. Hansi didn’t receive any compensation from the Republic of Austria for the years he was forced to live in hiding until 1963, eleven years after he had first submitted his application. The legally stipulated compensation was increased again in the mid-sixties. Hansi and Helga also received compensation for having been forced to wear the star of David, and for the interruption of their studies. They also received payments from Sammelstelle A, or “Collection Point A,” a fund from which stolen Jewish assets with no identifiable heirs were distributed to survivors.
It’s not nothing, I think, and discuss it with Helga. What was problematic, she says, was that it was paid out so late. In the immediate postwar period, they relied on the Jewish community’s welfare services. Helga’s parents’ apartment on Porzellangasse, for instance, was only furnished thanks to the community’s resources, and Hansi received a scholarship to continue his studies. And then there were the packages and small sums of money Hansi’s American relatives regularly sent. Things seemed to be going much better over there.
Helga likes to talk about the parcels. She pauses and looks at me: “You cannot possibly imagine,” she says. It’s a sober assertion, and she’s absolutely right. I nod. Throughout my life, my every need—and, oftentimes, my every want— has always been satisfied.
*
As soon as the war ended, Hansi’s family in New York began encouraging him to emigrate. His graduation, in early summer 1952, offered an opportunity. Young American physicians had to complete a one-year internship, in which they would work in various divisions of a hospital. These internships were well paid, and there were a lot of vacancies back then because there was a shortage of doctors throughout the United States. Hansi’s cousin Litzi learned that up in Poughkeepsie, north of New York City, two such posts were vacant. They paid $200 per month, the equivalent of about 4,000 shillings, which was more than twice the average monthly salary in Austria at that time. Room and board were included. Hansi applied for an immigration visa. Solely in order for Helga to go along too, they got married. The way she tells it is wholly unromantic and yet beautiful at the same time: the visa was the real reason they tied the knot, she says, but they knew they belonged together anyway.
On March 12, 1952, they signed their marriage certificate at the civil registry office on Martinstrasse, in the eighteenth district. Helga wore a simple black dress, the same one she wore at her graduation from medical school a few months later. Their group was small, she says, fewer than ten people. There was no money for a big celebration. For their honeymoon, they drove to Semmering, an hour away from Vienna, and stayed a few days. Helga continued living with her parents on Porzellangasse, Hansi with Pepi on Neubaugasse. They couldn’t afford their own apartment.
*
Hansi’s relatives in New York closed for the day their carpentry workshop and small furniture store in the Bronx in order to welcome Hansi and Helga upon their arrival. Hansi’s cousin Litzi had recently moved to a suburb out on Long Island. She and her husband had two small children and brought them along to the harbor.
“Outwardly, Aunt Frieda hasn’t changed a bit,” Hansi wrote back to Vienna regarding his mother’s twin sister, whom he’d last seen a decade and a half prior. “But she’s never recovered from the loss of her relatives.” Of the three sisters, Frieda was the only one to survive the Holocaust. She had corresponded with them up until the United States entered the war, in December 1941. I find a letter in Litzi’s apartment on Long Island. On April 28, 1941, my great-grandmother Rosa wrote to her sister in blue ink on beige onionskin paper: “I’m rushing to send my swift and heartfelt thanks for your precious letter! I read it with such joy, & words cannot express how much I & all of us are rejoicing along with you!” Frieda’s husband had gotten a promotion. She continued: “I was immediately reminded of how I had predicted, just before your departure, that Michel would first become a factory manager, & then bring us all over. Those words were a serious wish on my part, and I now realize a small part of my wish has already been fulfilled! … Now I just want to sincerely congratulate you on your new position, & we all hope the good Lord will bestow continuing success upon all your endeavors, & that you & yours may achieve all your goals in fine health & happiness, wherever your path may lead! As for me, I can only express an inner, more modest, yet fervent hope that I & mine might ‘soon be eyewitnesses of your calm, well-deserved contentedness.’”
