I was born in Vienna in 1932, the third and youngest child of Louise (Lilly) and Theodore (Theo) Schwarz. My older brothers were Victor Hugo (Vicky), who was five years old and Walter, two years old. On the whole, Mother brought us up mostly as die Kinder – the children – and I liked being lumped together like this even when not keeping up. I felt safe and happy. We had a nanny and a maid, and lived in the leafy suburb of Döbling.
My father, a middle child of ten children, came from Innsbruck. He was lively and not the type to stay put in the Tyrol. As a young man he enterprisingly got himself a job in the luxury hotel business in Paris, where he completely fell for the city, the French, and the cosmopolitan life around him. Later on, he became a businessman in the textile industry. He must have had a flair for it, as we lived well. I believe he had a good reputation and he enjoyed his work, especially travelling and making contacts all over Europe. He spoke several languages and was very interested in politics. Mother had to save all the English newspapers for him when he went away on his business trips. His mother, Grandma Rosa, was our only living grandparent. She regularly came to visit us in Vienna and we had holidays in her house in Igls, up in the hills above Innsbruck. She had a reputation for being difficult, but my mother liked and respected her.
My mother Lilly was born in Vienna, the youngest of five, and was such a late arrival that her siblings were already aged eighteen, seventeen, sixteen, and eleven. Her nearest sister Emmy was responsible for most of her upbringing. Mother remembered a school friend saying, ‘You don’t have to do what she says – she is only your sister.’ Lilly did not have a career and was twenty-one when she married my father. Their roles were pretty clear: Father was the teacher and Mother the pupil. Jumping ahead twenty-five years, my own marriage followed a not entirely dissimilar pattern.
My nursery school was located in the basement of our building, which must have felt cosy, and it was run by my mother’s niece. I remember going down long steps willingly and coming back up again. I was about three years old.
During this time, which seems like idyllic family life, my parents had many anxieties, as they were planning to leave Austria for good. My father believed the things that Adolf Hitler was saying in his speeches and he realised the dangers so close in Germany, unlike many of our Viennese friends and family, who never believed Hitler would carry out his plans. My brothers were being prepared for this dramatic change, especially my elder brother Vicky. But nothing was said to me. I was considered too young and was to be protected. My mother and brothers were already having English lessons. My brother Walter (who became a journalist) has written his own memoir The Ideal Occupation1, which depicts this early part of our lives extremely well and in more detail.
1 Walter Schwarz, The Ideal Occupation (Brighton: Revel Barker Publishing, 2011), pp. 6–30.