Russell The Saved and the Spurned

Northern Ireland, Vienna and the Holocaust
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-83594-000-6
Verlag: New Island
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

For several months before World War II, hundreds of persecuted Jews, mainly from Nazi-occupied Vienna, tried to escape to Northern Ireland. They had learned of a Stormont job-creation scheme to tackle the region's chronic unemployment by offering financial support to skilled professionals. Almost all applicants were rejected, and more than 125 of these men, women and children were murdered in the Holocaust. Based on extensive archival research, unpublished family memoirs and letters, and interviews with survivors and their descendants, this extraordinary book describes the applicants' desperate efforts to save their families and themselves, and highlights the tireless work done by committed Northern Irish people to rescue them. It also explores how the small numbers of refugees admitted made a major contribution to Northern Ireland's economic, social and cultural life that continues to this day.

Noel Russell is a journalist and TV producer, a former news editor of the Irish News and editor, Speech Radio, BBC Northern Ireland. He is an MA graduate of Queen's University Belfast, and the University of Michigan, and has written and produced several historical documentaries for BBC Northern Ireland, RTÉ and TG4.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Russell, Noel

Leseproben

1

‘PERISH JUDAH!’

In February 1938 the German Chancellor Adolf Hitler ordered his Austrian counterpart Kurt von Schuschnigg to Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. Historian Tim Bouverie captured the scene: ‘There he subjected him to a diatribe on Austrian iniquities before forcing him, under threat of immediate invasion, to lift the ban on Austrian National Socialists and accept two Austrian Nazis, Arthur Seyss-Inquart and Edmund Glaise-Horstenau, into his government. The threat of Anschluss was clear …’1

Shocked and humiliated, on Wednesday, 9 March 1938 Schuschnigg announced a plebiscite for the following Sunday. He was confident of a strong ‘Yes’ vote in favour of Austrian independence. Next day, Vienna was awash with patriotic fervour, with demonstrators marching through every district shouting their loyalty. But on the Friday evening, Schuschnigg broadcast that the German government had ordered President Wilhelm Miklas to cancel the referendum, replace him with a Nazi chancellor and obey their choice of ministers in the Austrian government. They were giving way to brute force, Schuschnigg said. Hitler was fearful that he would lose the plebiscite, and the Nazi Arthur Seyss-Inquart took over as Chancellor. That night, moviegoers went to the cinema with the streets full of Austrian flags and pro-Schuschnigg slogans, and came out to find them already replaced with red, black and white swastika flags. German troops, tanks and artillery crossed the border at 5.00 a.m. and were given a rapturous welcome when they reached Vienna later that day.

They entered a city that had seen ‘an enormous and comparatively rapid growth’ of the Jewish population, from 6,217 in 1857 to 175,318 in 1910, which had ‘aroused strong anti-Semitic sentiments among the local population. In no time at all the Jew had become the proverbial scapegoat for the many faults of the “sick man of Europe”, and anti-Semitic journals sprang up like mushrooms.’2 Anti-Semitism increased when many small Jewish employers were forced into bankruptcy by the country’s economic crisis and had to pay off their non-Jewish employees:

The situation was further aggravated by the very high proportion of Jews in many trades and professions … The preponderance of Jews in vital fields of the economy, such as exports and tourism, and the influence of Jewish capital (Dr Desider Friedmann, the President of the Jewish community in Vienna, was on a mission abroad by the Federal Chancellor, Dr Kurt Schuschnigg, a few weeks before the Anschluss in an attempt to save the Austrian currency) made the Jew, in public opinion, responsible for the continuous economic crisis.3

The Austrian National Socialist Workers’ Party had grown in strength since the early 1930s. It had been banned in 1933 by the Austrian government, and Nazis had assassinated the country’s Chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, in a failed coup the following year. The left-wing Social Democrats staged an uprising in February 1934, but it was crushed and the party banned. Hitler increased pressure on Austria, and in July 1936 Schuschnigg concluded an agreement with the German Reich. ‘The Austrian government undertook to suppress all anti-Nazi propaganda, to grant amnesty to Nazis in prison, to include the “national” minister Edmund Glaise-Horstenau in the government, thereby stepping up its discrimination against the Jews.’4 Austria’s Jews backed Schnuschnigg against Hitler, desperately hoping with other democratically minded sections of the community for the survival of Austrian independence.

