by Tim Bonyhady
Tuesday, February 7, 1939, was Anne’s first day at St. Vincent’s. I imagine her arriving in her first school uniform, ascending the school’s marble steps, exploring the grounds, where the most striking feature was a grotto dominated by an oversize statue of Our Lady of Lourdes. I see her entering the school’s chapel, where mass was said every morning, going into the class for the first time, knowing no one, and struggling with the cacophany of English. I think of her encountering the one other student who was a refugee from Austria. I know that after being able to put up her hair in Vienna, which she thought of as a mark of maturity, she hated having to cut it above her shoulders or wear it down in plaits, which she considered childlike.
Of course she enrolled in German so that one of her subjects would be simple. But she found it embarrassing that her teacher for most of the year was Gretl, who began working at St. Vincent’s at the end of the first term. Anne was shocked to find her English much worse than she expected. She feared she would fail Latin because the other girls had studied it for four years when she had done only one and a half. The schoolwork, the organization of the classes, and even the standard mode of addressing the nuns were very different from what she was used to. She dreaded the Leaving, the public examination at the end of the final Australian year of school, because it was made up entirely of written examinations and she had never taken one.
She continued to use German for all her private purposes but always used English in public and was intent on perfecting it because it was essential in her exams and the key to her assimilation. An anthology of British essays, which was one of her set texts, exemplifies her challenge. Before she could analyze the essays, she had to be able to read them. Her annotations reveal hundreds of words that she could understand only with the aid of a dictionary. But her progress was rapid, as illustrated by an exercise book she started in June 1939. While her teacher returned her first assignments crisscrossed with red marks, by October her work required no corrections. When her school principal wrote Anne a reference, she declared: “Her application to her studies this year has been most remarkable, her victory over new terms and a new language wonderful.”
Her expectations of her schoolmates were low after her ostracism at the Albertgasse. She was delighted simply because the other girls did not pick on her. While she made no close friends, she knew that was at least partly because she had vowed not to risk more friendships when her two best Viennese friends abandoned her after the Anschluss. The inclusion in the St. Vincent’s magazine of a story by her drawing on her experiences as a refugee is testimony to the school’s acceptance of her as well as its eye for novel content. A photograph reveals that Anne was part of the school’s chamber music group—showing her with her father’s cello. After her final day at St. Vincent’s that December, she wrote: “I have experienced much good and beautiful this year.”
Her results were a triumph. While she was pleased to have come in third in her class and topped the state in German, her mark in English meant the most to her. When she discovered that she had received an A, she described her result as “unbelievable” and feared for her humility. “I hope,” she observed, “I will not be too proud on this ground.” Just as Moriz and Hermine had rewarded Gretl with a diamond and pearl pendant when she graduated, so Gretl gave Anne her best watch, made by Patek, one of the most prestigious Swiss watchmakers. That night they had a celebratory supper at Cahill’s, a coffee shop in Kings Cross renowned for its caramel ice-cream cake.
Two of Sydney’s refugee organizations gave Anne more to do and reduced her isolation. The goal of the Continental Catholic Migrants Welfare Committee was to assist the new arrivals by “receiving, placing in employment and generally attending to the after-care of Catholic refugees.” Although the committee’s monthly meetings sometimes attracted significant numbers of refugees, it often drew almost none. As Gretl recalled, Anne became “Miss Committee,” eager to enliven this small group. When the German Emergency Fellowship Committee, including Mrs. Ryan, organized a harbor cruise for refugees, Anne met Gertrude Angel, who had arrived in Sydney at age fifteen a week after Anne, having also escaped Vienna immediately following Kristallnacht. She became Anne’s most enduring friend in Australia.
Anni Wiesbauer, Anne’s instructor in lace cleaning, also continued to try to help her from afar. After receiving a letter in which Anne expressed her sense of dislocation in Sydney, Anni responded with passion, stressing that she believed in Anne, recognized her inner worth, and would always care for her—that in a world where Anne had found that almost nothing was safe or reliable, Anni could be trusted. While Anni did not expressly refer to the anti-Semitism that had forced Gretl, Kathe, and Anne to flee, she clearly had it in mind when she wrote that the trials and tribulations experienced by Anne were God’s will and would make her a better person.
