After the war, my father was naturalised—a dreadful term that sounds chemical, like the pasteurisation of milk. Once he became a British citizen, he returned to Vienna to help with a process known as de-Nazification. Like other German and Austrian refugees keen to help rebuild their countries and eradicate the cancer that had destroyed them, he joined the British Intelligence Corps. Wearing its uniform, he took part in a naïve but well-intentioned Allied initiative to rid German and Austrian culture of every remnant of Nazi ideology in all spheres of public life.
The task was much greater and more difficult than anyone had anticipated, compromised by the poor language skills of most of the non-native recruits and the lack of impartiality of those who, like my father, had Jewish relatives. But the mission was urgent if Germany and Austria were to be rebuilt physically and psychologically, so deficiencies were overlooked.
My father was assigned to the university in Vienna, where he rooted out academics who harboured vestigial loyalties to the National Socialist regime. I do not know how many people he reported but I expect that he was methodical and ruthless. He had a lot to avenge.
Many years later he told my mother and me a story about those days which I have no doubt he embroidered. As with so many of these anecdotes, it cannot be verified. Nor was there any context for this episode. So I don’t know where he was staying, or for how long, whether he worked on his own or with others.
I am trying to imagine the overwhelming and complex emotions that must have been swirling around in this young man’s head, returning to his native city for the first time since the end of the war, fully cognisant of all the horror that had occurred. He must have been in a state of inner turmoil I can only liken to post-traumatic stress. But my father rarely talked about feelings, so I am only guessing.
One day, after he had finished his work, he decided, on impulse, to revisit the family home, to see what remained of it and who was now living there. He made his way to number 4 Weihburggasse and knocked on the door of his former apartment. He heard approaching steps, then a pause, presumably while someone looked through the spy glass to identify their visitor. There was another pause, then a muffled sound and a heavy slump, like the sound of a sack being dropped.
He rang the bell again. Now more steps, and this time a horrified shriek on the other side of the door. When it opened, he recognised his family’s former neighbours, the Tulicheks.
According to my father, Mr Tulichek had been an early adopter of Nazi ideology and had become some kind of self-appointed block warden, doing the party’s bidding. In this capacity, accompanied by other Nazis in civilian clothes, he had methodically requisitioned a large number of the family’s possessions, including all the silverware. My father remembers sitting on the floor of his home with Franzi, itemising every fork and spoon before everything was confiscated. Embracing the Nazi-sanctioned compulsory acquisition, Mr Tulichek paid a pittance for the family’s Blüthner baby grand piano and Alexander Baum’s substantial library, which my father estimated at two thousand leather-bound volumes of literature, philosophy and art, together with bookcases and fine rugs. It was all done perfectly legally, with copious handwritten receipts issued for everything.
When Alexander went into hiding and Laura fled to England, the Tulicheks seized the opportunity to move into the Baums’ larger apartment. Now Mr Tulichek lay on the ground, presumably felled by the shock of seeing my father, while his wife bent over him.
My father claimed Mr Tulichek was dead. He may have wanted that to be the case, but I believe that Mr Tulichek had fainted. My father did not stay long enough to find out. He took in the scene with a sweeping glance, recognising the hallway rug and other pieces of furniture. He made no attempt to enter the premises or to claim anything that was rightfully his. Turning on his heels, he left without a word.
I have so many questions: such as would my father and his sister have been entitled to reclaim the apartment after the war, when restitution programs were put in place? Later, they joined a class action and received a pension from the state to compensate for loss and damages. My father refused to take what he considered blood money and gave it to his sister. Neither showed any desire to return to their country.
By that time, my father’s assimilation into British life was in its first flush of promise: he’d won a scholarship to Manchester University from which he’d graduated with a First in history. He spoke the language without a trace of an accent and he had a new adopted family whom he loved and who loved him in return. He made the decision to turn over a new leaf and not to look back. Meanwhile, Franzi qualified as a nurse and moved to America with Laura and a fellow Kindertransport refugee whom she married and had children with. Once she left England, she and Harry were never close again.
Fast-forward to London in the late 1970s: at university I had a brainy boyfriend whose mother was a chilly, snooty Austrian. When the relationship got serious, he invited me to stay at the family schloss in the Vienna woods. During our holiday, we made the rounds of his semi-aristocratic relatives in their Viennese homes of faded gilding and chandeliered splendour. Almost in passing, he told me not to mention that I was Jewish as we attended stiffly formal teas with aunts who spoke no English. Stunned, never having considered this label might still carry any kind of social stigma, I smiled politely, nibbling at my linzertorte or krapfen. But it seems that my olive skin and surname were enough to make my racial heritage suspect. The aunts’ lips were pursed, their heads barely nodding to me with frosty hauteur and disapproving condescension. On our return, we showed my parents our holiday snaps over dinner. One featured a roof tiled with the name of the family business: Schenker.