As soon as German troops crossed the border, Austrian Nazis arrested thousands of members of the opposition parties, trade unionists, and of course Jews. The SS and the SA (Sturmabteilung, stormtroopers, the Nazi party’s paramilitary wing) raided homes and dragged people off to makeshift prisons and concentration camps. Everything changed immediately for the city’s Jewish population. George Clare, aged seventeen, a Jew who became a writer,5 described in his autobiography listening to Schuschnigg’s broadcast with his family in Vienna:

They played the national anthem. After the last few bars of Haydn’s tune, we all sat in utter silence for a few moments. Then, before any of us had had a chance to say anything, the sounds of hundreds of men shouting at the top of their voices could be heard. Still indistinct, still distant, it sounded threatening none the less. Those raucous voices grew louder, were coming closer.

I rushed to the window and looked out into Nußdorfer Strasse. It was still quite empty … Then the first lorry came into sight. It was packed with shouting, screaming men. A huge swastika flag fluttered over their heads. Most of them had swastika armlets on their sleeves, some wore S.A. caps, some even steel helmets.

Now we could hear clearly what they were shouting: ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!’ [One people, one empire, one leader] they were chanting in chorus, followed by ‘Ju-da verrecke! Ju-da verr-rrecke!’ (‘Per-rish Judah!’) In English this sounds softer, less threatening, but in German, coming from a thousand throats, screaming it out in the full fury of their hate, as lorry after lorry with frenzied Nazis passed below our window, it is a sound one can never forget …

I was still looking out into Nußdorfer Strasse when I suddenly heard a muffled shout from right below our window. I craned my neck and saw an Austrian policeman, a swastika brassard already over his dark green uniform sleeve, his truncheon in his fist, lashing out with berserk fury at a man writhing at his feet.

I immediately recognised that policeman. I had known him all my life. I had seen him on traffic duty at the nearby crossroads, had chatted with him when we occasionally met in the shops around the corner, had seen him give Father a polite salute in the street … Within minutes of Schuschnigg’s farewell, that policeman, yesterday’s protector, had been transformed into tomorrow’s persecutor and tormentor. That was more terrifying even than the frenzied ‘Ju-da verr-recke!’ Nothing could have driven home more clearly what had happened on this one day than this single incident … We did not know what was yet to come, but we all knew that our life in Austria and a family history linked so closely with that country for so long, were over.6

Family friends of the Clares, the Ornsteins, had listened to Schuschnigg’s speech with them. The words that Selma Ornstein spoke to her friend Stella Klaar, George’s mother, stayed with him for the rest of his life: ‘Tell me, Stella, what on earth did we talk about before? Maids, children, dresses, food? What world did we think we were living in?’7 George Clare, his mother and a small number of other Viennese Jews made it to Ireland thanks to co-operation between the Irish government and Austrian employers there.

Anti-Semitic violence and pillage got underway immediately. Gangs of looters stole property, while Jewish shopkeepers watched powerlessly or were taken to Vienna’s police stations, barracks or makeshift holding centres. The Nazis immediately set about a campaign of repression against anyone deemed to be an opponent or critic, arresting trade unionists, civil servants, bank officials, and political leaders of all persuasions. In the months following November 1938Alfred Wienerand his colleagues at the Jewish Central Information Office in Amsterdam collected over 350 contemporary testimonies and reports of the pogroms in Austria and Germany that year.8 An anonymous sixteen-year-old youth gave an account of his experience in the days following the Anschluss in Vienna:

Nowhere was safe for life as a Jew any more, since even a five-year-old boy had a knife 20 cm long, with which he threatened ‘Saujuden’ [Sow Jews] or was allowed to or should [sic] injure them.

I myself attended aRealgymnasium [grammar school] where the majority of pupils wereAryan. After Hitler invaded, theAryanpupils beat the Jewish ones so severely that the Nazi director of our establishment felt obliged to issue the following instruction: ‘Aryanpupils in future will not be aggressive towards Jewish pupils in the school building, since the fate of these people is being determined outside the school.’

I would like to point out that this directive naturally had not the slightest effect on the ‘German-Aryan’ pupils equipped with revolvers, knives, boots, brown and white shirts: they continued to come to lessons in the same garb and clearly showed that the Nazis were there now.

Another eyewitness reported how public humiliation and vicious attacks on Jews started immediately the Nazis took over:

The operations were applied with great vehemence directly after the Anschluss – one was continually asked on the street whether one wasAryan, and on replying in the negative [one was] taken away and involved in so-called Reibekolonnen[rubbing columns] for washing off slogans from the road embankments etc., which stemmed from the Schuschnigg vote. No consideration was given for women’s clothing, they too had to kneel on the street and wash with very caustic bleach – an acquaintance of my wife sustained such a serious injury to her knee from it that the flesh on the bones came off and after three months the wound is still clearly visible …...