by Tim Bonyhady
Mizzi landed in Fremantle two days later. Her arrival form reveals that she came with less than £40—one-fifth of what Erni, Gretl, and Käthe each carried. While some refugees used “Israel” and “Sara” when they landed because these names were on their passports, Mizzi did not. Like many refugees, she probably wondered what to write when asked to give her race. Some, including Gretl, Käthe, Annelore, and Erni, conformed to the White Australia policy by identifying as “white.” Others identified in different ways as Jews. One described herself as a “German Jewess,” another as “Hebrew (white).” Mizzi wrote “Jude,” which the immigration official replaced with “Jew.”
The Remo was the last boat from Italy to reach Australia before Mussolini declared war on June 10. Because Australian customs officers delayed its departure by requiring it to unload all its cargo, it was still in port on the tenth, enabling the government to seize it as a war prize. While they could have continued with another boat, Mizzi and Anna embarked on a much more remarkable journey across the continent on the Trans-Australian Railway, which included the longest stretch of straight train track in the world, extending 297 miles through the red-soiled, barely populated, almost treeless Nullarbor Plain. When they reached Melbourne, Fini was waiting with Erni, who had just moved to Tasmania. His presence at the station, notwithstanding wartime travel restrictions, was the first sign of his new appreciation of Mizzi. Although far from a model husband in Austria, he was about to become one in Australia.
The most revealing document that Bruce found when Mizzi died was an inventory that she compiled as Erni was preparing to leave Vienna in November 1938. While most of the documents needed by refugees were to satisfy the Nazis’ requirements, this “Owner’s Declaration in respect of personal or household effects” was required by the Australian government so it could determine the duty the refugees should pay on what they brought with them. Even though Mizzi almost never specified who had designed or made their things, there are few better records of what refugees with money expected to take with them following the Anschluss.
Mizzi’s list of 215 household items started with sixteen tables and twenty-four chairs, five bookcases, four cupboards, two sideboards, two commodes, two couches, two beds, a divan, and a bookstand. The tableware included a 277-piece floral dinner service, a 154-piece blue-and-white service, a 150-piece set of silver cutlery, a 110-piece set of glasses, a 100-piece table set of “German silver” (an alloy of nickel, copper, and zinc), and thirty-one pieces of faience pottery. Ernie and Mizzi had almost as much linen—including 264 napkins, 172 kitchen towels, 83 pillowcases, and 42 tablecloths—because Mizzi employed a washerwoman just once a month. They also had thirteen pillowcases, eleven quilt cases, and ten sheets for servants—a mark both of the life they had led and how they hoped it would continue.
The contents of their two display cabinets—“128 fancy goods”—were to come, too. So was everything in their kitchen including two electric coffeemakers (one espresso, one Turkish), a meat-mincing machine, a rotary grater, and a coffee mill. There were also twenty-eight framed paintings—above all, the Klimt Beech Forest, which was much more appealing to the Nazis than Klimt’s portraits of Jewish sitters, as demonstrated by how the Monuments Office assessed Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer’s collection in 1939. While the office expressed no interest in the Klimt portraits owned by Bloch-Bauer, it refused export permission for two of his landscapes, including his Beech Forest. But because Erni organized his departure in 1938, when the Monuments Office appears to have ignored all Klimt’s work, it gave him permission.
Other items ranged from a wireless and gramophone to opera glasses and binoculars, brooms and brushes, irons and an ironing board, thermometers, bells, and tools. There were five pipes because Erni was a heavy smoker. There was a riding whip that Erni probably inherited from Moriz, who was a keen horseman until he acquired his Gräf & Stift. There were two of Erni’s fur coats but just one belonging to Mizzi (who must have decided to retain her other furs because she was staying in Vienna). Their country clothes included a pair of Erni’s lederhosen and two of Mizzi’s dirndls, which Jews in Salzburg had been prohibited from wearing immediately after the Anschluss. Their one religious object was a menorah belonging to Mizzi—possibly the only Jewish object owned by any of the Gallias at the time of the annexation.