On seeing the name and learning of the connection, my father got up abruptly from the table, his face ashen. We waited in pained silence, but he did not return, leaving his meal unfinished. My mother delegated me to go and investigate.
I found him in his study, smoking himself into a fog and fury. It turned out that Schenker was the name of the removalist company that had, on Nazi orders, taken away his family’s furniture. He told me to break off with my boyfriend immediately (I think he actually said, ‘That is an ORDER’—one of his stock phrases). I did not comply, but the relationship was doomed.
One pleasing fact I later learned: when Arthur Seyss-Inquart was arrested in Hamburg, it was by a young member of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers with a distinctly un-Welsh name, Norman Miller (originally Mueller), who had left Nuremberg at the age of fifteen as part of the Kindertransport.
The last to mount the scaffold with nine other defendants, Seyss-Inquart, then 54, said: ‘I hope that this execution is the last act of the tragedy of the Second World War and that the lesson taken from it will be that peace and understanding should exist between peoples. I believe in Germany.’
I have always felt uncomfortable in Vienna. The city feels trapped in an aspic of snobbery, its past still not fully acknowledged, its enthusiastic embrace of Nazism never completely disclosed. I remember being there once with my father when I was in my teens and him suddenly chasing an elderly man in the street and calling him a Nazi to his face for no obvious reasons except that he was the right age—the fact that he was wearing a loden coat and one of those Tyrolean hats with a feather in the brim seemed to provide an irrational trigger, as if the traditional costume were an SS uniform. The man raised his stick to protect himself from my father and I was profoundly ashamed of him for making a scene. Now, when I think about what my father must have felt walking those streets, I cannot blame him.
But what to make of the fact that, a few years earlier, he had taken my mother to dinner at the Drei Husaren without ever mentioning to her that he had lived directly above the restaurant? Was he testing himself to see whether he could withstand the pain of his memories, and whether sufficient time had passed for the wounds to be cauterised? Could he enjoy the plush surrounds and familiar dishes without a bitter aftertaste? And on a subsequent visit, how could he sit serenely with my mother and me at the terrace of Sacher’s, eating their famously dense but overpriced chocolate torte? Never one to choose where we stayed casually, he would have been all too aware of the history of the lavish Imperial Hotel as the former headquarters of the Nazis. So was taking a suite there proof that success is the best revenge?
I would happily never set foot in the city again. No amount of old-world charm or Hapsburg grandeur can make up for my malaise there. Even Mozart can’t drown out the echoes of the chorus of Sieg Heils with which the good burghers welcomed Hitler.
My father could bring us to Vienna on a musical pilgrimage for a concert conducted by Herbert von Karajan, a known Nazi sympathiser, and enjoy it, because for him the orchestra was the orchestra of his boyhood, first heard with his father. The spirit of Furtwängler and Toscanini lingered in the ether when he came to pay his respects. For him, music was always a neutral, sacred space. After I had seen Taking Sides, a film about Furtwängler and his ambiguous role at the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic, my father wrote to me: ‘I am sure that he was politically naïve like many “cultivated” Germans and could not envisage that the Nazis would develop into such monsters or that the German people would allow themselves to be duped to such an extent. I always thought that when he was conducting, he psyched himself into some kind of trance, and in the same way he must’ve been in some kind of trance when he imagined that he could simply ignore them by not participating in their activities. In kidding himself that he could register his non participation by simply bowing to Hitler and co at a concert instead of giving the Nazi salute, he failed to appreciate that his very eminence created a burden of responsibility he could not escape … there were many contradictions in his character … Geissmar, his secretary, was partly Jewish and everybody knew it, but nobody ever tried to touch her but his third and final wife, Elizabeth was well-known as an enthusiastic Nazi supporter …’
Always impressed by any contact, however slight or random with greatness, he added: ‘I once sat next to Furtwängler at the Salzburg Festival; the sleeve of the suit I was wearing brushed against his.’ No matter the circumstance, my father had the capacity to be endearingly, sentimentally star-struck.
I believe the impact of being separated from his parents on an impressionable, alert, brainy boy of ten shaped and defined my father’s life forever. But he was never one for introspection, so I can’t be sure. To me, it drove him to excel, prove himself, make a mark as if to assuage the guilt he may have felt for surviving when so many did not. It manifested in even the smallest details of everyday life.
