by Erich Hackl
Fifty years later a woman from the disabled movement, Hannelore Witkofski, was interested in the fate of persons of restricted growth in German concentration camps. She went to Israel to visit Perla Ovici, the last survivor of the klezmer trio, and it was from her that she learnt the name of the photographer who had documented Mengele’s experiments. She found Brasse’s address through the Auschwitz Memorial Museum, went to Żywiec and questioned him on camera about the victims of Nazi medical research. The Polish documentary journalist, Irek Dobrowolski, happened to see the interview, about six years ago, Brasse says, and decided to make a film about him, Brasse, the portrait of a portraitist, so to speak; and Portrecista is the title of the film that Dobrowolski made, with his own equipment and at his own expense because no one was prepared to finance it, but since it was shown this year on Polish television and at film festivals abroad, Brasse’s telephone in ul. Sienkiewicza keeps on ringing and people he’s never heard of ask him whether he might have photographed their parents, grandparents, uncles or aunts, cousins, etc. in Auschwitz, perhaps he can remember. He is happy to receive such calls, he helps wherever he can, though he advises them to call in the morning, for after lunch his wife switches the television on and it’s quite possible he wouldn’t hear the telephone ring.
This is what Jacek Buras tells me during the drive from Kraków to Żywiec and I’m looking forward to finally getting to know Wilhelm Brasse. Jacek made a great effort to see that my book was published in Poland, on a hint from the Austrian writer and translator Martin Pollack, and was quite surprised when, one evening, the wedding photo from Auschwitz suddenly appeared on his television, immediately followed by the old man who had taken it and whom we are now going to take with us to Kraków.
Such is chance.
Thus the last piece falls into place. The photographer and the photo. His Austrian grandfather from Alsace and his Austrian friend in the camp. The other Austrian whom Buras has brought along and who has written about that friend.
(That’s all correct, Brasse will say after reading this and I won’t be unhappy to hear him say that.)
Rudi Friemel was not the only Austrian he grew fond of in the camp. Vickerl, real name Ludwig Vesely, Brasse calls him Vicky, also came from Vienna. They worked in the carpool, Rudi as foreman, Vicky as his assistant who dealt with any paperwork. The two had only become acquainted in the camp, in the winter of 1942 after Rudi, as a well-qualified motor mechanic and with his both self-assured and engaging manner, had risen very rapidly in the hierarchy of prisoners. Brasse profited from that; if new arrivals from Żywiec needed to be allocated to a good section, he knew he could rely on him. He knew that Rudi or Vicky would see that it was done. From conversations and hints he knew the story of Rudi’s life, at least in rough outline: fought against Dollfuss’ dictatorship in February 1934, was a political prisoner until 1938, then joined the International Brigades in Spain, where he met his great love, whom he was finally able to marry in the camp. Brasse also knew that in Vienna there was a son from his first marriage as well as the other one, of course, the comical little fellow he’d photographed. Rudi was allowed to let his hair grow and borrow a suit from the clothes store so that just looking at the photo one would never have guessed it was taken in Auschwitz. Also because his wife was so beautiful and well-groomed and because no one could imagine a wedding in Auschwitz anyway. Brasse recalls that the camp orchestra played the Wedding March.
For me that was a special story, something out of the ordinary, the only photograph I enjoyed taking.
Then he happened to hear of a romance between Rudi and one of the secretaries in the register office. He never saw any evidence of it himself. Not much will have happened, no more than happened between him and Anna, a girl from Tarnów who was Mengele’s secretary, but they were in love and swore to each other they’d get married after the liberation. After he returned from Austria, Brasse took the train to Tarnów as soon as possible and looked for Anna, but she was engaged, to another man.
What about our promise, he asked.
Oh, of course. I thought you hadn’t survived, she said.
A few times they went out together as a foursome, Anna and her fiancé and he with his future wife, but then they stopped, realizing that both their partners felt uncomfortable about it.