One of her Viennese schoolmates, Erika Brünn, whom Father Elzear also baptized at the Franciscan church in Vienna, was even more important to Anne. When they began corresponding, Anne was in a far better position than Erika, who had fled without her parents on a Kindertransport, the great British humanitarian endeavor initiated by Quakers that rescued thousands of Jewish children from December 1938. But Anne and Erika still had much in common. Just as Anne felt alienated and displaced in Sydney, so did Erika in the English coastal town of Claxton. Much like Anne, Erika found refuge in the Catholic Church when she began working in a hospital run by the Order of the Sacred Heart. They both longed for what Erika continued to describe as “our Vienna” but then would remember why they had fled, as Erika observed after hearing Hitler on the radio. She wrote: “One forgets much, especially when one is out of contact. But now again I have all the horror right before me and it distresses me terribly.”
St. Vincent’s College, Sydney, run by the Sisters of Charity, 1939. Anne is seated, third from the right, with her cello. (Illustration Credits ill.43)
The occasional concert by visiting musicians provided Anne with another link with her past, while also reminding her of what she was missing. The venue was symbolic. While Sydney was a city of almost 1.3 million people in 1939, over half the size of Vienna, it did not have a proper concert hall, let alone an opera house. As a result, most major concerts were staged in its town hall, where the acoustics were adequate but almost everything else was not. Because the hall was almost impossible to heat in winter, most of the audience sat through the performances in hats and gloves. Because the management refused to provide refreshments, many in the audience went to the hotel across the road during intermission. Anne’s first concerts there were by musicians whom Gretl had seen as a young woman in Vienna but were new to Anne. The first was the soprano Lotte Lehmann, whose antifascism led her to sever all ties with Germany and Austria following the Anschluss. The second was the piano virtuoso Artur Schnabel, who had taken refuge in the United States.
The arrival of the Mozart Boys’ Choir saw Anne put culture before politics, just as she had done before leaving Vienna. For a week, she resumed her old patterns of going out, attending three of the choir’s six evening performances and a matinee. Much of the repertoire was familiar, including Mozart’s short operetta Bastien und Bastienne and Strauss’s The Blue Danube. A novelty was Waltzing Matilda, the choir’s one acknowledgment of Australian culture, which they always performed as an encore. That it remained foreign to Anne is suggested by how she listed it once as Waltzing Mathilda, once as Dancing Mathilda, and once as Walking Mathilda.
Anne spent Christmas Eve at home in the apartment in Rose Bay, tidying her room, listening to music on the radio, and reading books in between Sunday mass in the morning and her first midnight mass that evening. She also took the opportunity to reflect on how her life had been transformed over the previous two years. She remembered her last Viennese Christmas in 1937, when her first ball season was about to begin and the Anschluss was yet to happen. She recalled how in 1938, Gretl, Kathe, and she had been sailing toward Australia with no idea what lay before them. Now they we
re in their own flat decorated with garlands and bells, having eaten good fish, Christmas cake, and gingerbread. They also had even more to look forward to as their “old friend” Mrs. Mabel Ferguson, whom they had met on the Nieuw Zeeland, was to visit them on Christmas Day. Anne thanked God for being so good to them.
Kathe, meanwhile, started her new life with high hopes. Because of her training as a chemist and long experience in the workforce, she looked forward to resuming the professional career she had abandoned when Lene died. If she did not establish her own laboratory when her scientific equipment reached Sydney, she would find a job as a chemist. But she soon found that Australian institutions only partially recognized her qualifications, while much of her equipment arrived broken. Her first job, in March 1939, was as a technician in a hospital replacing sick staff for just three weeks. In May she did so again. That was it until the start of the war in September created many vacancies and Kathe found work in a factory that made pencils and carbon paper. While she probably exaggerated when she described herself as an “industrial chemist,” she had a full-time, permanent job using some of her scientific knowledge.