Departures were always fraught in our family. Packing would go on for days before we left and anxiety levels would rise as the due date drew closer. Inevitably there would be a pre-departure row between my parents, when conditions just got too intense, my father becoming increasingly shrill and authoritarian, insisting on the exact moment when all suitcases must be closed, locked and presented at the front door. He would count them over and over as if they were children, to make sure none was missing, repeating the exercise at luggage carousels in stations and airports across the globe, sometimes yelling at the top of his lungs across crowded baggage halls to no one in particular ‘THE SHOE BAG IS MISSING!’ as if he could summon it back like a stray infant. Was this some kind of warped re-enactment of what happened in the fraught preparations for leaving the family home in Vienna? I never dared ask.
When I was in my teens and exhibiting the first sparks of desultory curiosity about anyone other than myself, my father told me about his Kindertransport experience as if it were a jolly jaunt. He made light of it. His tendency to exaggeration made him caricature individuals until they resembled grotesque characters from a gothic novel. He emphasised the sense of adventure and downplayed the fear of the unknown. There was never any talk of homesickness or loss.
Until I was in my thirties, I did not meet any members of the Hughes family, despite his reverential references to them. They were not invited to our home and did not attend significant birthdays. Why had my father drifted out of contact from a family he claimed to love and to whom he owed so much?
As if to make up for this inexplicable lapse, in 2000 my father arranged for a reunion with the Hugheses. Always aware of symbolism, he chose 3 September, the anniversary of the day the prime minister Neville Chamberlain told Britons they were at war with Germany. My father had listened to the solemn broadcast at home with the Hugheses, who, as Quakers, were committed pacifists.
We travelled up to York by train and walked to Bootham from the station, my father leading the way at his usual follow-the-leader jaunty clip. Outside the school two generations of Hugheses greeted us as if we had all seen each other the day before. The school was closed for the holidays but there was a caretaker on the premises who kindly allowed us in and we visited my father’s classroom and the library before going to lunch in a private room at a nearby hotel. Over drinks beforehand, my father made a speech that started with his usual polished confidence.
But when he got past the formalities of welcoming everyone as the magnanimous host and recalled his boyhood with the Hughes, a dam inside him broke and the floodgates opened. One minute he was saying that the years he spent with them were among the happiest of his life and the next he was weeping uncontrollably and nothing could stop him.
He choked and hiccupped and no amount of ‘There there, Harry, take a moment, breathe, sit down, have another drink,’ could calm or console him. He simply could not contain the emotion he had unleashed; it flooded out, drenching us all. Eventually one of the Hugheses rose to respond and suggested we move to the dining room, hoping that a change of scene would release us all from the intensity of my father’s outburst. It worked. He settled and the lunch was a gentle gathering of our strange and hybrid newly expanded clan. Like any family, we included the troubled young man who dabbled with drugs and could not hold a job and the introverted cousin who was hard work to sit next to, but our common fellowship was magnified, amplified when we were all mixed in together. No wonder the Quakers are known as the Society of Friends. That is what we were that day and that is what we remain.
I wonder how long it took for my father to discover the tattered remnants of his extended family. I was never aware of him searching for them. In my thirties we spent a harrowing day at Yad Vashem, the memorial to the Holocaust in Israel. My mother had to insist, with uncharacteristic force, that he take the opportunity of their unique database to look up his relatives. He did so half-heartedly and, after a cursory search, claimed they had nothing. The subject was closed.
The one story he did tell me, many years later, interrupted by tears, was the fate of his mother’s relatives, the Shochets, with whom he had holidayed at their home in Jasło, Poland, as a child.
In 2003 he wrote to me, giving me as much as he knew of the family’s history and providing a unique glimpse of the ambience of his stay in 1937:
The family house was on 3rd of May Street in the centre of the village. It was comfortably middle class with quite a few children and staff. Family discipline was strict, with meals eaten in silence with only grown-ups talking. Children only spoke in response to a question from adults. All meals started with kasha (buckwheat) which I hated. If you did not eat your kasha, that was the end of the meal for you. If a woman, including a servant, entered the room, boys had to stand up. Meals were eaten with children holding a folded newspaper under their arms to learn not to assail their neighbours with their elbows. Drop your newspaper and that was the end of your meal. After lunch you had a rest and then went riding or drove a droschke. We would also go for long walks across the fields barefoot, even though the stubble from the crops was razor sharp. It was an exercise in mind over matter. In the evening we played gramophone records and wrote home to our parents. It sounds terribly spartan but we had a great time and loved every minute of it.
The Shochet home was linked from the first-floor landing via a bridge to the family’s factory, a large diversified printing plant that employed three hundred people and also manufactured files, envelopes and adhesive tape, exporting these goods across Eastern Europe.