Rudi was cheerful, Vicky was cheerful, that was what the women prisoners liked about them, and the men as well. Their sense of humor, their self-assurance, their readiness to help, their confidence. Brasse spends a long time looking for a word that does justice to both their political stance and their stature as human beings. Social democrats, he says hesitantly, with a longish pause between the two words, but he’s not happy with that characterization. After a while he tries again. Genuine socialists. Then again: real humanists. (In fact they were communists, Vickerl always, Rudi since 1942 at the latest. But who wants to risk praising communists as models, as irreproachable, especially in Poland. Moreover the suspicion that the word ‘communist’ has lost its positive sense forever is not entirely unfounded and in that case Brasse would be quite correct.)
Once Vicky showed him a pistol. That was an indiscretion but also a great token of trust.
We’ll have to defend ourselves, he said, when they start to liquidate the camp.
Brasse was roped into the resistance network as well. Using the information collected in his section, for example, he made lists of the dead. His fellow-countryman Stanisław Kłodziński passed them on to civilian workers who had connections with the partisans outside. For reasons of security each of them only knew what was absolutely necessary. That was why he didn’t hear about the escape attempt of four Poles and one Austrian, at the end of October 1944, until after it had failed. Two months later, on December 30, the survivors of the attempt and their assistants, Friemel and Vesely, were hanged on the parade ground.
It was terrible for him to have to watch. Their death on the gallows a tragedy. Ernst Burger, Bernard Świerczyna, Piotr Piąty. Good comrades, all three of them. Piąty had worked in the dental ward, Burger slept in the same block as he did, 4 or 5. The worst, however, was the loss of Rudi and Vicky. Normally executions were carried out in silence, without incident, all that was to be heard the commands of the SS and a rustling when the 15,000 prisoners of the original camp took off their caps at the same moment. But to their very last breath those five shouted slogans that could be heard right across the parade ground. Long live Austria! Long live Poland! Down with the brown scum! Three cheers for the Soviet Union! He can remember that quite clearly. And that Vicky, the youngest, shouted loudest of all.
It would have been something if the two of them had survived. If they’d still been alive. Then he would have visited them, a little detour on his journey to Melk and Ebensee. And then I wouldn’t be asking what to make of Brasse’s words of farewell, who or what he includes in the Austria to whom he asked me to give his best wishes.
TWO PHOTOS are to go with this report. The one a still from Dobrowolski’s film: Brasse with the picture of the four girls that kept on appearing in his viewfinder. The other of the wedding: Marga and Rudi and between them little Edi, who died two years ago in France. The gulf between the two photos, the question whether each of them is incomplete without the other.
The third photo I am just going to describe in the hope readers can visualize it in their mind’s eye: a snapshot in Brasse’s front garden, taken by the ever slapdash Jacek Buras and therefore blurred. You have to blank me out, I’m irrelevant. What that leaves is an old man, bent but by no means infirm, in a dark-blue blazer, his hearing aid stuck in his right ear, his beret at an angle on his head, in the middle a large, fleshy nose. To his left a piece of the wall of the house, weathered to a sulfurous yellow and sandy gray, behind it (invisible) Frau Stanisława, five years younger than him, who is said to have been very beautiful sixty years ago, and a little jealous as well, and likes to switch on the television in the afternoon, which is why Brasse advises… But that’s already been said.
Tschofenig: The Name Behind the Street
That was something they were all exposed to:
—Manfred Franke, Mordverläufe
THAT WAS SOMETHING they were all exposed to: Some had a foreboding about it, even before it happened. They heard it in the night when it did happen. The following day they saw things that indicated how it had happened. They made a mental note of the place where it had happened. When everything was over, they went home. Then they indicated the place to the others, who hadn’t ceased to hope that it wouldn’t happen. These latter started to dig, cautiously and quietly, as if by that they could undo what had happened. After they’d turned the earth over with their spades a few times, they came upon the bodies. Gisela was at the bottom, doubled up, in her stockinged feet and with one empty eye socket. They dispersed and talked about it. That’s how some people heard about it; few were those who passed it on.
They talked about it: to Hermann, for example. It isn’t the first memory connected with his mother. In the first he’s lying beside her in bed. It’s dark and he can hear the rustling and scurrying in the joists above their heads. That woke him up or stopped him getting to sleep. His mother told him that it was mice. No need to feel afraid, they won’t hurt you. He also remembers a boy, three or four years older than him. He doesn’t know whether there were other children there or not. There probably were. During the day he played by a stream with the boy. He showed him how to catch crawfish in the shallow water.