The inventory ended with a list of equipment that Erni bought shortly before he left, just as Käthe bought a laboratory of scientific equipment. They both did so because it was a way of converting money, which they could not take, into possessions that they hoped would transform their lives as refugees. But whereas Käthe wanted to build on her qualifications and experience as a chemist, Erni wanted to abandon manufacturing. He bought everything he needed to establish a photographic studio, including two large-format cameras with tripods and plate holders; a set of silk, muslin, and cloth decoration rags and curtains; and developing tanks, dishes and boxes, and enlargers and draining racks for a darkroom. When asked his expected occupation after arriving in Australia, he answered, “industrial photographer.”
The standard Liftvans, or containers, used in Germany and Austria were big enough to serve as garages, external bedrooms, or weekend shacks when they reached their destinations. The things taken by Erni and Mizzi filled two of these Lifts as well as six crates. When the Nazis allowed Anna Jacobi to leave, her possessions filled two more Lifts and two crates, despite Germany then being at war with Australia.
While Gretl, Käthe, and Annelore called for their containers to be shipped as soon as they reached Australia, Erni did not because he was by himself, living in boardinghouses, with no prospects of renting a flat. By the time Mizzi and Anna Jacobi reached Australia in mid-1940, it was too late. Their Lifts were in the Italian port of Trieste when Mussolini declared war. They were still in Trieste in 1943 when Mussolini sequestered them as part of his larger expropriation of the property of men and women of Jewish origin. They remained there until 1944, when the Nazis seized them and sent them to Germany to escape the Allied forces that were pressing north through Italy. That was all Erni, Mizzi, and Anna could establish after the war. The paper trail stopped there.
The usual problem of refugees who lose their possessions is that there are no avenues for them to seek redress, no institutions they can sue. But even when they can lodge a claim, the onus of proof generally stymies them because the circumstance of their escape means that they cannot document what they owned, let alone establish its value. Erni, Mizzi, and Anna encountered these problems almost a decade after the disappearance of their consignments when they discovered that they could make claims against the Italian government, which had assumed responsibility for payment of compensation to foreign nationals whose property was lost or damaged in Italy as a result of the war. When Erni approached the Australian government for help late in 1953, it advised him to provide “an inventory of all the items in the lift vans including a description of each item and its value.” It also warned that “the Italian authorities require complete evidence of ownership, value and loss and in your own interests, therefore, you should supply the utmost information available to you.”
Erni had just one relevant document—the inventory prepared by Mizzi for Australian Customs—and an album of photographs showing their Viennese apartment. In his claim, he had to provide detailed descriptions of objects that he had not seen for fifteen years and estimate their value. When he lodged this claim at the start of 1954, he emphasized that all his figures fell far short of the objects’ replacement costs. He also explained how difficult it had been to obtain valuations in Australia because most of the objects had never been sold there. He offered to provide the photographs to substantiate his claim. The total he sought was £6,526.
The Italian government began by rejecting his evidence of what had become of his consignment. Erni had provided typewritten copies of the documents held by his shipping agents in Trieste; the Italian government demanded the originals. When Erni asked the agents to forward them,
they refused to do so “in accordance with a ruling of the Association of Italian Shipping Agents as it would make them liable for any damage occurred through loss of these documents.” When the agents provided photostatic copies, it was early 1955, prompting Erni to observe: “From the tone of their letter it would seem that the Italian government does not encourage Italian firms to be too helpful in these matters.”
When Italy finally reached a decision in mid-1955, it ignored all of Erni’s valuations. Instead, the government decided that the “one objective element” that existed to determine the value of the consignment was its weight, which was 7,095 kilograms (15,609 pounds). Its next assumption was that each kilogram was worth 1,000 lire, so the total value of the consignment was 7,095,000 lire or £5,067. It then imposed a discount of one-third, so Erni and Mizzi were entitled to £3,378 (then about $7,566), just over half of what Erni had claimed.
