by Tim Bonyhady
All three of them knew where to go and what to see over the next four days. As part of her school exercise about London in 1936, Annelore had described the view from the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral, looking up and down the Thames, across Tower Bridge, and over the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. Gretl, Käthe, and she went to all these places. They watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, visited Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus, the Tower of London, the Wallace Collection, and the Tate Gallery. They inspected some of London’s famous department stores but bought nothing for the first time in their lives, since they had less money than ever. Then they took the train to Southampton, England’s main passenger port. Just before they sailed, Käthe sent a letter to the Moll sisters describing the “beautiful things” they had seen.
When I visited the apartment in Sydney as a boy, several of their suitcases survived, plastered with labels from their travels. Now there is only one, Käthe’s hatbox, which carries labels recording stays at the Österreichischer Hof in Salzburg and the Grand Hotel Metropole in Milan, and the voyage of Gretl, Käthe, and Annelore from Southampton. This label reveals they sailed on the Baloeran, a Rotterdam Lloyd liner that could carry four hundred passengers. They were in cabin 83 on the first-class deck, a domain of privilege that the second- and third-class passengers could not enter.
They sailed across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea, and across the Indian Ocean to Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was then known, Singapore, and Java. Their first stop was Lisbon, then Tangiers, where they remained aboard the Baloeran because the only way to get ashore was by small boat and the sea was too rough. Similar conditions prevented their landing at Gibraltar, but they were able to land at Marseilles, Port Said, and Colombo. Their destination was Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies, now Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, which they reached on December 22, four weeks after leaving England.
Along the way, Gretl enjoyed the opportunity to show off the jewelry she had recovered from Dr. Widmer at the elegant shipboard dinners and dances that came with traveling first class. Although Annelore had been cared for by governesses and maids all her life, she was embarrassed that they had their own Indonesian servant who sat cross-legged outside their first-class cabin, waiting for their orders. She was happiest when helping out in the ship’s kindergarten, which allowed her to do more of the useful work she had enjoyed so much with Anni Wiesbauer. While Gretl, Käthe, and she had many more opportunities to shop when they reached port, they still bought almost nothing. A piece of batik that Gretl used to cover her desk in Sydney was a rare exception.
As they traveled, mail from the Molls awaited them at almost every port. Gretl, Käthe, and Annelore were also welcomed as they traveled—a common experience of refugees in the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht, when international outrage at Nazi persecution of Jews reached new heights. Some refugees who traveled to Australia via Canada were billeted by members of the Jewish community of Montreal, fed by other Jews as they crossed the prairies on the Trans-Canada Railway, then taken on an excursion by the Bishop of Honolulu as they sailed across the Pacific to Sydney. Gretl, Käthe, and Annelore were cared for in similar fashion thanks to John Osborn, Gretl’s friend in Manila. He arranged for them to be met at several ports by members of the Society of Friends, or Quakers, who were at the forefront of helping refugees from Germany and Austria in keeping with their larger concern for assisting persecuted minorities.
Like many other refugees, the Gallias struggled with this reception. As members of the upper middle class, they thought of themselves as givers of charity. They had no experience of receiving it. Their new situation was a cause of embarrassment, even humiliation. Although grateful to be met, they had to learn how to accept help. As Gretl later put it, “The main trouble was that for the first time in our lives we had to accept without being able to give.”
Gretl and Annelore as photographed in Brisbane by the Telegraph, January 4, 1939. (Illustration Credits ill.41)
The final leg of their journey was on the Nieuw Zeeland, one of the “Great White Yachts” of the Royal Packet Navigation Company. Its route took it along the coast of Java to Bali and Makassar and then through the Torres Strait. Its first Australian port was Brisbane, where it stayed just four hours, but the Gallias still made it into the local Telegraph, which often published photographs of fashionable women embarking on voyages or returning home. One of these photographs, on January 4, 1939, was “Arriving from Vienna.” It showed Gretl and Annelore, both beaming, with Annelore’s crucifix prominent. The accompanying text did not explain why they had come. It stated: “Mrs. Margaret Herschmann-Gallia and her daughter Miss Annelore Herschmann-Gallia passed through Brisbane on their way to Sydney this morning.” The Telegraph revealed more about Käthe, but was still coy, describing her as “a Doctor of Science, who hopes to find scope here for work which was interrupted in Vienna by the German occupation.”
