Berlin Diary (21 page)

“But you’ll have to stay there for a while,” he laughed.

We stayed until after dinner. Then wishing to go downtown we crept down the stairs, waited until our guard had paced several steps away from the door, and sneaked out on tiptoe in the darkness. We found a quiet bar off the Kärntnerstrasse for a talk. Ed was a little nervous.

“Let’s go to another place,” he suggested.

“Why?”

“I was here last night about this time,” he said. “A Jewish-looking fellow was standing at that bar. After a while he took an old-fashioned razor from his pocket and slashed his throat.”

Tess none too well. The phlebitis still critical. And her nerves not exactly soothed by the shock of what has been happening and the noise of Göring’s bombers over the hospital all day long. Ed flies back to London in the morning.

V
IENNA
,
March
20

Broadcast this morning. Described how Vienna has been completely Nazified in a week—a terrifying thing. One of the American radio networks had emphasized all week that
its
correspondent was not censored in what he said from here. But when he arrived at the studio to go on the air just after me, the Nazis demanded his script as well as mine and gave it a going-over.

V
IENNA
,
March
22

Tess’s condition still critical. And the atmosphere in the hospital has not helped. First, Tess says, there was a Jewish lady whose brother-in-law committed suicide the day Hitler entered town. She screamed all the first night. Today she left in black mourning clothes and veil, clutching her baby. There was a second Jewish lady. No one in her family was murdered, but the S.A., after taking over her husband’s business, proceeded to their home and looted it. She fears her husband will be killed or arrested, and weeps all night long.

On the streets today gangs of Jews, with jeering storm troopers standing over them and taunting crowds around them, on their hands and knees scrubbing the Schuschnigg signs off the sidewalks. Many Jews killing themselves. All sorts of reports of Nazi sadism, and from the Austrians it surprises me. Jewish men
and
women made to clean latrines. Hundreds of them just picked at random off the streets to clean the toilets of the Nazi boys. The lucky ones get off with merely cleaning cars—the thousands of automobiles which have been stolen from the Jews and “enemies” of the regime. The wife of a diplomat, a Jewess, told me today she dared not leave her home for fear of being picked up and put to “scrubbing things.”

V
IENNA
,
March
25

Went with Gillie to see the synagogue in the Seitenstättengasse, which was also the headquarters of the Jewish
Kultusgemeinde
. We had been told that the Jews had been made to scrub out toilets with the sacred praying-bands, the
Tefillin
. But the S.S. guards wouldn’t let us in. Inside we could see the guards lolling about smoking pipes. On our way to lunch in a little Italian restaurant back of the Cathedral, Gillie had a run-in with some storm troopers who took him for a Jew though he is the purest of Scots. Very annoying and we drowned our feelings in Chianti. Knick here, and Agnes, though Knick will depart shortly as he is barred from Germany and is not supposed to be here. Huss here trying to get the local INS correspondent, Alfred Tyrnauer, out of jail. His wife most frantic when I talked with her on the phone. The Fodors have gone to Bratislava, taken there on the initiative of John Wiley, who sent them out in a Legation car. Schuschnigg under arrest, and the story is that the Nazis torture him by keeping the radio in his room on night and day.

V
IENNA
,
April
8

Tess and baby at last home from the hospital. I carried her upstairs from the car this morning and it will be some time before she can walk. But the worst is over.

V
IENNA
,
April
10 (
Palm Sunday
)

The “plebiscite” passed off today in a weird sort of holiday atmosphere. The Austrians, according to Goebbels’s count, have voted ninety-nine per cent
Ja
. Maybe so. It took a brave Austrian to vote
No
, as everyone felt the Nazis had some way of checking up on how they voted. This afternoon I visited a polling station in the Hofburg. The room, I imagine, had once been occupied by the Emperor’s guard. I went inside one of the booths. Pasted on the wall in front of you was a sample ballot showing you how to mark yours with a
Yes
. There was also a wide slit in the corner of the booth which gave the election committee sitting a few feet away a pretty good view of how you voted! Broadcast for fifteen minutes at seven thirty p.m., and though the polls had just closed, I said the Austrians were voting ninety-nine per cent
Yes
. A Nazi official told me so just as I went on the air and I assumed he knew. Probably he knew yesterday. And so Austria today “votes” away its centuries-old independence and joins the Greater Reich.
Finis Austria!

V
IENNA
,
April
12

This crisis has done one thing for us. I think radio talks by Ed and me are now established. Birth of the “radio foreign correspondent,” so to speak.

V
IENNA
,
April
14

Czechoslovakia will certainly be next on Hitler’s list. Militarily it is doomed now that Germany has it flanked on the south as well as the north. All our broadcasts from Prague now must go by telephone line
through
Germany, even if we take them via Geneva. That will be bad in case of trouble. Must ask the Czechs about their new short-wave transmitter when I go to Prague tomorrow.

P
RAGUE
,
April
16

Put on President Beneš and Miss Alice Masaryk in a broadcast to America tonight. Yesterday I expressed the hope that Dr. Beneš would say something about the German question, though their theme tonight was ostensibly the Red Cross. Dr. Beneš obliged me beautifully, though his language was moderate and reasonable. Strange, then, that when he got to the German question he was badly faded out. Unfortunately New York booked the show via the German short-wave station at Zeesen instead of through Geneva as I had asked. I suspect the Germans faded out Beneš on purpose, though Berlin denied it when I spoke with the people there on the phone after the broadcast. They said the fault was here in Prague. The Czechs deny it. I had a long talk tonight with Svoboda, chief engineer of the Czech Broadcasting System, urging him to rush work on his new short-wave transmitter, explaining that if the Germans got tough, that would be Prague’s only outlet. Promised our co-operation in making transatlantic tests. A good-natured fellow, he does not think the Germans will do anything until they’ve digested Austria, which he thinks will take years. But he promised to get along with the new
Sender
.