Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (54 page)

At our meeting in Rome he followed his remark about the Pope’s lack of freedom of movement by raising and then dropping his hands in a gesture of despair, and saying, “It was not only that: I remember when I came to see the Holy Father for … perhaps the tenth time, in 1944; he was angry. When he saw me as I entered the room and stood at the door awaiting permission to approach, he raised both his arms in a gesture of exasperation. ‘I have listened again and again to your representations about Our unhappy children in Poland,’ he said. ‘Must I be given the same story yet again?’ I knelt before him and I said, ‘Holy Father, however often I have already come, I will come again and again to beg you to do more and yet again more for the Poles.’ With which”, Monsieur Papée added to me, “I meant, of course
all
the Poles, including the Jews, most of whom, of course, by this time, were dead.”

*
Monsieur Papée has since moved to a smaller apartment.

*
As of 1973 when this book originally went into print. The document reprinted on this page has now (1976) been included in one of the latest volumes.

†
Here given in the author’s translation from the original French.

*
Translated in full in
The Tablet
, January 2, 1943.

*
The italics which pick this sentence out are the author’s.

Part VI

1

F
RAU
S
TANGL’S
sister, Helene Eidenböck, has all the qualities we associate nostalgically with the Austria of long ago – charm, gentleness, humour, real goodness … it is extraordinary that she of all people, should have lived on the fringes of such infernal events.

She continued her profession as a cook for a large Vienna restaurant throughout and after the war, and met her husband in 1958, when she was forty-nine. “We met at a swimming-pool where I used to go a lot,” she said, her face lighting up as it did whenever she spoke of him. “He was a construction engineer, and the gentlest man in the world. We talked a few times, at the pool; then one day he came here to see me, and I suppose he never left again. He surrounded me with care and love. He loved music – he was all music, you know. We went to the opera, to concerts, almost every day. We went to the mountains, the lakes. We stayed with his daughter Hanne and her family on a kibbutz in Israel every year. I love her as if she were my own.” She brought out photographs of an attractive young couple and two boys in the flowery garden of a whitewashed house. “I can’t talk to the boys,” she said. “They only speak Hebrew. But they are wonderful. So clean, so straight, so honest.” It was evident that when Heli Eidenböck speaks about Jews she is simply speaking about
people
who happen to be Jews. It would never occur to her to say, “I don’t care what they are,” because she genuinely doesn’t.

Her husband, married to his first wife at the time of the Anschluss, was kept on in his essential job in Vienna until 1939, by which time the United States was no longer issuing visas for Austrian Jews. “The only place he could get a visa for was Shanghai,” she said, “and his wife wouldn’t go there. She had a friend in England. She said she’d go there, and she did. He went to Shanghai alone, and worked there throughout the war, and then came back to Vienna. His wife wouldn’t come back – they had grown apart and she didn’t want to live with him again. So he was alone, like me.”

They were together when the Stangl affair first reached the newspapers. “No, he’d had no idea,” said Heli. “None of us had. He read about it in the papers here in Vienna when it was reported in 1964 that Wiesenthal was looking for him. And then, when it really broke, he hardly spoke for a week. He was totally shattered by it; I suppose it was worse – even worse – for him than me, because here he was, with me, loving me, and this man, accused of these awful, awful things was my brother-in-law.… He used to read the papers and then just sit, shaking his head. ‘You can’t really understand,’ he’d say to me. ‘Imagine, just imagine it was your child, your baby they took, and slammed against a wall shattering its head. Your child, before your eyes.…’ Perhaps I didn’t understand the way he did,” she said softly. “But I felt it; I felt the horror of it all through my body.”

Her husband died in 1968. “He lived just long enough to follow the beginning of the trial,” she said. “He’d had a heart condition for twelve years but never a tremor since we met. And then – that awful day – he was on his way upstairs and he fell, right down here in the entrance to our house. And was dead. For me, the light went out that day. We had had ten years.”

