50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany (5 page)

L
IKE THOUSANDS OF
other Jewish families in Vienna, Kurt Herman’s family lived in Leopoldstadt, the city’s teeming Second District carved out of an island formed by the Danube Canal to the west and the much wider Danube River that ran along the district’s eastern edge. His father, Heinrich, had been born in Poland but grew up in Vienna and, as an adult, ran a fabric business with Kurt’s grandfather. Kurt’s mother, Martha, was born in the eastern German town of Görlitz, just across the border with Poland. As a youngster—Kurt was born in 1930—the round-faced boy with oversize ears and an impish smile remembered the joyous experience of accompanying his father to one of Vienna’s public bathhouses, not far from the family’s apartment at No. 8 Lilienbrunngasse. “Little kids were always bathed in the sink in the apartment building where my family lived, so it was a thrill for me whenever I could go to the bathhouse with my dad,” he said. “We would either walk or take one of the trams. My uncle was a traveling salesman and was also the only person in the family who owned an automobile. So a really big thrill was to go to my uncle’s house on Sunday for a ride in the car.”

F
OR GENERATIONS, THE
residents of Leopoldstadt—Jews and non-Jews alike—had enjoyed the green and leafy surroundings of the Wiener Prater, the former imperial hunting grounds that had been transformed into a large public park during the eighteenth century. At the edge of the Prater stood the gargantuan Wiener Riesenrad, the famous Vienna Ferris wheel that was built in 1897 to celebrate the golden jubilee of Emperor Franz Josef I. Such was life in the late 1920s and early 1930s for the tens of thousands of Jewish boys and girls growing up across Vienna. Erwin Tepper’s parents, Juda and Schifra, had both come to Vienna from their native Poland so that Erwin’s father could study accounting at the university. The family lived in a nice apartment, at No. 11 Georgsiglgasse, near the Danube Canal in the Leopoldstadt area that had become known as Mazzesinsel—Matzo Island—because of its concentrated Jewish population.

F
RITZI AND
E
LIZABETH
Zinger also lived with their parents in an apartment, at No. 7 Rauscherstrasse, near the Danube and the lovely green parks not far from the canal. “I was always busy playing ball on the porch of our apartment, and of course the ball would always fall down to the street below,” remembered Elizabeth, who was born in 1933 and known in the family as Lisl. “My mother would come to the rescue by looking down and asking whoever was walking by to please deposit the ball in a basket and bring it back up to the apartment. So that was even more fun than being outside.” Her older sister Fritzi would roll her eyes at Lisl’s childish antics, but the two girls were extremely close. Their mother regularly dressed them in matching outfits, accentuating the tight bond that held the Zinger girls together.

T
EN BLOCKS AWAY
, Kurt Roth lived with his parents, Hermann and Bertha, at No. 32 Treustrasse, tucked away near the Danube Canal in Vienna’s working-class Twentieth District that, like the Second and Ninth districts, included a significant Jewish population. Kurt’s parents, neither of whom were particularly religious, sent him to an afternoon Jewish school so that he could acquire at least a rudimentary knowledge of his faith and culture. But Kurt was more inclined to play hooky whenever he could get away with it, sneaking off with a friend from the neighborhood who owned an impressive collection of tin soldiers “with which we could conduct sweeping war maneuvers on the apartment floor.”

A
LL THE WAY
across town, Paul Beller lived with his parents at No. 48 Stumpergasse, in the more commercial Sixth District, which had a much smaller Jewish population than other parts of the city. His father, Leo, and two uncles were partners in a thriving plywood business that supported all three families very comfortably. Paul’s mother, Mina, was an excellent cook and baker. “She enjoyed going to the park and talking with the other ladies,” recalled Paul, who was born in 1931. “She liked playing piano and she loved classical music—Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart. Up until the time that the Nazis marched in, our family was living a very nice and comfortable life.”