Australian officials acknowledged that this process was “somewhat arbitrary” but advised that it was “difficult to see the grounds on which the Australian Legation at Rome could ask the Italian Government to reconsider the offer” unless Erni could provide new evidence to “substantiate the quantity and value of the various articles.” Erni, of course, could not do so, as he reiterated at the end of 1955: “It is impossible for me to produce fresh evidence regarding the valuation of my property. This consisted, besides the photographic equipment, of household goods, objets d’art, etc., bought over a period of nearly two decades. Some were willed to me by my parents. Whatever bills, etc., I had kept were in the desk packed in one of the lifts. The pictures, carpets, china, silver, etc., were bought at art sales and dealers in Austria, as well as England, France, Denmark, Italy, Germany. I doubt these could help me even if I tried. The firm Wiener Werkstätte which had made some of the silver pieces … has gone out of business.”
His anger was palpable a few days later when, having no alternative, he accepted Italy’s offer. “I wish to stress,” Erni wrote, that “if the Italian Government is not prepared to go beyond a certain amount unless the claim is substantiated by invoices, etc., this fact should have been made known. In my case it would have saved me infinite work and trouble in fixing a true and by no means exaggerated valuation on each item.” He could not have imagined that it would be over two more years before the Italian government authorized payment or that he would not receive this sum until September 1958, almost five years after he lodged his claim.
7
Capture
The persecution that made Austria’s Jews the most unfortunate in the world in 1938 ultimately worked in their favor by spurring the majority to try to leave while there was still time. The assimilation of Austria’s Jews also benefited them because it made countries such as Australia more inclined to accept them. As a result, three in four survived the war, almost twice the European average. Yet sixty-five thousand Austrian Jews died, devastating many families. The Herschmanns—the family of Annelore’s father, Paul—were among them because they lacked money and connections and their age was against them. Only the youngest Herschmann brother—Otto, who turned forty-four in 1938—succeeded in fleeing Europe for Argentina, where he saw out the war in safety.
The first record of Paul after the Anschluss is from mid-1938, when Jews with property worth over 5,000 reichsmarks had to submit lists of their assets. Paul’s list came to 10,000 marks, which was less than one-tenth of what Gretl reported and barely more than Annelore declared. By the end of the year he was below the 5,000-mark threshold as the value of the family leather business plummeted, even though it was yet to be Aryanized. The Gestapo had also seized but then released him. The following April, he obtained a German passport, which shows the forty-seven-year-old Paul looking remarkably young—his face devoid of lines, his hair still dark, though the accompanying description identifies it as mixed with gray. Within a few weeks, he was attempting the only means of escape open to him, set on crossing illegally into Belgium because he could not get a visa. In order to reach Belgium, he had to evade both the German border guards and the Belgian ones, whose numbers had increased markedly when Belgium, like other European countries, began trying to keep out German and Austrian Jews.
Paul’s passport when he escaped the Nazis by illegally entering Belgium without a visa, 1939. The red J stamped on the front of the passport has leached through next to his photograph. (Illustration Credits ill.42)
The best conditions for attempting the crossing were “bei Nacht und Nebel,” at night under cover of fog. Most refugees employed what would now be called “people smugglers”—teams of Germans and Belgians looking to make quick money by transporting refugees. Fritz Loewenstein, a Berliner, paid 400 marks or about one-tenth of what Paul owned. In return, a van took Loewenstein into Belgium, where he was met by other guides with another vehicle. As he got out, they were fired at by German guards, despite already being across the border. Then Belgian guards flagged down the car, which evaded them by accelerating through their checkpoint. The crucial distance was nineteen miles beyond the frontier. The thousands of refugees caught within this zone were returned by Belgium to Germany. Those who got farther found Belgium much more generous than most other European countries. While its government sent a few hundred back, it allowed twenty-four thousand to remain and, from mid-1939, also supported them.