The arrival forms, which they filled out in Brisbane, summarized their situation. Gretl and Käthe each had the £200 required of adult non-British migrants, while Annelore had another £100. When they reached Sydney, they expected to stay at the Catholic Women’s Association near the center of the city. They knew no one. When asked to provide the names and addresses of two relatives or friends in Australia, the best they could offer was “Sir Harry Luke, Governor of Fiji and Pacific, Suva.”
Gretl, Käthe, and Annelore were met in Sydney, where three new organizations were helping refugees. One was the Jewish Welfare Society, founded by Australian Jews of British origin to assist their coreligionists. Another was the Continental Catholic Migrants Welfare Committee, formed by local Catholics. The third was the Germany Emergency Fellowship Committee, which primarily helped Protestant and nondenominational refugees but also assisted Jews and Catholics. While this emergency fellowship committee owed its existence to Quakers, its members also included Protestants eager to help the new arrivals. When the Nieuw Zeeland sailed under the Sydney Harbour Bridge on January 6, members of the committee were at Walsh Bay to meet Gretl, Käthe, and Annelore.
Mrs. Nellie Ryan, the wife of a Sydney public servant, with twin daughters a little younger than Annelore, was among this welcoming party. During 1939, she assisted one family of Viennese refugees after another by inviting them to supper, taking them on outings, helping them to find schools for their children, and accompanying them on their first school day. When she heard that Gretl, Käthe, and Annelore were planning to stay at the Catholic Women’s Association, she invited them to spend their first Australian weekend in her house on Sydney’s inner North Shore, where she had rooms to spare. According to Gretl, Mrs. Ryan saw herself as doing “good in private to three helpless and friendless ladies.”
Other refugees helped by Mrs. Ryan found her shockingly English, if only because she was the first British Australian with whom they had significant contact. For Gretl, Käthe, and Annelore, their weekend with the Ryans was not just their first experience of Australian suburbia but also the first time any of them had stayed in a detached single-story house. A letter written a few years later by Gretl records how difficult Käthe, Annelore, and she found it being in a strange land under the roof of strangers. Gretl “nearly died” because the Ryans did not allow smoking in the house as part of their strict Presbyterianism. Yet Gretl also recognized how lucky they were to be cared for by “dear” Mrs. Ryan and her “honorable” family.
Like most refugees who arrived with only their cabin baggage, Gretl, Käthe, and Annelore took a furnished apartment until their containers arrived. While the German Emergency Fellowship Committee had found one for them in Kings Cross close to the city center, it was so filthy and ill-furnished that Gretl and Käthe rejected it. The one they found for themselves in neighboring Darlinghurst was not much better. But they did not have to stay long because their containers were already in Italy, waiting for Gretl and Käthe to authorize their shipment by freighter. Six weeks later, their containers
were in Sydney, allowing them to express their gratitude to the Ryans by giving them the largest of their newly arrived silver trays.
Because the £500 that they had brought with them was a quarter of the cost of an ordinary house in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, they continued renting. Their problem was that most Sydney apartments were smaller than Gretl’s Viennese apartment and they also had Käthe’s furniture. While their new apartment in Rose Bay came with a garage, which they used for storage, they could not keep everything. Many other refugees, who arrived at the same time with vast containers but little money, sold their best furniture, creating a brief glut on the local market. Gretl and Käthe could have joined them, but their Hoffmann furniture had not been particularly valuable in Vienna and was worth even less in Sydney, where there was no appreciation of Austrian design. Instead they sold Gretl’s Steinway grand piano, which was one of their few possessions to maintain its value across the hemispheres, as well as the hardest to get into their third-floor flat.
