Steven Karras

by The Enemy I Knew: German Jews in the Allied Military

  We had telephone calls from people telling us about nasty things that were happening. One very good friend of my parents told us that brown-shirted Nazis had already come within a few hours. A truck stood downstairs and they stole everything there was to steal and then dragged her husband away. When she asked about what would happen to him, they said, “You can collect his ashes tomorrow at Gestapo headquarters.”

  We also received several phone calls from people abroad urging us to get out immediately, including one from the Duke of Windsor (who was then staying at the Ephrussi de Rothschild Villa in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat) asking if he could help. Vienna used to be an international medical center, and patients like the Duke came from all over Europe to be treated. The Duke visited Vienna yearly before and after his short reign as Edward VIII, partially to consult some physicians, including my father, with whom he became quite friendly. (On one of my birthdays, I received a present from him, the latest model of a Puch bicycle.) Back then, the Duke generally stayed as a guest of Alfons de Rothschild in the country and at the Bristol Hotel in Vienna, where a complete medical unit with X-ray and other equipment had to be installed because the Duke did not visit doctors’ offices. At the time, my father declined his help, thinking that the League of Nations, or at least the British and French, would force the Germans to turn back.

  Brownshirts, the SA, were the worst. When we looked out the window on the street, and we lived on the sixth floor, we saw horrible scenes—people, mostly Jews, being arrested, being forced to clean up the anti-Nazi slogans from the street.

  At that point, somebody called from England and offered to help—which they eventually did—but at that point, my father said, “There’s nothing that you can do.” The next few days were pretty rough. German planes flew over the next morning and dropped leaflets. Right in front of our apartment was a park, which became an encampment for hundreds of German soldiers.

  The German soldiers came into Vienna and I watched that. Unexpectedly, they were a very bedraggled group. The German Army broke down forty miles between Vienna and Linz because their supplies hadn’t reached them, which was because they entered three days later. They were dirty, as if they had been through a war. Still, the Austrians greeted them with open arms and cheered and shouted, “Heil Hitler!” I remember distinctly that they didn’t look like the German soldiers that I expected to march into town.

  Everybody wore a swastika badge unless the person was a foreigner or a Jew. Therefore Jews were recognized for not wearing anything. These badges were sold on every street corner for a few cents and were available in all different sizes. Real anti-Nazis also wore the badge but a tiny one, so if you saw somebody with a small badge you knew they were anti-Nazi Austrians. The bigger the badge, the more support the wearer wanted to show.

  On the second day, the concierge of the building came up with enormous Nazi flags and said he was told that each apartment had to fly one. Since we were Jewish, he said it was best to comply so as to not draw attention to ourselves. So, from our porch, there flew a Nazi flag and no one bothered us.

  My parents didn’t allow me to go out on the street, mainly because of the scenes we kept seeing and people who kept calling our house. The mother of the writer Stefan Zweig, who lived in England, was an old lady who, at that time, had a nurse. She was used to going for a walk every morning in this park. Literally within a day or two of the Anschluss, park benches were marked that Jews were forbidden to sit on them. She saw that, but sat down anyway. She wasn’t asked to move, but the nurse refused to sit with her. When they got home, Mrs. Zweig was agitated and her doctor—a colleague of my father’s—said that he wanted the nurse to stay overnight. The nurse said she couldn’t stay overnight because she read in the papers that Aryan women were forbidden to stay in a Jewish house (unless they have been employed for a great deal of time) and especially if there was a male Jew was present. So, the doctor ended up staying with Mrs. Zweig, and she died shortly after.

  The next few weeks, none of us Jews went out. We found out on the telephone that all schools were closed, mainly to weed out Jewish teachers.

  I had one incident after school started. When I had to change trolley cars, I saw a department store and there were some Brownshirts with an Austrian woman carrying a poster that read, “Ich bin ein Christian Schwien, Denn ich kauf’ bie Jude nein” (I’m a Christian pig because I shop at a Jewish store).

