by Tim Bonyhady
The Jewish students at the Albertgasse were immediate targets. Annelore was accustomed to sitting at the front of her class with her two best friends, who were both Aryans. After the Anschluss, the class was segregated. While the Aryans occupied the front rows, the Jews, including Annelore, were relegated to the back. If they came too close, the Aryan girls would draw their clothes to their bodies in ostentatious displays of fear of contamination. The two girls who had been Annelore’s best friends were at the forefront of this ostracism because they felt obliged to make up for their previous support of Schuschnigg. According to Anne, these girls “did not know her any more.”
This exclusion extended to Nazi symbolism and ceremony. The Aryan students at Viennese schools started each day by raising their right arms to “Heil Hitler.” The Jewish students were prohibited from doing so. They had to listen while the other pupils learned the Nazi anthem: “When Jewish blood spurts from the knife, then everything will be double fine.” They were banned from donning swastikas, which everyone else wore. Anne particularly remembered the response of one of her classmates whose Jewish father was imprisoned by the Nazis while her Aryan mother was not. Anne recalled, with a mixture of envy and contempt, that this girl varied the size of swastika she wore according to the teacher, choosing the biggest for the most fervent Nazis. “It was dreadful,” Anne wrote, “to be an outcast and live in this changed atmosphere.”
She still thought herself relatively fortunate because many of the Aryan pupils and teachers at the Albertgasse were long-standing Nazis who did not feel obliged to engage in extreme acts of anti-Semitism in order to prove themselves to the new regime. She also could have been excluded altogether from the gymnasium, as a new Nazi law prohibited Jews from going to the schools they had been attending and required them to move to eight new schools restricted to Jews. But as with many of the Nazis’ anti-Semitic measures, the enforcement of this law proved uneven. At some schools they evicted Jews as soon as the law came into effect at the end of April. At others they placed Jews in separate classes and required them to use separate entrances and toilets. Some, including the Albertgasse, allowed Jews to stay where they were.
Annelore’s great solace was the Staatsoper, which replaced the Burgtheater at the start of 1938 as her favorite place to go. The catalyst was her sixteenth birthday, a month before the Anschluss. Until then, Annelore had always been taken to the theater and opera at night by adults, usually occupying very expensive seats. Her ambition was to attend as many performances as possible regardless of where she sat. When she turned sixteen, Annelore was allowed to go alone and buy tickets to the opera’s standing areas, the one democratic feature of this elitist institution. In all there were five hundred standing places against twenty-five hundred seats. Some were at the front of the Gods, the opera’s fourth and highest tier. Others were at the sides of the third tier. The best were at the back of the parterre, or ground floor of the theater, offering a perfect view of the stage for a token schilling or two. Annelore first stood for a performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the end of February 1938. She thought it “outstanding!”
The chaos caused by the Anschluss closed the opera, and when it reopened at the end of March, many people stayed away regardless of their religion. Gitta Sereny, best known for her book on Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, was among them. As Sereny recalled in an autobiographical essay, she and her best friend, both Protestants, both aged fifteen, were forbidden by their parents from walking home at night and, even when they went out in large groups, did not attend any performances. Because Annelore was a Jew, she had even more reason to stay away or seek protection in numbers and Gretl, one of the most anxious of mothers, had particular cause to insist that her only child do so because of Käthe’s arrest. Yet Gretl usually gave Annelore what she most desired, and before long Annelore was going more than ever. While Käthe was imprisoned in April and May, Annelore went to fourteen performances and then another nine in June. At her most intense—just before Vienna’s operas, theaters, and concert houses closed for the summer—she went out four nights in succession and five nights out of six.
She was free to attend these performances as a matter of law since Nazi legislation prohibiting Jews from attending places of public entertainment only came into force at the end of the year. In practice, the opera was already forbidden to Jews, as the Nazis made plain following the Anschluss when they dismissed eleven “racially unworthy” members of the orchestra and tried to arrest Bruno Walter, only to find that he was performing in Amsterdam. Annelore thought of the opera as Judenverbot, a place where Jews were forbidden. Although she went for her own pleasure, these outings were another form of defiance of the Nazis, like the food she illicitly brought Käthe in prison. As much as she was alive to the hazards, she probably was thrilled by them. She wrote in her memoir: “There was one thing I insisted on. Even though Jews were not permitted in the opera or theater, I went there, never mind the risk. It was in that time of my life that I discovered the charm of the standing room. I stood throughout the operas, loved it, and forgot the dismal world outside.”
More than seventeen hundred Viennese Jews became Roman Catholics in the first five months after the Anschluss. Annelore was one of them. “It was decided that I should not be Jewish,” she recalled. “Many people felt the same and a Franciscan priest conducted a large class of would-be converts.” She would have jumped at this opportunity a few years before because of her antipathy toward Judaism and her desire to share the Catholicism of Hermine, Gretl, and Käthe. But by 1938, aged sixteen, Annelore was skeptical about organized religion, whatever its form. Just as the novelist Felix Dahn probably fueled her rejection of Judaism in A Fight for Rome, so he expressed if not shaped her view of Christianity when he wrote: “To believe in God is childish. To deny the existence of God is madness. To search for God is the answer.” The decision that Annelore should convert was made by Gretl and Käthe.