The very day Hansi and Helga arrived, they got a call from the hospital in Poughkeepsie. Management wanted them both to come immediately, not two weeks later as planned. They agreed to report for duty the following Monday. That Sunday, the family drove them up to Poughkeepsie by car, in just under three hours.
A few days later, Aunt Frieda wrote to Pepi, whom she had never personally met. She blames herself for not having sufficiently spoiled her nephew and his wife immediately after they arrived. She was too upset: “When I look into his dark eyes, I see his mother standing before me, and then I get so emotional I can barely hold back my tears. I get so worked up; without even talking about the past, memories that have lain dormant for years are now being awakened. I walk around as if in a dream …”
*
The young couple was assigned a small bungalow on the spacious hospital grounds overlooking the Hudson Valley. Ten years had passed since they had met, and now they were living together for the first time. They had a large room, a bathroom, and even a porch. How was it? “Good” is all Helga says. They were rarely home and could eat four meals a day at the hospital cafeteria. Every other night and every other weekend they were on call, a duty they usually did together: those on first call had to be the first responders in case of emergency; those on second call stepped in when the first-call doctor was already busy. It was fairly rare to get a second-call summons, so Helga and Hansi split the shift so that each could get a little sleep.
The team of interns was small—two Mexicans, two Americans, a Greek, and a Persian—and constantly busy. They learned a lot; being at the most important hospital in a city of 40,000 meant they got to see a broad range of cases. Because there were only a few experienced doctors, the interns took on a lot of demanding roles: in the children’s ward, Helga treated kids affected by the polio epidemic; in gynecology she delivered newborns and carried out curettages. Hansi performed a fair number of surgeries on his own. The hospital was well equipped, and also offered additional training sessions every week.
Come what may, their plan was to spend a year there and save up as much money as possible. What would happen afterward remained an open question. “We didn’t know if we’d like America,” Helga says. In April 1956 they returned to Vienna, where they spent the rest of their lives. Why?
Although they had both studied English, they didn’t speak it fluently when they arrived. Helga didn’t much care but was soon able to make herself understood. To this day, she’s fluent in English, although her Viennese mother tongue remains clearly audible. Hansi, however, felt hindered by not being able to fully express himself with his usual ease and levity. “I try to hide my linguistic incompetence with an understanding grunt, but sometimes my despair reveals itself,” he wrote Pepi. “When I talk to patients, I formulate my questions in such a way that they can only be answered with a simple yes or no.” He often feels like he’s “in a glass box,” watching people talk, but not understanding them, especially when they speak with any kind of accent. “When I meet a new person, it takes me nearly ten or fifteen minutes to get used to their unique tone.” A month later, he felt better: “I understand ninety percent of what’s said to me. (That doesn’t apply to people who mumble, slur, or swallow their words.)” But even after all that, he never did manage to properly pronounce anything with th in it.
I had a similar experience when I was twenty and went off to study in England. I quickly discovered how tedious and exhausting it all was: formulating sentences before speaking them out loud; feeling so uncertain of how to use words you’ve read in actual conversation; people’s facial expressions when they can’t understand you; how difficult it is to explain more complicated trains of thought. “What I miss most, here in America, is my own personality,” Hansi wrote in September. Emigration means so much more than just a change of scenery.
Hansi’s correspondence with Pepi kept him connected to his homeland, and he wrote at least one long letter a week. When I ask my grandmother about Poughkeepsie yet again, she hands me a big bag full of aerograms, letters typed onto a single, postage-paid sheet of thin, light-blue paper that then folds up into itself, seals up as an envelope, and is addressed and sent by air mail.
Many of Hansi’s letters are a linguistic mixture, and rereading them, I notice how quickly his English improved: “Everybody speaks English to me, so when I think, sleep, and talk, I mix German and English expressions,” he writes shortly after arrival. Little by little, the English parts become longer and increasingly error-free. He reports that he also reads novels from the hospital library. Language can’t have been the real reason they returned to Vienna, I think.