T
HE
B
RAUNS
, W
ENKARTS
, Teppers, Bellers, and others were just a few of the thousands of Jewish families that, during the early decades of the twentieth century, had little if any reason to question their rightful place in the fabric of Viennese life and culture. During the 1920s and early 1930s, Jews formed a sizeable community that, by and large, considered itself an indelible part of the city.

Not unlike those in the rest of Europe, Jews in Vienna had endured mixed blessings for hundreds of years. The first mention of a synagogue in Vienna dates back to 1204. Yet even though Emperor Friedrich II offered his protection to Jews in 1238, local Catholic Church leaders officially banned all social dealings between Christians and Jews thirty years later. Albert V, the Vienna-born archduke of Austria, issued a proclamation in 1420 that called for the expulsion of all Jews from Vienna and lower Austria; the city’s original synagogue, built in an open plaza that later came to be known as the Judenplatz, was destroyed. By the end of the sixteenth century, a small number of Jews had been allowed to settle once again in Vienna, though they would soon be restricted to a ghetto in the area that would later become Leopoldstadt, named for Emperor Leopold I, who in 1670 ordered a second expulsion of Jews from Vienna. Within only a few years, however, a handful of wealthy “court Jews” had been permitted to return as a reward for their role as military suppliers and financiers.

A more enduring turn of good fortune occurred in 1782, when Emperor Joseph II issued his Edict of Tolerance, wiping away a variety of discriminatory laws directed at Jews. In the wake of Austria’s 1848 revolution, which threatened the ruling monarchy, Vienna’s Jews gained additional rights, including official recognition of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde—the organization representing the city’s Jewish community. Austria’s new constitution, drafted in 1867, further liberalized attitudes toward Jews, granting them the unrestricted right to live in freedom and practice their religion throughout the country. Vienna’s Jewish population skyrocketed during this period—rising from a tiny community of 2,600 in 1857 to more than 40,000 by 1870. By the end of the nineteenth century, Vienna was home to nearly 150,000 Jews, which accounted for about 9 percent of the city’s overall population of 1.7 million people.

Although a virulent wave of anti-Semitism washed over the city at the turn of the century, the outbreak of World War I triggered yet another influx of Jewish arrivals. Some 50,000 to 70,000 Jews sought refuge from the battle-and-pogrom-scarred eastern regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, principally in the Galicia region. Although many of these migrant Jews returned to their homes once the worst of the horrors along the Eastern Front had passed, Vienna’s Jewish population continued to rise. The high-water mark came in the early 1920s, when roughly 200,000 Jews accounted for more than 10 percent of Vienna’s total population. In many ways, Jewish culture during this period became synonymous with café culture, as Jewish journalists, writers, and intellectuals exerted a palpable influence over the social, political, and cultural life of the city.

Yet the safety and security of Jewish Vienna remained fragile. Undercurrents of deep-seated anti-Semitism were gaining swift momentum in the aftermath of Germany’s crushing defeat in World War I and the disappearance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Jews once again were singled out as scapegoats, cast as the chief culprits responsible for Germany’s descent into ashes, the humiliating terms of the peace treaty with its wartime enemies, and the catastrophic economic conditions that brought Germany to its knees in the years following the war.

By the time that Adolf Hitler became Germany’s chancellor in 1933, Vienna’s Jewish population had drifted slightly downward to about 185,000, which still made it the third largest Jewish community in Europe, trailing behind only Warsaw and Budapest. More Jews lived in Vienna than in Berlin, the German capital, which counted 160,000 Jews during Hitler’s first year in power. Over the next six years, half of Berlin’s Jews left the city in response to the Nazis’ incremental, but increasingly hostile, campaign to rid the Reich of its Jewish inhabitants. In Vienna, as the winter of 1938 was about to give way to spring, the happy childhoods of Robert Braun, Henny Wenkart, Helga Weisz, Kurt Herman, and thousands of other Jewish children dissolved almost at once into a nightmare.