Gretl proved more adaptable, like many other women refugees who had never worked before. When required to specify her expected occupation on her arrival form, she wrote, “Unknown as yet.” She feared she would be able to get only menial work. But the years of musical training intended to make her a cultured society lady almost immediately created an opportunity. She began teaching German songs at one of Sydney’s best music schools, run by the Sisters of Charity on the same site as St. Vincent’s, where Anne went to school. While Gretl’s position was for only an hour a week, it was skilled work starting just three weeks after she landed.
Her years of language training—again intended to make her a cultured society lady—proved even more useful. By April, she had another part-time position at St. Vincent’s as a language mistress teaching German and French, a role for which she had neither experience nor qualifications beyond her command of both languages. In between she took private language pupils and cleaned houses. One of her first employers was a much older Jewish woman who had come to Australia as a refugee a few years before. After Gretl had finished cleaning, they would play four-handed piano together, temporarily transforming Gretl from a servant into an equal.
Australian women’s magazines gave Gretl another opportunity. When she discovered they were staging recipe competitions, she tried her luck, despite her limited experience as a cook. The standard format was highly attractive. You did not even have to bake a cake or make a pie. Instead, you simply had to buy a copy of the magazine, fill out the enclosed coupon, submit a recipe, and see if the judges selected it from the thousands of entries. The Viennese recipes entered by Gretl were a small test of Australia’s appetite for the new and willingness to embrace the Continental. When one proved successful, Gretl made the most of her surprise. That night, when Käthe and Anne sat down for dinner, they each found one-third of her winnings next to their plates.
The money and public recognition mattered to them. Gretl’s part-time teaching position at St. Vincent’s paid £2 15s (then $10.15) per week. An orange cream cake, which came in second when Gretl and Kathe entered a competition staged by the Australian Home Journal, won £12 10 (then $46.00). The joy of private acceptance was also great. After seven recipes entered by Gretl, Käthe, and Anne in a competition run by Woman magazine appeared in its book of Tested Recipes, which claimed to represent “the best in culinary art,” Gretl received this letter from Mrs. Merle Pateman of Murrumbateman in rural New South Wales: “No doubt you will think that I am presuming in writing to you, but I feel that I must. Some time ago I purchased a copy of Woman’s cookery book, and on looking through it, I was particularly impressed with your recipes and those also of Dr. Gallia and Miss Gallia, too. I have only been married four months, but the recipes were so simple, yet so delicious, that I was able to follow them easily, without mistake.” As a result, Mrs. Merle Pateman wanted more. When she next visited Sydney, she came for dinner.
This unlikely friendship with a newly married country girl was one of many made by Gretl. While most refugees began by moving almost exclusively within refugee circles, Gretl rapidly made friends with Anglo-Australians, including a number of influential figures in the Sydney community. The key was how Gretl, much more than Kathe, satisfied the taste of some Australians for high European culture and their desire for the cosmopolitan. Gretl was the kind of refugee whom correspondents of the Sydney Morning Herald had in mind when they emphasized how refugees would enrich Australian society because “cultured people” made the “best immigrants.” While Gretl’s fluent English was a great asset, her smart clothes and refined manners, her obvious identity as a well-bred woman, gave her cachet.
John Ferguson was a judge of the New South Wales Industrial Court better known as a bibliophile who compiled a seven-volume Bibliography of Australia. He was also a relative of the Mrs. Ferguson who had met Gretl, Käthe, and Anne as they sailed to Australia on the Nieuw Zeeland at the end of 1938 and then spent much of Christmas Day with them at the end of 1939 in a remarkable display of concern for their well-being. As Mrs. Ferguson looked to do more for Gretl, Käthe, and Anne, she encouraged Justice Ferguson to help them. As part of thanking him “for his kind interest and many a good advice,” Gretl later described Ferguson as “the first friend we made in Sydney.”