That was in Möltschach, outside Villach, Carinthia, in the house of the Tatschl family. That was where his mother was arrested by the Gestapo. But he’s unable to remember that. He doesn’t know what happened next, either. I assume Frau Tatschl took him to his grandmother, Theresia Tschofenig, in Villach-Völkendorf, who will then have informed the Taurers, his maternal grandparents, in Linz. Klaus Taurer was an engineer on the railroad, Gisela’s brother Albert a traffic superintendent with the railroad, it wouldn’t have been difficult for them to collect Hermann in Villach the next day. They were familiar to him, after he was born he and his mother had lived with them, in Füchselstrasse, Block J, Staircase 2 of the railroad development, two rooms whose third-floor windows opened onto the track of the Western Railway.
In July 1944 Gisela had gone with him to Carinthia, to find a safe refuge, she’d probably been given a sign that she should disappear for the time being. Her mother Helene was relieved, thinking perhaps that Gisela, out of consideration for little Hermann, had finally given way to her urgings and abandoned her subversive activities, about which she knew nothing specific, only that there was something going on that couldn’t be discussed. Her arrest in or near Villach, which Hermann cannot remember, took place on September 26. It is uncertain whether Gisela was immediately transferred to Linz or interrogated while she was still in Carinthia, or even (as her friend Resi Reindl claimed) in Vienna, but if she was, she didn’t stay there for long, for her first card to her mother from the Kaplanhof women’s prison in Linz is dated 9/30/1944.
Dear Mother,
Please send me clean underwear and my suit, gray winter coat, soap, toothpaste, toothbrush, comb, sanitary towels & the girdle for them, tracksuit. Mother-in-law should send my winter things. You can hand it in here at any time. A food parcel would be welcome as well. Please take care of my little boy. Don’t forget handkerchiefs and stockings.
You’ve got something to worry about again, Mother dear. Best wishes to everyone.
Gisela
A warm nightie.
SHE’S NOT THERE in his next memories. In them he’s in Linz, out in the open air, during the last weeks of the Hitler years. Near the building in Füchselstrasse a pond has been dug, to provide water for fighting fires after air raids. Together with another child, Hermann is sticking little pieces of wood in the ground beside the pond, when he suddenly notices soil spurting up beside him. Puzzled, he looks up and sees the fighter pilot who is firing at them. It’s only now that he hears the engine noise, the rat-tat-tat of the aircraft’s gun as well. And a few days before or after that he’s standing by the air-raid shelter outside the house; it sticks up out of the grass a bit and the soil all around has been piled up and smoothed out to make a little slope on which a neighbor, who’s called the assistant air-raid warden, is lying and shooting with a machine gun at people floating through the air, hanging defenseless on strings under an umbrella. Hermann remembers that. And he remembers the designation assistant air-raid warden as well. It occurs to him that at the end of the war their neighbor disappeared. It was said that he went to live in Urfahr, on the other side of the Danube, in the Soviet Zone of Occupation, where he assumed he’d be safe from the investigations of the American military authorities. Hermann must have picked that up from his grandmother or his Aunt Leni.
The fourth memory still hurts even today. Holding his grandmother’s hand, he’s going to Schörgenhub Camp where his mother is imprisoned. It’s spring, the end of March or the beginning of April forty-five. His grandmother’s made a savory blancmange (“don’t ask me what a savory blancmange is,” Hermann will say sixty-three years later) and asks the guard at the gate (in a steel helmet and carrying a rifle, he will recall) to be allowed to hand over the blancmange for Gisela. The man shakes his head and sends her away. Brusquely and with a threatening gesture because Helene Taurer has tried to get him to change his mind. A long way away, behind barbed wire, next to a hut, Hermann sees a woman waving, her arms stretched far above her head: his mother Gisela. And he’s happy because now he’s going to get to eat the blancmange. Her high-spirited waving, his secret joy: the pain that stays with him.