Then what was it? Financially, they were doing better than ever before. They lived frugally. They bought and shared a used car with two other interns. Hansi’s brother-in-law, Litzi’s husband, taught him how to drive. In return, he helped build an addition to her one-story home on Long Island, for a new dining room. Hansi showed up to the driving test with his own car, which was common at the time. Shortly after the test started, the car stopped in its tracks. The other couple they shared it with had forgotten to refill the gas tank. A few weeks later, Hansi went back to take the test a second time and passed.
There is constant pressure to buy new things, Hansi writes. Therefore, many people are deep in debt. “It’s like they just love having gift-giving orgies over here,” he writes one June after Father’s Day, when his cousin Litzi gave him a shirt (“despite the fact that I’m not even a dad”), and he frantically went out to get his own uncle a gift—aftershave—at the very last minute. But, by the same token, he was also fascinated by the technological innovations he was discovering, and was now able to write about them in English: “Litzi got last week a new dish-washer. This is a machine in which you can put all your dishes and glasses then you close and after half an hour your dishes are clean and dry and you must only take them out.”
Were my grandparents lonely and socially isolated, as one sometimes hears immigrants say? Quite the contrary. It seems they could barely say no to all the invitations. Fellow doctors and hospital employees had them over, and they went to parties and the movies. One family that had to travel for several weeks even generously let them stay in their stately home while they were away. Helga and Hansi spent most of their time in the living room, listening to records.
Time and again they’d run into acquaintances from Vienna who had emigrated like them. They spent their free weekends in New York City with the family, who wanted to show them around town and help them integrate. They went to concerts, the theater, and museums, and they enjoyed lavish dinners for the Jewish holidays. Hansi appreciated his intelligent and attentive aunt, his engaged and family-oriented cousin, and his good-natured and amicable uncle. Helga’s memories of Hansi’s family are also very positive.
In July, Hansi writes Pepi that a friendly fellow Jewish doctor invited them to go swimming—at a “Jewish lake.” “Poughkeepsie’s Jews have bought their own lake. Everything here is separated. There isn’t much mixing. People stay in their own little circles, with others of the same social background.” Helga confirms it; she had found the degree of racial segregation, in particular, deeply disturbing. The staff of the hospital was mixed; their fellow interns included a black doctor, and her senior physician was black as well. On paper, New York was one of the most progressive states when it came to anti-discrimination legislation. A government commission against discrimination at work had been introduced in 1945; from 1952 onward, people could sue for unequal treatment in public places; by 1954, segregation in schools had been declared illegal nationwide. Reality was rather different, Helga learned, when one of her black colleagues gave her a lift into the center of Poughkeepsie. Helga asked if he’d like to go shopping with her. He declined, saying that he couldn’t be seen beside a white woman in public.
She was no less disturbed upon learning that an Austrian acquaintance who worked at the same hospital often wasn’t invited when they were. Jewish doctors invited the Jewish couple, but not their non-Jewish friend. “I had had enough of that during the war,” says Helga. So rigid, racist social conventions certainly played a major role in their decision to return to Europe.
But why didn’t they just go to New York City, a more open-minded metropolis? “New York sure is exciting,” Hansi wrote Pepi in July. “Its incredible dynamism and sheer diversity of races gives the whole place a certain fairytale feeling. Never have I seen such a vibrant city, so teeming with life. Riding the subway and seeing so many different faces is itself a form of entertainment.” They would have been able to get a job there as well. Depending on the state, there were different requirements that they would have needed to meet, but they definitely could have gotten a license to practice medicine.
Well, says Helga, they still had family in Vienna—Pepi above all.
“Dear father,” Hansi began each of his letters. Five years earlier, on January 24, 1950, the two had signed an adoption agreement. “Completed between Dr. Josef Feldner, MD, b. May 1, 1887 in Vienna, on the one hand, and Hans Bustin, his foster son, b. Oct. 18, 1925 in Vienna, on the other. Dr. Josef Feldner adopts Hans Bustin as his child, and assumes all duties which, according to law, foster parents pledge to provide for their adoptive children, with the exception of a pension, and grants the foster child all rights entitled by law, with the exception of pension. Hans Bustin accepts this request and promises to recognize Dr. Josef Feldner as his adoptive father and to fulfill all obligations of an adopted son, with the exception of any pension-related obligations. Henceforth, Hans Bustin shall go by the name Hans Feldner-Bustin.”