  My father and I were arrested in May. One Sunday morning my father said, “We should get fresh air and go to the park.” There was a park called the Prater in Vienna. It was the first time my father and I went out for pleasure. We were suddenly surrounded by Brownshirts who had come out from behind a tree.

  They asked my father, “Why aren’t you wearing our badge?”

  My father replied, “Because we are Jewish.” He then produced a document which had been given to him at the instigation of Dr. Seyss-Inquart, the new chancellor Hitler had installed (he was hanged as a war criminal at Nuremberg at the end of the war). We had known Seyss-Inquart very well from before the Anschluss. There had been chamber music at my house every Sunday afternoon, and one of the guests who often came was Seyss-Inquart, an attorney, but back then nobody knew he was an illegal member of the Nazi Party and also close to Hitler. About two or three weeks after the Germans entered Vienna, Seyss-Inquart made an appointment to see my father professionally. When he arrived he was already chancellor of Austria. He had seen somebody had scrawled “Jude” across my father’s glass plaque downstairs at the entrance of the office, which he ordered removed. He gave my father this document, which said, “Herr Tischler is not to be arrested for the purpose of street scrubbing and other purposes.”

  The Brownshirts in the park took the document to a man sitting in a staff car, and they came back and said, “Seyss-Inquart is out of the country today, so it isn’t valid, and anyway it doesn’t apply to your son, so come with us.”

  We went down this big boulevard to the football stadium, and there were thousands of Jews being arrested that day. There were a couple of Austrian patriots looking on from the sidelines; one policeman threw his swastika badge to the ground in protest and was forced to march with the Jews, while one elderly woman yelled insults at the Nazis for being like animals, acting like it was the Middle Ages. She said, “I’m a good Catholic and I won’t stand to see this.”

  We walked to this spot where people were screaming at us, throwing eggs—it was bad. I think the worst thing for me was to see my father, who was a dignified and well-known person, in that situation. When we were marching down the boulevard, we were told to undo our ties and mess up our hair, because some SS man thought we’d look more Jewish that way.

  We were told to stand at the Danube Canal, facing the water right in front of us. We were told anyone who turned around would be shot. I remember my father put his arm around me and said, “If they throw us in, the first thing you do is take off your shoes.” And then there was silence. Finally, I turned around and they were gone, and in their place were taxis. By the time we got home, my mother was frantic. I remember my father looking out the window for a long time, and he finally said, “Now we leave, we can’t stay here.” Until then, my father thought everything would pass.

  The problem at that time was not leaving the country but finding the country that would take you in. The policy at that time was not killing Jews in Auschwitz but finding ways to send them out of the country. This was also the case in Germany. It was virtually impossible to get to the United States or Great Britain; there was a quota system and you needed a sponsor.

  The worst thing was the paranoia of who you could trust.

  TWO MONTHS AFTER THE INVASION, in May 1938, my father was arrested and imprisoned at the Gestapo HQ, which was formerly the Hotel Metropole in Vienna. The Hotel Metropole was a quite large, old hotel on the Danube Canal bank on the opposite bank from what had been, until the mid-nineteenth century, the Jewish Ghetto. The Gestapo took it over as a headquarters and a prison for som
e of the more prominent Austrians. Among them were Kurt von Schuschnigg, the now deposed chancellor of Austria, and Baron Alfons de Rothschild, the head of the Austrian Branch. Both Rothschild and Schuschnigg were made to clean the Gestapo latrines.

  My father was taken there after a former employee at his office denounced him for having dismissed him when he was found out to be a then-illegal member of the Nazi Party. My father was kept in a single, quite comfortable but locked, former guest room and taken for interrogation every day by an Austrian Gestapo official named Dr. Schmidt, who greeted him each time with the question, “Sind Sie der Jude Dr. Tischler?” (Are you the Jew Dr. Tischler?)