Saul Symonds was a second-generation Australian Jew of mixed British and Russian origin, best known as the president of its Great Synagogue, the foundation chairman of its Jewish Advisory Board, and a member of the executive of its Jewish Welfare Society. When Gretl went to its offices and revealed her Catholicism, as she did not want to receive the society’s help under false pretenses, her honesty, along with her impeccable manners and cultural sophistication, impressed Symonds, who introduced her to his family. Their friendship was all the more exceptional because, like similar organizations in the United States, the Jewish Welfare Society was ambivalent about European Jews fleeing the Nazis. As its honorary secretary later acknowledged, the society “wanted to help the refugees but not to mix with them”; its members “would do anything on an official basis but little on a personal basis.”
2
Aliens
The war altered the status of Gretl, Kathe, and Anne again. Just five days after it started, the Australian government introduced new security legislation transforming all Germans and Austrians in Australia from foreign nationals enjoying almost the same rights and freedoms as ordinary citizens into “enemy aliens” subject to a welter of restrictions. The government’s premise was that some of these Germans and Austrians supported Hitler and hence needed to be subjected to close scrutiny. But while this assumption had substance in relation to those Germans and Austrians who had come to Australia other than as refugees, the categorization of refugees as enemies was bizarre when the circumstances in which they had fled Europe made them staunch antifascists. It also was contrary to Australia’s own military interests, as many of the men were eager to fight the Nazis but their classification as enemy aliens prevented them from enlisting.
The Gallias supported Australia’s war effort as best they could. They knitted, just as Gretl had during World War I. They gave a pair of Zeiss binoculars to the army as a National Defense Contribution. They became regular donors to the Red Cross Blood Transfusion Service. Meanwhile, they complied with the new law by registering as enemy aliens, carrying their certificates of registration at all times, and reporting to their local police station once a week. Although Anne did not mention these requirements in her diaries, which might suggest they did not affect her, an autobiographical story she wrote a few years later indicates otherwise. She described how “she had to report to the police to obtain a card which told her that she was an alien. Nothing beyond that happened and yet more than anything else this brought home to her the fact that she was a stranger in a strange country.”
The Nazis’ rapid conque
st of the Netherlands, Belgium, and France in mid-1940 fueled fears about refugees. As stories of “fifth columnists” abounded, the new British government of Winston Churchill interned or deported thirty thousand enemy aliens, including many Jews. In Australia, the New South Wales government called on the Commonwealth to intern all enemy aliens because of their involvement in “insidious propaganda” and “the probable existence of plots to neutralize the war effort,” and because the continued freedom of refugees engendered a “disturbed state of public mind.” Over the next two years a range of groups gathered thousands of signatures on petitions supporting this call, which the Commonwealth ignored while subjecting refugees to ever-tighter controls and greater scrutiny.
The majority of refugees looked back on these events as something to be dismissed with a laugh and treated as trivial. Their sense of good fortune in escaping the Holocaust stopped them from criticizing the country that gave them refuge. But many saw things differently at the time. As one described it in 1940, the war had put an end to their “very kind welcome” because Australians had come to regard them as “enemies” and tried to send them “to concentration camps and imprisonment.” Anne’s old Viennese dancing partner Georg Schidlof, who escaped to England following the Anschluss, experienced that fate after being sent to Australia for internment. When Georg later explained why he did not contact Anne, he revealed his fear that the Gallias “might not be too pleased to receive a letter from an internee, especially when the anti-alien feeling in Australia was already strong and still growing.”
A government report later found that the enforcement of Australia’s enemy alien regulations ranged from “unnecessary and overbearing intolerance” to “laxity.” As Anne described it in mid-1940, the officers she had to deal with were “especially nice” policemen. When two other officers came to the apartment in Rose Bay to search it and question Gretl, Kathe, and Anne, they stayed for afternoon tea and were again “very nice.” But Australia’s censors were more concerned when they intercepted a letter to Kathe from one of her Viennese friends who had fled to England. While the text of this letter simply contained news of mutual friends who had also become refugees, the censors reported that “unusual and apparently unnecessary curved strokes occur in many places over various letters,” which the censors considered “enough to form some hidden message.” The security services immediately ordered Kathe to attend their headquarters in the city, which must have reminded Kathe of her experiences in room 383 of the Hotel Metropol two years before. This time she was allowed to leave, after a short interview with a lieutenant who found her “harmless.”