Following the Nazi–Soviet pact of August 1939, Jasło found itself in Nazi territory. The two brothers who were heads of the family business, Ludwig and Poldek, called all their employees and their families together and told them that as Jews they could not remain in Jasło and had decided to flee into the Soviet zone. Any employees and their families who wished to do so were welcome to go with them, regardless of whether they were Jewish or not. They could take no luggage so as to maximise space for as many people as possible.
Most chose to go. Mobilising all the village trucks, they set off in a convoy towards the east, and were arrested by the Soviets who transported them by rail to Siberia. In 1941, my father received a postcard in York from his uncle Ludwig, saying that he was in a Siberian camp, starving. My father contacted another uncle in New York, who arranged to send food parcels but none of them ever got through. By 1942, though many had died of starvation and disease, there were more than two hundred members of the Jasło contingent still alive, and they decided to break out of their prison and walk to Palestine. This was a journey equivalent to walking from Sydney to Perth. They were recaptured by the Soviets and taken back to Siberia, where they were so hungry they ate cow dung to survive.
In early 1945 the group escaped a second time and began a fresh attempt to reach Palestine on foot. Although twenty-six members of the family perished, the Shochets succeeded and made a home for themselves there, at 27 Pines Street, Tel Aviv, re-establishing an identical factory to the one they had left behind in Poland, connected to the house by a bridge at the rear. My father’s uncle Ludwig survived. The house was presided over by my father’s regal Great-aunt Fanny, who had emigrated to Palestine in 1911. Through her network of friends and acquaintances, she managed to find food, shelter and employment for everyone who had endured the migration ordeal.
When my father visited without warning in 1951, he was welcomed by an astonished Fanny and her son:
Down the stairs came my uncle Ludwig, wearing exactly the same jacket he had worn every day in Jaslo and presumably Siberia and on the march and he spoke to me in exactly the same tone as he would have used to me had I still been eight years old, as if the past sixteen years had not occurred, as if zillions of people had not been killed, ‘Harry, warum hast Du uns nicht gesagt das Du kommst?’ [Harry, why did you not tell us you were coming?]
That evening there was the same bustle of people, with children returning for dinner from the army and university. The same meal time discipline prevailed as had in Jaslo. It was the preservation of this discipline which brought these people through all that misery and suffering and pain and danger.
I visited Israel for the first time during my gap year at the age of seventeen with four girlfriends, all of them from Jewish families. For the final days of the trip, my father treated us all to the luxury of the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem, then the epicentre of backchannel diplomacy and intrigue, but we were ignorant of that. Tanned and lean, our hair matted and tangled with sand and salt from Eilat beaches and the Sinai desert, we soaked in the deep baths like hippos and sprawled beneath the domed ceilings of our rooms with their elaborately tiled walls, feeling like oriental princesses on the lam. We gorged on the hotel’s famous breakfast buffet before wandering the golden streets of the old city, haggling for trinkets and visiting the sights. (At one point a stallholder offered to buy me in exchange for three camels.) At no point did my father tell me that I had relatives less than two hours’ drive away.
Fifteen years later, I returned to Israel with my parents. We spent a week there, including the visit to Yad Vashem. No mention was ever made of the Shochets.
I look up the Schochet compound address on Google Earth. It’s a grand terracotta-coloured three-tiered structure, with shutters and a roof garden. It looks prosperous and splendid, a fitting sanctuary for those who made that remarkable journey, a monument to the endurance of the spirit. As I move the cursor to do all these things so effortlessly, I am swamped with feelings of regret and sorrow at how little I know, and how it is all too late. Or is it? I look up a couple of genealogy sites and wonder if any of my relatives live at that address today. And if they did, would they have the answers to any of my questions?
Many months later I meet a woman of my age, another journalist and writer, who tells me that, like me, she has a parent who left her native home thanks to Kindertransport. I am mildly interested, as I am each time I hear such an account: they all feature similar details, though each is subtly different in its tragedy.
The jolt comes when she tells me that her family also included a branch that walked from Siberia to Palestine. I am stunned: the way my father told it, the heroism with which he endowed the journey made it seem mythic and unique. I had no idea that this trek to freedom was the fate of others. Suddenly I feel destabilised, rocked by this information, even more so when she tells me that she went to Israel and met relatives she did not know she had.
A sudden ugly tide washes over me, like having a bucket of dirty water thrown on your head from an upstairs window. Envy: she managed what I had not, she found something I did not even know to look for until it was too late. Churned up, anxious, ashamed of my feelings, I find her on a walk a few hours later and confess the effect her revelations have had on me. She understands, and a fresh bond of kinship forged from a common past is made, there and then. Some families are connected by common blood, others by shared memory.