  Meanwhile, my mother contacted the Duke of Windsor and asked him if he could now help us get to England. One day, Dr. Schmidt suddenly rose from his desk, apologized to my father for the past “inconvenience” and personally took him down to a waiting car displaying the British Union Jack flag. It had been provided by the British Embassy through the intercession from the duke. Who, after all, could refuse a request from a former king?

  That scoundrel Schmidt also got in the car, and they were driven to our house, where my father’s unexpected appearance sparked a joyous reception from my mother and the servants. She thought Dr. Schmidt, who was in civilian clothes, was responsible for his rescue, and greeted him and thanked him profusely, to which that bastard replied that he would be happy to help us in any way he could. The surprising thing was that he actually did, and he facilitated our departure for Switzerland five weeks later.

  It was a very moving scene on the plane. In those days, a three-engined aircraft was used and the flight to Zurich took three hours. At one point, there was an announcement from the captain that we had just crossed the border into Switzerland. There were several other Jewish families onboard and they all got up and embraced each other. One very old Jewish lady grabbed a Swiss Air flight attendant’s hand and kissed her. There were also some German businessmen, Nazis, sitting silently. No smiles there.

  We arrived in Zurich that afternoon. It was incredible for me to not see swastikas everywhere and one really felt free. We took a night train to Paris and then stayed there for many months. My father went to England, where he treated many members of the royal family and tried to decide whether he should practice medicine there or in Paris. He decided on England and we followed.

  Despite the nasty things said about the duke and his domineering wife, Mrs. Simpson, regarding their apparent admiration for Hitler, it was he who had got us out of occupied Austria and had his former equerry Sir Geoffrey Thomas to meet us at Victoria station in London. Among my father’s patients was Sigmund Freud, who was already in England at the time, and he had arranged for us to stay temporarily in the house next door to his in Hampstead. This place was a boarding house for retired colonels of the Indian Army, and it smelled like boiled cabbage. We ate awful food compared to Vienna.

  Former patients of my father started to shower money on him. Subsequently, we moved into a newly acquired house in St. John’s Wood (near Abbey Road). When the Germans first penetrated the London defenses, we watched a dogfight over Regent’s Park, and that night we were bombed out of our house. My parents were then offered a small house belonging to Lord Victor Rothschild in Buckinghamshire, outside of London.

  IN 1940, I WAS SENT TO BOARDING SCHOOL and England became my home. I had already spoke English when I arrived, and I soon became more British than Austrian. I immediately began writing letters in English because it was easier to converse than in German. To the other kids, I was this colorful personality because I was from someplace else, and was immediately accepted.

  On my eighteenth birthday, I enlisted into this awful Pioneer Corps. It was an unarmed British regiment that was a glorified Labour Corps for men unfit for military service and Enemy Aliens like me.

  Yet there was a tremendous class difference; the unfit British couldn’t read or write. That first night, I thought I was in a place where all of the British jails were open, and the escapees had the better jobs. I spent a month rolling tar barrels over uneven ground that were unloaded by English pioneers, and another Enemy Alien had to roll tar barrels across the field to unload onto a train. I always suspected it came back every day just to keep us busy.

  From the moment I got in, I wanted to do something. I made a nuisance of myself and kept on going to the colonel every day and telling him, “I have to join a fighting unit. I’m fit and speak several languages and there’s got to be a better way.” Finally, they got somebody to interview me. That’s how I ended up in this funny German-speaking English unit.

  We had to go to Bradford in Yorkshire, which was the original induction center when I joined the Pioneer Corps. We were told to get rid of our uniforms or anything with our names in it. We didn’t know why, but anything we wanted replaced, we just put our names in it. Then we were told to follow somebody to a train station. That somebody turned out to be our future sergeant major, who wore a funny uniform. We got onto the train. In England all signs of towns were removed during the war, so in case German parachutists were dropped, they wouldn’t know where they were. But somebody who knew the area said that we were going to Wales.

  When we arrived at our destination, I remember seeing men in commando uniforms and green berets and suddenly recognizing someone who had mysteriously disappeared from the Pioneer Corps. Then we started to recognize more people whom we knew. The lorry driver taking us to camp was Private Tennant, formerly Von Troyan, a non-Jewish Austrian from the province of Styria.