CHAPTER 4

What people don’t understand is that in the beginning you could get out. Everyone could get out. But nobody would let us in
.

—H
ENNY
W
ENKART

V
IENNA

M
ARCH
–A
PRIL
1938

T
he young girl sat upright in bed, struggling to hear the voices that crackled out from the large console radio that her parents kept in the living room of their apartment. Henny was not quite ten years old but, sadly, knew plenty about the rapidly deteriorating world around her. After listening for a few more moments, she recognized the strained voice on the radio as that of Kurt Schuschnigg, Austria’s chancellor for the past four years. She also grasped at least the vague outlines of Schuschnigg’s solemn address. The German army was on its way to Vienna, and the beleaguered Austrian leader had no intention of spilling any blood in a futile challenge to Adolf Hitler’s lightning-fast move to swallow up Austria into the Third Reich. “And so, I take leave of the Austrian people with a word of farewell uttered from the depths of my heart,” Schuschnigg somberly informed his radio audience. “God protect Austria.” It was the evening of Friday, March 11, 1938, and once Schuschnigg had concluded his speech, a radio announcer dispassionately informed listeners that, as of the next day, Austria would no longer exist as an independent nation. At that very moment, German troops were amassed along the border, waiting for orders to enter the country.

The radio station began playing the opening strains of Beethoven’s First Symphony. Before the broadcast had ended, Austrian Nazi Party members and supporters began streaming through Vienna’s streets with lusty shouts of “
Sieg Heil!
” while waving swastika banners and cheering Hitler’s unopposed annexation of the country. As Henny lay in bed later that evening, she heard her mother and father talking in whispers. She was unable to make out what they were saying.

A few days later, Hermann Wenkart took his daughter for a walk in a nearby park. Already small metal plaques had been attached to almost all of the long wooden benches, announcing that the benches were reserved for Aryans. With a deep sigh in his voice, he began telling Henny about the Anschluss and what it foretold for themselves, along with their relatives and friends. Henny looked up at her father and said, “Well, I already know that.” He smiled and then told her something that came as a great surprise. He had awakened at four o’clock that morning and made his way to the American consulate, where he took his place in a long line that had already formed outside the building in the predawn darkness. Everyone there had the same objective: getting their names on a rapidly expanding waiting list for visas to America. Henny was taken aback. Nobody she knew was ever up at four in the morning, other than the men who drove the horse-drawn milk wagons that delivered bottles of fresh milk and cream before dawn each day. Hermann looked into his daughter’s eyes and made a solemn promise: “I give you my word of honor that you will be all right.”

Adolf Hitler returned to Vienna on the morning of Saturday, April 9, arriving by train from Berlin at the city’s Westbahnhof station and stepping into his six-wheeled Mercedes limousine. The motorcade, with Hitler’s car in the lead, drove down Mariahilferstrasse, Vienna’s main shopping avenue, only a few blocks from Paul Beller’s apartment building. Three weeks earlier,
Völkischer Beobachter
, a leading Nazi Party newspaper, noted that the street was the most “Jew-infested” commercial thoroughfare in Vienna. On the day of Hitler’s return, however, “Vienna is again a German city,” exclaimed the newspaper. One day later, on April 10, 99.7 percent of Austrians voted yes in a plebiscite that formally approved Hitler’s takeover of the country.

Within the first ten days of the Anschluss, the Viennese police reported nearly one hundred suicides throughout the city, virtually all of them Jews. By the end of April, the number of suicides had jumped to at least two thousand. Among the victims was Henny Wenkart’s pediatrician, who took his life by jumping out a window. It took less than a year to wipe out Vienna’s once-plentiful ranks of Jewish doctors, all of whom, in the name of Aryanization, were no longer permitted to practice medicine. A city that had once been home to two thousand Jewish doctors—including, most famously, Sigmund Freud—now had none. Freud himself had been given permission to leave for London in June 1938, traveling on the Orient Express with his wife and daughter.