Although Pepi’s answers to Hansi’s letters haven’t been preserved, Hansi’s texts bring the relationship of the two to life for me. I notice that my grandfather was clearly writing to someone he was used to interacting with on a daily basis. He skips segues, hops from subject to subject, dispenses with courtesy phrases, and expresses concern for everyday matters—kitchen renovations, cold winter weather, distant relatives’ personalities and quirks. His tone is respectful yet familiar. A few months before Hansi’s departure, Pepi published his book on pediatrics, and Hansi got as wound up as Pepi must have when he was invited to give a lecture. Pepi was shy and wanted little to do with the academic world. Hansi repeatedly encourages him to present his theories, mentions that he’s reread this or that passage from the book and finds it particularly well done, and uses terms he picked up from Pepi. Hansi concludes almost every letter with an admonition that his father be careful to eat enough and not work too much. Several times Hansi reminds Pepi to send his measurements, so he can buy him shirts and shoes in the US. And, over and over, he asks Pepi if he needs money. Obviously Pepi never replied to such questions, so Hansi simply sent small amounts and little gifts here and there back to Vienna, unsolicited.
Hansi writes that they will have a lot to tell one another when they finally see each other again. He emphasizes details above all: “People don’t really place much value in having their children have proper posture,” he says after visiting friends. “Kids roll around rather creatively all over the floor, striking picturesque poses, and even grown-ups sometimes sit on the floor.” And people’s relationship to money is completely different from what he’s used to back home: “There is no sentimentality in business here,” he writes. “It sounds paradoxical, but people here donate huge sums of money to charity, for truly charitable work, but they don’t spare anyone a dime when it comes to business matters.” He also finds how people deal with death rather different here: “Most people are embalmed and made up to look incredibly elegant. They’re often more beautiful as corpses than they ever were before.”
The more time passes, the more frequently Hansi writes how much he misses Pepi, especially their evening talks. Toward the end of the summer, his mood finally plummets. “Dear Father, I miss you so much. We’re now halfway through our time here, but it’s a bit like strudel layers, a never-ending swirl, time just isn’t moving. The months drag on, and I’d like it to be December, or January, with our day of departure clearly in sight.” He even thinks about leaving early, but decides against it, because he still wants to improve his English.
Hansi and Helga ultimately decided to return to Vienna after their internship was over. Hansi hesitated for months before finally telling his aunt. Perhaps, he wonders, it might have been wiser to tell everyone, from day one, that their stay would eventually come to an end, because the reaction of those around him was unanimous: “Everybody says we’re crazy to leave. Doctors make such a good living. The latter is true. But living well is no small task in this country. And besides, you can quickly take money for granted.”
Only in October did Hansi muster the courage to tell his family about their departure that March. The announcement shook his aunt so much that he followed up with a six-page letter a few days later. “I want to tell you about me, about Pepi and me. He’s now sixty-nine, and he’s been in my life for over thirteen years. I’ve never talked much about my emotional life, my relationships, and what he means to me, since I find the subject difficult to broach. But I have no inhibitions about telling you, because I know how sympathetic you can be, how understanding. People generally expect me to be grateful to him for what he’s done for me, and it’s only logical that this sense of gratitude shapes my decisions and actions. But gratitude is only a tiny part of what I feel for him. He was, and still is, a fatherly friend to me, the person who tried to replace both of my parents during a very difficult time, and to the extent that anyone could ever succeed at all in accomplishing such an impossible task, he succeeded. He succeeded so well that I now cling to him with a childlike love and adoration. His well-being factors into all my considerations, and I must confess, I don’t feel well here.” He mentions two acquaintances whose parents, the same age as Pepi, recently and quite unexpectedly died. Pepi was in good health, but the moment he needed Hansi’s presence could come at any time—“and the thought of being so helplessly far away is unbearable.” “He never once made the slightest hint that I should come back, but we always had an unspoken agreement that we wanted to live together…. Both of us only feel well when we’re within arm’s reach of each other. When I go back to Vienna next March, I’m not going to pay a debt of gratitude, I’m going because I have a deep-seated personal need to see him happy.”