  I asked him, “What is this place? Where are you taking us?”

  He said, “There will be no return ticket; once you’re here, you’re here. You’re lucky if you come out alive.” It wasn’t much of a welcome.

  We reached a house and saw the man who interviewed me in London. He would be known to us as “the Skipper.” He had the London phonebook out and gave me a few minutes to choose a name; I chose Terry. Now I had to let my parents know how to contact me. It was up to us to find a mail drop—someone with an English name who lived nearby and knew my parents. To this person we would address the letter so that the local Welsh postmaster in Aberdovey wouldn’t suddenly start seeing letters to people called “Tischler,” or other German names and ultimately get suspicious as to who we really were.

  The Skipper was Brian Hilton Jones, a smallish fellow with a baby face. He looked like a fifteen-year-old. He was a Cambridge graduate who majored in German but very few of us knew this. In fact, he never let on that he knew German probably because he wanted to know what we said to each other. He was a somewhat remote person but a superman. Having come from North Wales, he was a rock climber.

  It was pretty horrendous in the beginning what he made us do. He told us to go down into the village to the jetty and, in full uniform jump, into the sea. Then he would scream at us because we got our weapons wet and make us do the whole thing again.

  I remember a ridge almost at the top of a mountain, where we were in single file following the Skipper, who hailed from these parts and had probably done this many times before. The ridge was sometimes just a foot or so wide, with almost vertical drops on either side, and there was a howling wind. Ahead, the Skipper walked with hands in his pockets as if this was just a stroll along Regent Street in London, while we, laden with fifty-pound gear, negotiated the ledge by sitting atop and moving ourselves along on our bottoms, trying not to look down on either side. I felt rather foolish doing this, especially when I saw the Skipper come to the end, turn around, and look at us in those embarrassing positions, slowly shaking his head in apparent disbelief at that sight of his commandos being scared stiff. I have forgotten what he said after we reached him. We all sat or lay down and lit our mess kits to prepare some warm rations. Finally, after a rest he ordered us to get up and descend the mountain, so we did, re-negotiating the ridge in the opposite direction, this time standing upright. Hours later we reached Harlech, the town from which we had started. There was never a bad word said about
this man.

  In addition to this, we were taught demolition and house breaking—there was a former burglar they let out of prison to teach us. I can still get into anyplace you’d want me to. I know how to break in.

  During a survival course, there was a man who joined us called the Duke of Rutland, a frightfully aristocratic fellow. He was training with us because he was going to join the Long Range Desert Group. During the course, we were told by some man in the catering corps how to fend for ourselves when we were nowhere. This idiot started off by saying, “Well, if you are out in the middle of the jungle or somewhere, if you want to cook, the first thing you have to find is a frying pan. Now you can always find a frying pan.”

  And there was the Duke of Rutland leaning on a stick, who said, “Oh can you?”

  I had a German Army course taught by a former sergeant who was in the Afrika Corps and captured by the Eighth Army. From this course, I learned every rank, the whole order of battle, names of German cleaning materials for jackboots, brass work, and glassware. We even learned German songs.

  There were some very colorful characters. One of my best friends was Julian Sayers—a Hungarian Jew named “Sauer,” who had been an art student in Paris. When war was declared, he was afraid that France would be invaded and went south to Marseille, where he joined the French Foreign Legion and was sent to Morocco. When the Germans invaded the first countries, Denmark and Norway, the French Foreign Legion was sent to Norway to fight the Germans. When the British and Free French withdrew, he got on a British destroyer, which was sunk. Julian was now swimming and was somehow saved. He was picked up by another British battleship. When the British realized he was Free French, they dropped him off in Calais, France, instead of taking him to England. He was sent to an army hospital in northern France to recover from his wounds. When the Germans invaded northern France, he walked out of the hospital and managed to get to Dunkirk and then to England.