My mother carefully saved and numbered each letter and note I sent from the trenches of the Eastern Front. Many of these were scribbled in pencil on tiny salvaged scraps of paper. In the chaos of the war, when often all that remained was our rifles and the clothes on our backs, it was impossible to preserve her letters to me.
After returning home, and following a two-year stay in a tuberculosis sanatorium, I began to paint, and eventually became a professional artist. I left Europe in 1966, moving to New York and California before settling for the past thirty years in Mexico. The letters from Russia always accompanied me. Though I sometimes shared humorous or exciting events from the war years, the letters themselves were never reopened or read. I was certain I would only be embarrassed by the ramblings and complaints of a frightened nineteen-year-old.
One afternoon in February 1984, my wife, Phyllis, and I were discussing that evening’s activity. Each month a group got together and read from their latest literary efforts. Phyllis said she had nothing prepared, but that it didn’t really matter. I suddenly realized that the date was almost exactly forty years after those terrible frozen days of my first Russian winter.
I looked up and read what I had written on three days in February 1944. Phyllis quickly translated the letters, and we took the versions in both languages to the party. When it was our turn, I began to read a letter in the original German and then faded into the background while Phyllis took over, reading the English translation. We felt the strong impact our presentation had made on those present, mostly artists and retirees living in beautiful, balmy Mexico, people who were free to follow their passions and whims every day of the year. The contrast was powerful.
Next, I reread all of my letters for the first time and found they were quite different from what I had imagined. Surprised at the humor and the honesty, I began to imagine a book about my war experiences that could set the record straight. Mine would be a very different story from those in the movies. I had always complained about war films, with their phony uniforms and backward swastikas. Worst of all, they told a tale that was very different from anything I had experienced. An antiwar book featuring a nonhero might even be helpful for upcoming generations of young men faced with other wars.
When I began writing, long-forgotten events, including the minutest details, poured out from a deeply buried source. I stopped painting and did nothing but write until the book was completed. In the process I recognized that my true reason for writing had been to heal myself. Even after ten years of painting sad-faced men and harlequins, I still hadn’t completely dealt with the guilt and shame of the war years. Writing this book gave me much-needed clarity and helped me to deal with emotions I had never permitted myself to feel.
During the writing of this book, another Austrian artist told me that his experience was similar to mine, since he also had a Jewish grandmother. As far as I knew we were perhaps the only two one-quarter Jews who had been drafted. During the war I met no other soldiers of Jewish extraction, though I never hid my own background.
It wasn’t until the recent publication of Bryan Mark Rigg’s heavily researched book Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers that I learned that there were many thousands of full, one-half, and one-quarter Jews in the German Wehrmacht. I’m sure that of those who survived, each must have had a unique and moving tale to tell. I have encountered no other autobiography, however, by one of these soldiers.
My mother’s anti-Hitler involvement was terribly dangerous, and I worried about her after I went to the front. Obviously there was no way she could either comfort me or keep me informed, if she was to preserve her safety. After I was captured and all letters stopped, I wasn’t to know for a long time if she had even survived.
After the war, I was to learn very little from my mother regarding the Jews in our attic and how that story concluded. She never wanted to talk about it, and the few times I asked her directly, she started to cry. I did know that Haday hadn’t made it, since I never saw her again, and she had been a family friend.
A few others obviously hadn’t gotten away, because a number of valuable art objects belonging to them remained in our apartment and were never reclaimed. Some did make it successfully to England or America and sent my mother word. These had no desire ever to return to Vienna, preferring that this period of their lives be permanently erased from memory.
In one of the postwar years, a nearby coal merchant delivered a load of heating materials sufficient to heat our apartment for the entire winter. He said someone outside the country who preferred to remain anonymous had paid for it. I was happy to believe the coal was a gift from another Jewish couple who had successfully escaped.
My parents divorced after the war, and I remained particularly close to my mother. She did achieve that full and happy life that she had assured me she would enjoy, even were I not to return from Russia. She would have loved being an artist herself, but the circumstances of her life, including two world wars, weren’t to permit this. Probably that’s why she especially enjoyed being in the company of the young artists who were around our apartment after the war.
When Russian tanks occupied Hungary in 1956, thousands of Hungarians came streaming over the Austrian border with no more than the clothing on their backs. Many slept on the streets of Vienna the first few nights, but my mother was soon again in her element. She sprang into action, mobilizing family and friends to take in as many refugees as possible.
Beatrix Rauch died at eighty-one in 1970, and up until her death she continued to study important books by physicists, poets, and philosophers. She was a fine pianist, and music always remained a major pleasure in her life.