Alfred Apsler

APSLER: The Reminiscences of Fred Apsler. 

I am 74 years old. I remember from my early childhood that we lived in Vienna, in the second district, in a predominantly Jewish part of town, a rather poor neighborhood. We had a little apartment consisting of a main room, a small bedroom, a kitchen, and an entryway. There was a small water closet in the corridor, which was shared by several other parties on the same floor. My father worked in an office of the textile factory as a bookkeeper, eventually being promoted in later years to accountant and right-hand man of the owner. The factory itself was in what later became Czechoslovakia. My mother had also worked before I was born as a clerical worker, but she stopped after my birth. I was an only child. I remember when I must have been three or four years old, there was another child, a boy, apparently sickly. My mother was also sick. The baby died shortly after and there were no more siblings. 

There are not many memories from these pre-school years. One item is that we had very close family ties with my mother’s family. Never with my father’s family. There was grandfather and grandmother – Moses and Sheindl Pasternak – who lived only a block or so away, also in a tiny, rather poor apartment. Grandfather was watchmaker, but he worked only at home in his little cabinet, mostly repairing and also buying and selling gold and silver and things like that. And from all appearances he must have made a very scarce living. He was a very religious man, in the old Hassidic sense. And as soon as I could walk, he would take me along to the little storefront synagogue, the shul, which was also very close by and where he and the other Hasidim prayed and sang and also danced. Festival seasons and some Saturday afternoons, they would gather to sing and also to have a little liquor and sometimes they became quite happy on those occasions. He [Alfred’s father] and my grandfather often had arguments. Obviously it was not a love match. It was an arranged match, which in those days was the only thing possible. They had both come to Vienna from a small town in Galitzia, which later became part of Poland. My mother, Helena Pasternak, also was born there and came to Vienna as a young girl. She had two sisters: Laura Asher, who had married Sigmund Asher. Sigmund had a store in the inner city, but apparently he was a very poor businessman, because they were always in need of money. Later I found out that they were financially supported by my parents, which was a great source of sadness to my aunt, who was very proud and very unhappy about this situation. 

Another sister lived in [inaudible] or as it was then called, Lemberg (also Galitzia), later to become part of Poland. And I think now it is a part of Russia. Eventually my aunt Laura Asher had three children: one son, Hymie, and two daughters, Lena and Ruth. They were both younger than I was. Hymie was younger, Lena still another year younger, and Ruth several more years younger. I grew up with Hymie and Lena, and we saw each other very often, going back and forth. I am still in contact with these two up to this day. One situation that I remember is this: despite our obvious lack of wealth (I think we considered ourselves lower-middle class) we seemed to always have a full time maid who came from the countryside and slept in the kitchen on a kind of roll-away bed. She did all of the housework and also served as a babysitter for me when this was necessary. These were very poor girls. They had free time maybe only Sunday afternoon. Still it was, for them, a step up from living in a forlorn country village. And there was always the hope to find a nice fellow to marry in the big city.

Another item that I remember in connection with that is the maid would take me to the nearby park. Since we lived upstairs on the third or fourth floor of the tenement house, in a row of tenement houses, one had to be taken to one of the public parks nearby to play. There were several such parks in walking distance. There, the children would play ball and other things under the supervision of mothers or maids or, in the case of more wealthier kids, their governesses. There were all sorts of restrictions. You were not supposed to step on the grass. That was verboten. Policemen would patrol to see that this was really observed. During the summer we would rent an apartment in a nearby resort and we would move with practically the whole household there. This would be approximately 20-30 or so miles south of Vienna. I remember one of these resort towns by the name of [sounds like Geinfarm]. It was near Vöslau, which is a mineral water resort. There, my mother and the maid would set up housekeeping. They would rent a wagon with a horse to bring all kinds of dishes and silver and towels and linens along, and we would live there for two months or so. My father would come out for the weekends and we would pick him up at the railroad station. 