Hermann’s fifth memory flickers in my mind’s eye like a sequence of images repeated again and again, in pale colors, as if they’re being projected onto a dirty-gray sheet of plastic: his grandmother is pushing the stroller that he’s sitting in along a gravel track. Hurriedly and roughly, not bothering about the potholes, she just manages to avoid the big puddles. Three or four women suddenly appear at the side of the road, out of the hollow where the grounds of the camp extend. Crying, they run over to the stroller, embrace his grandmother and press his face to their wet cheeks. Then they run off, back into the grounds and his grandmother follows them; they come back, wrap their arms around him. They yell or groan something that Hermann cannot understand or refuses to understand.
“That was the first time I had some intimation of what had happened.”
Two days later his mother is buried in Kleinmünchen Cemetery.
“But I refused to accept it,” Hermann says.
WE KNOW hardly anything about her childhood apart from: addresses, school grades, photograph captions. It’s too late to find out anything more since Gisela’s sister died in 2007, a few months after her husband Franz Ripota, both could have told me some things. Her brothers Andreas and Albert have already been dead for nine or thirteen years respectively; Andi was the eldest of the Taurer children, he was born in 1913, Albert one year later, Gisela in 1917, Leni in 1919.
Gisela was eight when the family moved from St. Leonhard, a village on the northern outskirts of Villach, into the town itself, no. 7a Marxgasse. In 1924 she went to the elementary school in Vassach, from 1925 to 1928 the girls’ elementary school in Villach, from 1928 to 1932 the junior high school in Villach, following that the three-year course at the women’s college for professions in business and industry. Her diploma has ‘very good’ in nineteen subjects, ‘good’ in five, she was given a ‘satisfactory’ in one alone: Foreign Languages (French I assume). Her parents, it says in a brief, strangely dispassionate biographical outline that someone in her immediate family must have written years ago, brought her up in the spirit of socialism. Even as a child Gisela had been “politically relatively aggressive, more than her brothers and sister.” Pretty soon, it goes on, she had “come into contact” with Josef ‘Pepe’ Tschofenig, who was four years older—a friendship, quickly developing into love that clearly didn’t need to look far, resting as it did on reside
ntial proximity, a common social background and agreement in outlook: they were railroaders’ children, lived almost next door to each other for a while in Marxgasse (Pepe at no. 3), spent their free time in socialist youth groups, first the Kinderfreunde then the Rote Falken, ran around in the countryside, exerted themselves swimming, racing, skiing, honed their knowledge of the world and the way it ought to be at lectures and in discussion groups. The older they became, the less the difference in age mattered; Gisela made up for Pepe’s advantage in direct experience through the stimulus she received from home. A photo from 1932 shows her together with her family: five people in upright posture, facing the camera, their expressions proud and self-assured (only her mother is looking to one side); it is hard to imagine that anything could shake their confidence. In the album their names are listed along with their age and occupations; it sounds as if that’s not for the family, as an aid to memory or a sentimental look back at the past, but for later generations: “The Taurer family in the ‘music chamber’ of 7a Marxgasse: Karl (43), Austrian Railways engineer, and Helene (40), housewife; Andreas (19), technical college graduate, and Albert (18), attending trade school, Gisela (15), girls’ junior high school graduate, and Helene (13) attending junior high school.” On another photo from thirty-two, taken at the Völkendorf Rote Falken group’s holiday camp on the Wöllanernock, Gisela can be seen in a blouse and neckerchief with, behind her, the Red Office, a wooden hut with two open windows for ‘Cooperative Shop’ and ‘Lost Property’. Longish face, straight, chin-length hair, arms hidden behind her slim body, right leg slightly bent at the knee. A hint of skepticism or impatience in her look. And then, thirdly, the picture in which she’s posing together with Pepe, in the snow with skis fixed, on this one she’s smiling, her flat cap pulled down coquettishly over her right ear. In the short, tight-fitting jacket with the broad lapels, which emphasizes her figure, Gisela looks almost grown-up, at the same time light-hearted, carefree, as if time were on her side, with Pepe and their happy life together to look forward to. He’s a good head taller than Gisela, six foot, perhaps even six foot two, and is looking straight at the camera. A lean figure, controlled strength, a dark, sunburnt face. One of the few photos on which he seems to be smiling: “Gailtal 1933: on the Oisternig (6676 ft.) in the Carnic Alps.”