They reduced their possessions again when Käthe got a job on the North Shore three years later, prompting them to move to Cremorne, where their new apartment did not have a garage. While wartime austerity meant the market was particularly weak, they sold their Hoffmann desk, two Hoffmann armchairs, and three Hoffmann chandeliers. They also sold their entire set of Flora Danica. Because they still had little money, they did much of the packing and unpacking themselves. Yet they could not do it all because they retained too many things. The extent of what the three of them had succeeded in taking out of Austria was again underlined when they had six haulers work for them one day, three the next, and two more for another two days.
6
Loss
The Australian government did not mind senior British officials such as Sir Harry Luke exerting their influence to get Australian visas for select refugees. That was how the empire worked when Australia was still attached to Britain, though no longer its colony. But the government did not expect “that so many people in Australia would be taking up the cases of the Jews and making representations to the Department.” One of these Australians was William O’Sullivan, the owner of a Brisbane company that made cardboard out of recycled materials using the same process as the Jacobis’ in Vienna. In September 1938, he secured visas for Erni and Mizzi, who immediately began arranging their departure. They obtained new passports, employed haulers to pack up their apartment so that its contents could be put into containers, and moved to a new, furnished apartment while they made more preparations. But like many couples who fled the Nazis, they did not leave together. When Erni went in January 1939, Mizzi stayed.
The state of their marriage was a factor. Through much of the 1930s, after Erni and Hermine sold Johann Timmels-Witwe, Erni’s investment in the Hamburger family business led him to work in Fulnek, where he helped to run the company’s vinegar factory. An archetypal playboy, he owned a succession of sports cars, entered rallies, drove recklessly, and had a number of mistresses. The last of them was in Vienna after Erni shifted most of his capital into the Jacobi factories. Anne recalled that when she went skating at the Eislaufverein every Sunday, Erni danced with her until Mrs. Roth arrived. If Erni did not hide his mistress from Annelore, all his family and most of his friends and acquaintances must have known, given that the Eislaufverein was hardly a discreet venue for assignations.
Mizzi’s widowed mother was her prime reason for staying. In 1938, Anna Jacobi was sixty-four, an age no country wanted. The dilemma for thousands of Jewish families was acute. They had to choose between remaining together in Austria or having the children leave their parents behind. While Mizzi’s younger sister, Fini, left for Australia that November, having secured a place as a guaranteed migrant that required her to work as a governess for a Melbourne dentist, Mizzi and her brother, Fritz, remained in Vienna, and Mizzi decided she would leave only with Anna. When Erni sailed for Australia at the start of 1939—traveling first-class like Gretl, Käthe, and Annelore, and carrying the standard £200 in landing money—Mizzi moved to the Jacobi family home in the Piaristengasse to be with her mother.
Many countries tightened their controls on the admission of Jews following Kristallnacht because they feared a flood of refugees. The Australian government claimed it would take more but in fact reduced the annual number from fifty-one hundred to five thousand. Then the government relaxed its restrictions by creating a new quota of an additional five hundred for men and women over the age of fifty-five who were the parents of refugees already in Australia. This quota gave Anna Jacobi a chance. As soon as Erni reached Melbourne, where Fini Jacobi was already working, he applied for a permit for Mizzi as a guaranteed migrant, then Fini and he applied for permits for Anna and Fritz.
The government was primarily concerned that refugees it accepted did not become burdens on the Australian taxpayer. Erni and Fini had to show that they could support Mizzi, Anna, and Fritz with the test considering capital and income. While Erni was unemployed, he had his £200 of landing money and expected a further £400 “coming in next time.” Fini only had £50, which was all she had needed as a refugee with a guarantor, but she was earning £1 15s. a week on top of full board. Between them, it was enough. At the start of June, the government sent Erni three permits.