Paul remained in Brussels for a year. He was there when World War II started in September 1939 with the German invasion of Poland. He was there in January 1940, when he had his passport extended for another year by the German embassy. He was still there that May, when the Germans put an end to the “phony war” by invading Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, and then France. While tens of thousands of Jews tried to flee the Germans, Paul was among several thousand more whom the Nazis expelled from Belgium as part of an ongoing effort to empty their territory of Jews and foist them onto other countries. The Nazis’ new “dumping ground” was southern France, which the Germans chose not to occupy, leaving its rule to its French collaborators led by Marshal Pétain.
The Vichy government needed no encouragement to embrace anti-Semitism. It immediately enacted an array of laws that went beyond those of German-occupied France, including one authorizing local French officials to arrest “any foreigner of the Jewish race” and put these Jews in special prisons known, as in Germany, as “camps de concentration.” Paul was interred in one of these camps but seems to have escaped before security became too tight. One of his few consolations was that he remained in regular contact with his favorite brother, Franz, who late in 1937 had become just the second of the Herschmann brothers to marry. A year later, Franz was arrested in Vienna on the morning of Kristallnacht, but he was released after several weeks. When he fled in 1939, it was without his new wife. By 1941 or 1942, both Paul and he were in Graulhet, a small town in the Tarn region, about forty miles from Toulouse, which was a major tanning center. Most likely, Paul’s long involvement in the leather industry gave him contacts there—especially among the many French Jewish families involved in tanning.
The “final solution,” the Nazis’ mass murder of Jews intended to exterminate them as a race, put Paul and Franz in jeopardy. Instead of encouraging the departure of Jews from their territory, as they had done in Austria, or compelling it, as they had in Belgium, the Nazis now set about their genocide. The SS official in charge of implementing this policy was Adolf Eichmann, who had established the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna. In June 1942, he demanded that France hand over Jews within its borders. While the Vichy government refused to deport all French Jews, it delivered almost all foreign ones, starting with those already in French internment camps, supplemented by many more caught in mass roundups.
The trains carrying these Jews began running with the regularity that the Nazis desired from July, when they left the main Vichy transit camp in the Parisian suburb of Drancy three times weekly, week in, week out. Each convoy carried about one thousand Jews, usually a mix of men, women, and children, i
n freight cars sealed so they were pitch black. The standard journey lasted five days. Those aboard received neither food nor water. Their destination was southeastern Poland—the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, otherwise known as Birkenau or Auschwitz II, where two farmhouses had been turned into gas chambers.
The biggest roundup in the Tarn was on August 26, when the Vichy police caught two hundred German, Austrian, Russian, Polish, Belgian, and Dutch Jews. While Paul escaped, Franz was arrested. Within a day or two he was in Drancy and, on September 9, in a convoy. When he reached Auschwitz-Birkenau on the fourteenth, the waiting SS officials would not have hesitated. While they selected fewer than one in twenty for hard labor and picked out twins so the doctors could experiment on them, they dealt with adults over forty just like they treated babies and children, consigning almost all to the gas chambers. Franz, who was fifty-four, was gassed along with 974 of the other 1,017 members of the convoy.
The Catholic Church was almost totally silent about the Vichy government’s treatment of Jews during its first two years in power. However, several clergymen spoke out in the second half of 1942. In a pastoral letter read in most churches in his diocese on August 23, the Archbishop of Toulouse, Jules-Gérard Saliège, reminded his flock: “The Jews are real men and women. They cannot be abused without limit.… They are part of the human species. They are our brothers.” In another letter read out in every parish in the Tarn following the roundup that caught Franz, Bishop Pierre-Marie Théas declared: “In Paris, Jews by tens of thousands have been treated with the most barbarous savagery. And now in our region we are witnessing a heartbreaking spectacle: families are being dislocated; men and women are being treated like animals and sent toward an unknown destination, with the prospect of the gravest danger. I declare the indignant protest of the Christian conscience.” When the Church put these principles into action by giving sanctuary to men and women of Jewish origin, creating false identities for them, and providing them with food and money, Paul was taken in by a convent in Graulhet. As he later described it, “Life was in constant danger under the Pétain regime but the French were helpful and humane and saved many.”