They knew that under the Nürnberg Laws Annelore would remain a Jew so far as the Nazis were concerned, but Gretl and Käthe still hoped her conversion would help to protect Annelore in Vienna. They thought Catholicism might make her life safer and easier wherever they went as refugees. Her conversion was also a matter of belief for Käthe, though not for Gretl, whose Catholicism had become nominal. Anne wrote that Käthe was “very pleased that she was about to become a member of the Catholic church.” Her conversion was “something Käthe had always wished for.”
I asked once about Anne’s father, Paul Herschmann. Had he tried to stop her baptism? Anne was not sure whether Paul was in Vienna when she converted or had already fled the Nazis. She reminded me that their confrontation over the cello meant that they no longer had any contact. They had, she recalled, never said good-bye. In fact, Paul not only was still in Vienna but remained in touch with Gretl if not with Annelore. When Annelore submitted a list of her property in July, in accordance with the Nazis’ Ordinance for the Registration of Jewish Property, Paul signed her form as her father and legal guardian. Paul may have played the same role when she converted a month later. At any rate, he did not interfere.
Any other summer, Annelore would have persuaded Gretl or Käthe to take her to Hinterbichl, as her passion for the Vienna Boys’ Choir remained intense, even though the Nazis had dismissed the choir’s director, Rektor Schnitt, because he opposed them. As Anne remembered it, the Anschluss meant that Gretl and Käthe could not take her. In fact, many families of Jewish descent tried to treat the summer of 1938 like any other, either going to their own houses, renting villas for the summer, or staying at hotels or guesthouses. Gretl and Käthe probably did not want to do so in case there was something they could do in Vienna to accelerate their departure. They knew it would be foolish to holiday when they needed to flee. Käthe’s lawyer was also trying to recover her jewelry. In the account that she sent Gauleiter Bürckel about what happened when the SS and Gestapo raided her apartment, Käthe stressed that she wanted this jewelry for its sentimental si
gnificance as much as its monetary value. She also emphasized that the seizure of this jewelry was unwarranted when her official identity as a Jew was simply a matter of legal definition resulting from the Nürnberg Laws. By implication, Käthe resented being declared a Jew.
Annelore began her formal Christian instruction at the Franciscan church in Vienna’s First District by acquiring a copy of the New Testament, a missal containing the masses for all the Sundays and church festivals of the year, and a catechism, which she annotated in several places. One of the questions that prompted a long marginal note was: Why does God let us suffer? Another was: Are all sins equally great? This instruction, Anne recalled, had no effect on her. While she liked her teacher, Father Elzear Wangler, she did not believe anything he taught. Catholicism remained strange, even alien, to her. She still had no faith when Father Elzear baptized her with Käthe as her godmother and Gretl looking on—Gretl’s first attendance at a service since Hermine’s Requiem Mass two years before. Yet when Annelore took Holy Communion the following day, she not only believed for reasons she could never explain, but her faith was so intense that she insisted Gretl and Käthe also become regular churchgoers.
Annelore, newly baptized, with her crucifix, September 1938. (Illustration Credits ill.40)
Gretl was accustomed to having Annelore’s portrait taken to commemorate significant events in her life, particularly ones involving special clothes and jewelry. The occasion of Annelore’s baptism prompted Gretl to do so that September, despite the Anschluss. As usual, they went to Jobst, who photographed Annelore with her hair up in a roll and a thin chain around her neck, wearing the light purple dress she wore for her baptism. The most beautiful of Jobst’s three photographs shows her in profile—the simplest classical pose. In another her body is turned more toward the camera but she looks up and away to the side. The last, which shows her with rounded shoulders, looking straight at the camera, is the least attractive but the most telling—revealing that the chain around her neck bears a small gold crucifix.
Before she left Vienna, the newly converted Annelore bought a copy of Der Ewige Jude, or The Eternal Jew, one of the Nazis’ most virulent pieces of anti-Semitism. Its 128 pages, replete with 265 photographs, opened with an account of the origins of the Jewish nose and ended with an attack on Zionism. In between it cast Jews as dishonest, dirty, perverted, treacherous, and murderous. The picture on its cover, which also was featured on banners, posters, and postcards, depicted an “eastern” Jew in a caftan with a whip in one hand, gold coins in the other, and a map bearing the hammer and sickle under his arm, a figure designed to be as threatening because of his Bolshevism as his avarice. The title was in red—its lettering reminiscent of Hebrew script.
The exhibition that formed the basis of this book opened in Munich in November 1937. Over the next twelve weeks, it was seen by five thousand people a day and delighted the Gestapo by heightening anti-Semitism and inciting attacks against Jewish businesses. When it moved to Vienna in August 1938, the crowds were even bigger. Meanwhile, the book became a bestseller. When Annelore bought her copy, one hundred thousand had been sold and another thirty thousand printed. She wanted a copy so she would never be homesick for Austria or grow nostalgic about it—to remind herself that Austria was a country she would be lucky to escape.