The hazards of remaining in Vienna were all too clear by then, even to those far away. Annelore’s former cello teacher, Lucie Weiss, wrote from New York, “My poor mother remains in Vienna. Otherwise none of my closest family are there. Thank God.” Mizzi and Anna put themselves at particular risk by how they managed the family house in the Piaristengasse. As a Nazi official in the Eighth District reported in March 1939, they helped their fellow Jews by renting the apartments to them, so the building became a Jewish enclave. By June, the Nazis had retaliated by selling the house for a fraction of its value, forcing Mizzi, Anna, and all their tenants to move.
The permits obtained by Erni should have reached Vienna early in July, giving Mizzi, Anna, and Fritz just enough time to escape together before the war started in September. When they did not arrive, Fritz left on a visa from the British government, which responded to Kristallnacht by accepting many more Jewish refugees. But because Anna could not leave, Mizzi stayed, too, and, by the time Erni realized what had gone wrong, the war had started. Their one piece of good fortune was that while the war led the Australian government to stop issuing any new permits to refugees and to revoke many permits it had already granted, the government issued duplicates to Mizzi and Anna.
A host of measures affected Mizzi and Anna while they waited. One required all men and women whom the Nazis identified as Jews to adopt new middle names. While the men became Israel, the women became Sara. This law not only made Jews more identifiable but also cast them as creatures of the Old Testament, whether they were religious or not, and diminished their individuality. Marie Sara Gallia and Anna Sara Jacobi, as Mizzi and Anna became, were barred from public places, prohibited from being out after eight in the evening, and forbidden from listening to the radio. They had to relinquish their furs, woolen clothing, jewelry, and silver apart from their wedding rings, watches, table service for two, and tooth fillings. Like most Jews who remained in Vienna, they were forced to move yet again—a process that generally resulted in several families’ being compelled to share the same small apartments. Anna and Mizzi were typical of this community in which the old and the female predominated because they were least able to flee.
Mizzi’s worst experience came when the Nazis forced her to sell the Villa Gallia for a fraction of its value early in 1940, and Mizzi had to go to Alt Aussee to hand over the keys to the villa’s new owners. Although in constant danger in Vienna, she was entitled to be there. She visited Aussee illegally because it had declared itself Judenrein, or cleansed of Jews. Mizzi had never before experienced such fear, but the proceeds of the villa’s sale were useful. While a significant portion went to the family’s lawyer, Stephan Lehner, the remainder allowed Mizzi to pay the departure tax, which was
25 percent of total assets, and the Judenkontribution, which accounted for another 25 percent
By then it was more difficult than ever for Jews to escape. Whereas over 126,000 left Vienna in 1938 and 1939, only 2,000 did so in 1940 and 1941. In April 1940, Mizzi and Anna obtained the papers to leave Vienna and travel through Italy, which had troops fighting in Abyssinia and Spain but otherwise remained neutral. At the start of May, they sailed from Naples on the Remo, one of three Lloyd Triestino boats that regularly sailed to Australia. They, too, traveled first-class, though only because they had bought their tickets in 1939, when they had much more money. Their voyage depended on Mussolini. Even before they left Vienna, he was expected to enter the war on the side of Germany. If he did so before the Remo reached Australia, its crew would head for the nearest neutral port or scuttle the boat to stop its falling into enemy hands.
Anne’s first Australian diaries record her fears. When she heard that Anna and Mizzi were about to leave Vienna, Anne was “trembling” because Italy’s forces were massing on the Yugoslav border. When Anna and Mizzi were about to sail, Anne wrote, “We need to pray she arrives safely as the situation in Italy is critical” and duly did all she could by saying the rosary for Mizzi every day. As the Remo approached Western Australia four weeks later, her anxiety remained acute. “The ship is still four to five days from Fremantle and one does not know when everything will go wrong with Musso,” she wrote. “Everything with Italy is even worse and Aunt Mizzi is still three to four days from Fremantle,” was her next entry. “If only Aunt Mizzi had already landed,” she continued on June 3.