He had weighed it carefully: “As for you, I know you observe my life with the eyes of a mother, that you’re worried sick, and the last thing I’d ever want is to hurt your feelings.” But she was well cared for by her family, while Pepi, his father, was living all alone in Vienna. Although Pepi had offered to move to the States, Hansi didn’t think it advisable. Furthermore, Helga also felt obliged to be closer to her family, which was now firmly anchored in Vienna again. That’s why Hansi felt he was doing the right thing.
I hold this letter in my hands a few weeks before my own departure from New York. I am with Litzi, who is now ninety-two and still lives in her cottage out on Long Island. Her TV is in the sunroom that, once upon a time, my grandfather helped build. I suspect it still looks almost exactly as it did back then. The brown, finely carved sideboard, the round dining table, the living room wallpaper—the only difference I see is the many photos on the walls, shelves, and atop the piano, showing that Litzi has two grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. She’s lost some of her independence in recent years, which is why her daughter is scouring the house for documents that might interest me. She finds the “Holland-America Line Contract of Carriage,” which allowed Hansi’s Aunt Frieda and her husband to flee to the United States in November 1939; a letter from an American Jewish aid organization, which in September 1941 sought in vain for a visa for Frieda’s older sister, Sophie; the naturalization certificates of Litzi and her parents, issued in December 1945; an invitation to the wedding of Hansi and Litzi’s cousin Ilse in London in July 1951. And Hansi’s long letter to his Aunt Frieda.
This letter is an eye-opener for me. My grandfather was someone who didn’t talk much about his feelings. A few years after his death, we cleared out his old basement workshop. There, where his workbench had been, we discovered a depression under the linoleum in the floor, a spot so large that an adult could lie down in it. It was connected to a ventilation pipe that led to the outside. Never before had any of us noticed it. The fear of persecution never left Hansi. He suffered from insomnia, and there were days when he just wanted to be left alone. His purposeful pessimism—“if you don’t have any expectations, you can’t be disappointed”—set him apart from Pepi, who was for the most part confident and cheerful. I had only been able to imagine how close they truly were, how much they really loved each other, until I discovered that letter.
In the spring of 1973, seventeen years after Hansi and Helga returned from the States, Pepi fell and broke his femur. He was eighty-six years old. Pepi had always been suspicious of other doctors when it came to his own health, and at the hospital, he refused to let the staff look after him. Hansi took care of him and spent nights there. “When he was sick he’d usually just withdraw from his surroundings, and wouldn’t eat for days, until his condition stabilized and passed on its own,” Hansi writes. “Pepi had a deeply rooted conviction that every disease has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that this natural course can easily be disturbed by a doctor’s intervention. He also fully accepted that the end result of such a natural course of events could well be death.” Pepi’s last apartment was on the ground floor of my grandparents’ house in the nineteenth district. Its large windows reached all the way to the floor, so he could look directly out into the courtyard greenery. Hansi made a wooden ramp so he could push Pepi’s bed into the garden. It was a mild spring when Pepi died.
In his will, Pepi bequeathed to Hansi his few possessions, and wished that all his scientific work be left to his adoptive son. His corpse was to be cremated, with no one but the funeral parlor staff present. No music, no speech, “since the burial attendant couldn’t possibly be interested,” and no printed announcement. “My relatives and acquaintances shall be informed of my death as their paths happen to cross, in person.” Hansi did not respect Pepi’s last will. The entire family was present as Pepi’s remains were placed in the Feldner family tomb near Villach. Yet Hansi probably did fulfill Pepi’s most important wish: “I consider my son the ideal representative of my intellectual potential, and I am convinced that, through him, I shall continue to exist.”