Only

by Caroline Baum

  I grew up with no relationship to my grandmother, barely knowing or visiting her. She was hardly mentioned. I assumed she was dead so that I was shocked when, one evening in my teens, we received the news that she had just passed away in New York. My father did not attend her funeral and I don’t believe he ever visited her gravesite.

  Only a couple of years ago, my father announced, out of the blue, that he believed his father had died in Minsk, now the capital of Belarus. He suddenly claimed to remember receiving a postcard from his father somewhere near there.

  He also told us that the Red Cross tried to inform him of his father’s deportation. Alexander was arrested by the Nazis supposedly for possessing a complete set of Die Fackel, Karl Kraus’s magazine. The Red Cross reported, in a letter sent in October 1946, that he was sent to Minsk on 29 December 1941, but my father never received their communication—he was by then a student at Manchester University and the Red Cross did not track him down there.

  But as he had never mentioned it before, my mother wondered if he was imagining things, as my father was unable to explain where he was when he got this news. By then in his late seventies, he wanted to go to Minsk and look for traces of my grandfather’s final resting place, a journey for which he was not physically equipped. Hoping to prevent him from undertaking such an arduous journey, my mother undertook her own research and correspondence with Jewish organisations and got a prompt reply. It confirmed that there were at least ten deportations of Jewish males from Vienna to Minsk between November 1941 and October 1942.

  As to their fate, Yuri Dorn, the coordinator of Jewish Heritage in Belarus, wrote without attempt to gloss over the starkness of the facts: ‘First the trains went to Vilovysk [Volkovysk]. In this town people were moved to trains used to transport animals and then they were moved to the ghetto in Minsk. This trip lasted seven to eight days. There was neither food nor water. Ten per cent of men died on the journey. When they arrived in Minsk, professionals such as tailors and shoemakers were selected and sent to a concentration camp called Maly Trostinetz [Trostenets], about 12 kms from the town. Others lived in the ghetto, where there were 7300 Jews from Austria and Germany. They were killed in 1942–1943. The professionals who had been selected for Maly Trostinetz and their families were shot and burned at the beginning of 1944. No lists of the victims’ names were preserved.’

  It is believed that the Jews were buried in a mass grave. It had taken my father sixty years to dredge this episode out of his subconscious. What else might have been lurking there?

  CHAPTER 7

  Return to Vienna

  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 mak
e 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.