Unlikely Warrior (35 page)

During the writing of this book, another Austrian artist told me that his experience was similar to mine, since he also had a Jewish grandmother. As far as I knew we were perhaps the only two one-quarter Jews who had been drafted. During the war I met no other soldiers of Jewish extraction, though I never hid my own background.

It wasn’t until the recent publication of Bryan Mark Rigg’s heavily researched book
Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers
that I learned that there were many thousands of full, one-half, and one-quarter Jews in the German Wehrmacht. I’m sure that of those who survived, each must have had a unique and moving tale to tell. I have encountered no other autobiography, however, by one of these soldiers.

My mother’s anti-Hitler involvement was terribly dangerous, and I worried about her after I went to the front. Obviously there was no way she could either comfort me or keep me informed, if she was to preserve her safety. After I was captured and all letters stopped, I wasn’t to know for a long time if she had even survived.

After the war, I was to learn very little from my mother regarding the Jews in our attic and how that story concluded. She never wanted to talk about it, and the few times I asked her directly, she started to cry. I did know that Haday hadn’t made it, since I never saw her again, and she had been a family friend.

A few others obviously hadn’t gotten away, because a number of valuable art objects belonging to them remained in our apartment and were never reclaimed. Some did make it successfully to England or America and sent my mother word. These had no desire ever to return to Vienna, preferring that this period of their lives be permanently erased from memory.

In one of the postwar years, a nearby coal merchant delivered a load of heating materials sufficient to heat our apartment for the entire winter. He said someone outside the country who preferred to remain anonymous had paid for it. I was happy to believe the coal was a gift from another Jewish couple who had successfully escaped.

My parents divorced after the war, and I remained particularly close to my mother. She did achieve that full and happy life that she had assured me she would enjoy, even were I not to return from Russia. She would have loved being an artist herself, but the circumstances of her life, including two world wars, weren’t to permit this. Probably that’s why she especially enjoyed being in the company of the young artists who were around our apartment after the war.

When Russian tanks occupied Hungary in 1956, thousands of Hungarians came streaming over the Austrian border with no more than the clothing on their backs. Many slept on the streets of Vienna the first few nights, but my mother was soon again in her element. She sprang into action, mobilizing family and friends to take in as many refugees as possible.

Beatrix Rauch died at eighty-one in 1970, and up until her death she continued to study important books by physicists, poets, and philosophers. She was a fine pianist, and music always remained a major pleasure in her life.

GLOSSARY OF GERMAN WORDS

GLOSSARY OF RUSSIAN/UKRAINIAN WORDS

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Phyllis Rauch grew up in Ohio and received her bachelor’s degree in English at Bowling Green State University and her master’s degree in library science at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She studied German at the Goethe Institute in Rothenburg ob der Tauber and then worked at German libraries, including the Internationale Kinderbibliothek in Munich and the Amerika Gedenkbibliothek in Berlin. She met Georg Rauch in Vienna in 1965 and they were married the following year.

Fluent in Spanish as well as German, Phyllis has written extensively in Mexico for English-language magazines, newspapers, and Web sites and has also worked as a Spanish-to-English translator. As an innkeeper in central Mexico, she welcomes visitors to her home and to Georg’s art studio (
www.losdosmexico.com
and
www.georgrauch.com
).

Unlikely Warrior
, Phyllis’s first book-length translation, has been a labor of love.

Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers

175 Fifth Avenue, New York 10010

Text copyright © 2006, 2015 Georg Rauch

All rights reserved

First hardcover edition, 2015

eBook edition, February 2015

macteenbooks.com

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Rauch, Georg, 1924–2006, author.

    Unlikely warrior: a Jewish soldier in Hitler’s army / Georg Rauch; translated from the German by Phyllis Rauch. — Revised edition.

          pages cm

    Previously published as The Jew with the Iron Cross: a record of survival in WWII Russia. New York: iUniverse, 2006.

    ISBN 978-0-374-30142-2 (hardback)

    ISBN 978-0-374-30277-1 (trade paperback)

    ISBN 978-0-374-30143-9 (e-book)

    1.  Rauch, Georg, 1924–2006.   2.  Jewish soldiers—Austria—Vienna—Juvenile literature.   3.  World War, 1939–1945—Prisoners and prisons, Soviet—Juvenile literature.   4.  World War, 1939–1945—Personal narratives, Jewish—Juvenile literature.   5.  World War, 1939–1945—Participation, Jewish—Juvenile literature.   6.  Jewish soldiers—Austria—Vienna.   7.  World War, 1939–1945—Prisoners and prisons, Soviet.   8.  World War, 1939–1945—Personal narratives, Jewish.   9.  World War, 1939–1945—Participation, Jewish.   I.  Title.

DS135.A93R388 2015

940.54'1343092—dc23

2014041184

eISBN 9780374301439