“Only ten years,” I said.

“Only?” she repeated. “It was a lifetime, a whole life for me. Now I go to the cemetery every few days. I stay with him a little. I think of our wonderful quiet days, full of music and his goodness. I go to see his daughter in Israel every year. I still can’t speak to the boys, but we look at each other and smile, and that is enough. And he has a cousin in Vienna too – and I see her quite often. So you see, he has seen to it that I am no longer alone.…”

I asked her what she remembered of the time, in 1947, when Stangl was first imprisoned by the Austrians. “Well,” she said, “it was a case of the mighty falling, wasn’t it? But again, you see, we’d had no idea that he had done anything special – even about Hartheim, we hardly knew about that. Resl kept a very close mouth about it to the family. She told us later that she was going to him – yes, to Syria – and that she was taking all their furniture. I remember she wrote later from Damascus that the piano had arrived all in pieces.…”

2

“F
ROM THE
moment Paul arrived in Syria,” Frau Stangl said, “he lived incredibly frugally; he saved every penny for one year towards paying for our trip out to join him. And finally, in May 1949, he sent us the tickets and we could go. I had got everything ready on our side; I had applied for a passport – the children still travelled on mine – and I had packed up all our things. There was a bit of trouble first about taking the girls to the Middle East; the Austrian authorities were worried that they might fall into the hands of white slavers. It was only when I showed them my husband’s letters from Damascus, with his address on them, that they were reassured and believed me that we were really going out to join him. And then they gave us the exit permit.” (In Austria, with its long tradition of enlightened laws for the protection of minors, the Court of Guardianship is co-responsible for any child living with a single parent.) “But as you can see,” said Frau Stangl, “there was no secret whatever about our leaving; everybody knew we were going to join Paul in Damascus. The packing cases for our household goods stood in the front garden of our house; two men helped me pack – blankets, mattresses, sewing machine, china, chairs, tables, the bedroom furniture, the piano – the whole town could see – and saw – what I was doing, and everybody saw when we nailed the chests shut and I painted on them big and clear (she wrote it for me)
FRANZ PAUL STANGL, SCHUHHADER, HELUANIE 14, DAMASKUS
. This was also, of course, the address I gave to the police in Wels when they asked me why I wanted to leave Austria; I told them specifically, ‘To join my husband who escaped.’ ”

Austrian law requires anyone arriving or departing to fill in a police certificate; with the assistance of the Ministries of Justice and of the Interior in Vienna, I was able to confirm that Frau Stangl’s certificate is on the record in Wels, dated May 6, 1949, with the address she gave me, and the annotation “
Mann geflüchtet
” (husband escaped).

“I applied for the Syrian visa,” she continued, “and there was no problem about it at all – though I can’t quite remember whether I wrote to Vienna or Linz for it. I know it had to go through a Swiss consulate. Were they representing Syria in Austria at the time? I don’t know. Anyway, I was handed it in Wels. And on May 4 or 6, we left by train for Genoa.

“I remember the children were dead tired when we got there and I took a room at the Excelsior, near the station, and put them to bed. The ship was due to leave the following morning, but the line informed me that it was delayed because of repairs and wouldn’t leave for four days. I had no money left whatever; you see, all I had was just enough to get us on to the ship; as Paul had prepaid our trip I hadn’t expected to need more cash. Now that night at the hotel, dinner and breakfast were going to exhaust everything I had and I needed more. I had to do something. Of course, I spoke fluent Italian – from my time in Florence years before – so I went to the station and offered my services as an interpreter to a group of Germans. I took them to my hotel, got them rooms and spent the next three days showing them around. I earned enough to pay for our stay, and I could even take the children on a boat trip for a day. And finally we got on board and had four really good days crossing – a rest and good food.

“When Paul met us in Damascus, I found him to be the happy sweet man he had been years before all the horror. It was
my
decision not to talk to him again about Treblinka. I felt I had to let him regain his peace of mind; the awful things that had been done were done, and my thoughts now had to be for the children, for our life together, for the future.