4
Visas
Like many children in the 1920s and 1930s, Annelore collected stamps. When I went through what remained of her collection, two envelopes caught my eye because of their sender, John Osborn, an American long resident in the Philippines, to whom Gretl turned for help with visas after Käthe was released from the Hahngasse in 1938. These envelopes suggested that Gretl, who met Osborn in Italy on one of her holidays without Annelore in the early 1930s, remained in regular contact with him, making it plausible for her to ask his help. The stamps and frankings on these envelopes also suggested that Gretl must have told Osborn about Annelore’s childhood interest in collecting. While their contents had long been destroyed, the envelopes were part of the chain of connections that gave Gretl, Käthe, and Annelore hope of escape.
The official talk after the Anschluss, as often with refugees, stressed the need for queues and orderly processes, with everyone taking their turn and being judged by the same criteria. Yet there typically was much more disorder than order as refugees used their connections to improve their prospects and governments bent and broke their own rules. As Anne remembered it, Gretl called on three people for help. One was an American woman of German descent who had corresponded with Gretl from the time they became pen pals as girls thirty years before. She responded that Austria’s Jews were “getting what they deserved.” Another was Osborn, a well-connected government official in Manila, whose initial response was vague, though he soon wrote again to say that he had secured visas for them. The third was Eugénie Luke, the Austrian widow of an English businessman, who had been close to Hermine.
Gretl was eager to draw on this friendship because Mrs. Luke’s son, Harry, was even better placed to help them than Osborn. Gretl hoped that Sir Harry Luke, as he became in 1933, would exploit his position as a senior British diplomat to secure British visas for them. But Britain defined itself as “not a country of immigration.” Its government was interested only in Jews whom it deemed likely to be an asset to the United Kingdom—a very narrow class. Jews with international reputations as scientists, doctors, researchers, or artists, such as Freud, passed the government’s test. So did successful industrialists with businesses that they could transfer to the United Kingdom. Other refugees, including Gretl, Käthe, and Annelore, were ineligible. While some senior British diplomats still tried to secure British visas for Jews who did not satisfy their government’s specifications, others such as Sir Harry Luke used their influence to get them visas elsewhere. That Gretl, Käthe, and Annelore should go to Australia, a country of immigration since it became a British penitentiary in 1788, was probably Sir Harry’s idea.
Australia was readier to accept European Jews than other former British colonies such as Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa but was far from generous. The national ideal, White Australia, rested on racial homogeneity. The population, by some counts, was 97, if not 98, percent British, and the government wanted it to remain so. While it encouraged British migrants through an assisted passage scheme, non-British migrants with no one in Australia to act as their financial guarantor were eligible for entry only if they arrived with £200 (then $800) and intended to pursue occupations that would not deprive Australians of work. When the Anschluss prompted several hundred Austrian Jews with the necessary “landing money” to apply for Australian visas, the government feared twenty thousand might come within a year and imposed an annual limit of fifty-one hundred. Yet the government continued to maintain that so long as applicants were white, it did not discriminate against any nationality, race, or religion. Just as the government refused to acknowledge that Jews fleeing Hitler were “refugees,” so it instructed its officials never to describe its restrictions as a “quota.”
By June, Australia had such a backlog of applicants that the government advised the British consul general, who represented Australia’s interests in Vienna, to warn all new applicants that they had little chance of success. At the international conference on Jewish refugees held at President Roosevelt’s initiative at Evian in France in July, Australia was one of many countries that refused to do more. It insisted that it could not give “undue privileges … to one particular class of non-British subjects”—Jews facing persecution—“without injustice to others.” It declared that Australia had “no real racial problem” and was “not desirous of importing one.” A confidential government paper observed that, while there was “no cause for alarm at the moment” about the number of Jews in Australia, which was one-third of 1 percent of the total population, this number would have to be “watched very carefully.”
The Jews competing for visas in mid-1938 included Poles fleeing state persecution as well as Aus
trians and Germans trying to escape Hitler. Of the five hundred applications the Australian government received each week, it approved one in ten. Gretl, Käthe, and Annelore were fortunate that the government gave preference to Germans and Austrians, both because it considered them in greater need and because it expected them to fit into Australian society more easily than the Poles, whom it regarded as “lesser types.” After touring Europe, one senior Australian official compared the Poles to Australian Aborigines, dismissing the Poles as the “poorest specimens outside blackfellows” he had seen.
Australia’s criteria for determining whether or not to grant visas fixed on the applicants’ age, qualifications, occupation, and capital. Käthe’s case was strong as she satisfied the Australian preference for applicants under forty, was a university graduate, and had spent almost ten years managing the Graetzinlicht Gesellschaft. Gretl’s case—and hence also that of Annelore as her dependent—was weak because Gretl was forty-two, had no degree, and had never worked. But she had the support of Sir Harry Luke, who was about to become British High Commissioner for the South Seas and governor of Fiji. While the Australian government took four months to decide most applications, the Gallias had their permits “in no time,” Anne recalled, after Sir Harry wrote to “his representative in Australia.” By mid-August they knew they would be successful. In early September they had their papers.