“All that year before we came, Paul had worked at this textile mill – the job Bishop Hudal had originally obtained for him. But just after we got there, the owner of this business died, the firm collapsed and Paul found himself without a job. It was very hard. He looked desperately for work but it took a long time before he found some. In the meantime we had to live, so I started to work as a masseuse; it was lucky that my training at the school of social work had included quite a bit of what is now called physiotherapy. Anyway, I got quite a few clients quite soon; fat women, you know; I usually started with their heads; they were always losing their hair, so I first massaged their scalps and then worked my way down to their toes.

“For the first six months we lived in a flat in the rue de Baghdad – with practically no furniture because it took a long time for our things to arrive from Austria.”

Several of the books describing the Nazi escape network mention an address in Damascus – 22 rue George Haddat. After our talks in Brazil I wrote to Frau Stangl, asking her if she remembered this address. “I am not sure,” she replied, “but that may be the place where we lived for a short time after our arrival in Damascus.
*
It was a kind of ‘pension’ where there were other Germans, but I think they used pseudonyms because I can remember them only as ‘the Capt’n’ or ‘Lodz’.” (This to some extent bears out the description of 22 rue George Haddat given by “Werner Brockdorff” in
Flucht vor Nürnberg
, who portrays it as a reception centre for refugees arriving from Rome.)

“In the beginning of December 1949, our luck turned,” Frau Stangl continued. “Paul got a job as a mechanical engineer with the Imperial Knitting Company; thank God he had qualifications.” (He had, apparently, taken a German correspondence course in mechanics in 1935 – when she was in Florence and he working for the police in Linz.)

“His salary – very good for those days – was 500 Syrian pounds a month. Our furniture had arrived and we moved to a bigger flat, in the old part of Damascus, rue de Youssuff. It was a wonderful old house, and with our things we made the flat into a real home.” (Later she wrote: “We were the first German family there to have our own home, and
all
the Germans visited us.”)
†

“I loved the Middle East; I spent every moment I could at museums, and I even managed to get to Mesopotamia to watch excavations. I wouldn’t have missed that period for anything.

“It was a good time, but after about a year an extraordinary problem arose. The front of the house we lived in belonged to the Police President of Damascus; he lived there with his harem. Well, he became far too interested in Renate – our middle daughter. She was twelve.… [Renate, born February 17, 1937, was actually fourteen. The mistake is insignificant, except that it does point to a slight tendency on Frau Stangl’s part, despite her general honesty, to dramatize events.]

“She was very blonde and very pretty and he really had his eyes on her,” she continued. “Renate could do anything she liked; she could do no wrong as far as he was concerned. We got into a panic about it. What could we do – foreigners in Syria – if he took it into his head he wanted her? What could we possibly hope to achieve against the Police President? Father said we’d have to leave. He said I was to go to Beirut and make the rounds of South American consulates – there weren’t any in Damascus – and we’d accept the first visa offer we got. Well, I went off to Beirut at once; I started with the Venezuelans and then the Brazilians. The Venezuelans were very nice too, but they said it would take some time to get a decision from Caracas. The Brazilian consul asked immediately what Paul could do and when I said he was a mechanical engineer, they said they wanted to see him; so Paul went to Beirut as soon as I got back. And we got the visa very quickly – a month later I think.

“When we had it, I went to see the Police President and told him that here we were, offered this great opportunity by the Brazilians, and that we felt we must accept it. We had been afraid of what his reaction might be, but in the end he was really nice about it, and we left very soon afterwards; as soon as Paul’s factory found a replacement for him – an Italian it was – two months later.

“I had saved 2,000 dollars; we sold our piano to an Arab for 900-odd Syrian pounds and our bedroom furniture to a German who had brought his girlfriend out from home and got married. And Paul got a leaving-bonus from the firm: he’d done very well there: they gave him a nice reference too.”