This would continue until the First World War broke out. By that time I had begun to attend the first grade, vort schulen. I walked to school every morning. I took along a kind of a sandwich, which I would eat in the middle of the morning. School would continue until 12:00 or 1:00, and then I would come home and [inaudible]. And that was the schedule as far as school was concerned. That would be six days a week, Monday through Saturday. All through the grade school year I had the same teacher, a man. His name was Waracek – a Czech name. Many people in Vienna had Czech names. There were only boys in the class. No girls. It was not co-educational. The great majority of the boys were Jewish. There were only two or three Catholic kids in the class. Therefore on Jewish holidays we used to not come to school, but the other “official” holidays, and also the Catholic holidays, were celebrated by not having school. Lehrer Waracek was a strange person. He was a bachelor and might have been a homosexual. He liked to spank the kids with a long stick. It didn’t hurt very much but he obviously enjoyed that and made quite a procedure out of it. 

I did very well in school, but not in all subjects. I did not excel the physical education type. It was individual, mostly drill or turnverein, as it is called in German – marching around and doing exercises in tempo with the whole class, and then working on some of these typical gymnastic feats, like rings and horizontal bars and so forth and so on. On the other hand, I excelled in memorizing poetry and astounded the teachers by reciting long ballads by Goethe and by other German classics. I remember sometimes they would call in other teachers or the principal to listen to me reciting. And then, of course, my parents would show off and have me recite before guests or family members. The social life of my parents was mostly in one of the coffee houses where they would meet another couple on a Saturday night. There was very little visiting back and forth – very little inviting to dinner. There was occasionally dropping in of relatives, particularly my aunt and uncle, and then later on my cousins back and forth.

Being an only child, I had somewhat of a hard time to making friends. I eventually did pick up on two chums, and we would visit one another and play with one another games. But it was not an easy thing for me to do. In the meantime, the First World War had broken out and so most of my grade school years were spent during the war. This meant all kinds of hardships. It meant rationing, ration cards, shortages of food and clothing, and many other things. I didn’t suffer hunger pangs, but I know that my parents would deprive themselves often to procure some special food so that I would have it. My father would line up in front of butcher shops, sometimes for the whole night, in order to get some food in the morning. He also would, as many others did, range out into the countryside and do some bartering with the farmers there. He would barter rings or other pieces of jewelry for a sack of potatoes or a chicken. I remember one evening he came home from such a forage in the country quite tipsy. He could hardly find the door. Apparently, in order to keep the farmer in a good mood, he had to sit down with him and drink in the bierhuis – in the inn – and he wasn’t quite as used, as the farmer, to the strong drink. But those were the joys of wartime living. Many things were unavailable, like real butter, real coffee. There were all kinds of substitutes, material, which of course was very inferior.

In school we were indoctrinated to hate our enemies. I remember one poem that we learned and recited. It had the refrain, “May God Punish England” because England was one of our enemies. So were the Italians. We were taken to various patriotic occasions to nail nails into the iron soldiers, who were made of iron and wood and placed on a public thoroughfare. For every nail that you put in, you paid so much money, which was in support of the war effort. We were also occasionally celebrating victories of the Germans or Austrians (we never celebrated, of course, their defeats).

And so it was in this situation that I finished grade school. Then came the examination for entrance into the grammar school, the gymnasium. I got into a semi-modern type of this grammar school called a real gymnasium. The difference between such a gymnasium and the traditional gymnasium was that instead of studying Greek and Latin, we only studied Latin as a classic language, and as a second language we studied French. We also had a rather poor one-year course in drafting. Otherwise the two types of schools were pretty much identical. The great traumatic experience was the examination to get in. Not every kid after finishing grade school automatically was admitted to grammar school. You had to pass a written examination, which I think lasted two days. One day you had an examination in German, in writing, the other in mathematics. Then the tension until you found out whether you had passed or not was unbearable, even for my parents. I imagine that my parents would have considered themselves completely disgraced if I had failed this examination. But I didn’t fail it, though I was very fearful. 

For the next eight years I attended the Spell Gymnasium, the gymnasium in the Spell Gasse. I don’t know the origin of the name. There was probably a person of that name after whom they called the street. It was an old building, narrow, dark rooms. Nothing green around it. Very, very different from a typical American high school campus. There was a gym, but it was just a big room where there were rings and bars and so forth, and that was about it. Again, it was not co-educational. It was just boys. And so with the same group of boys I progressed from one grade to the next. As we progressed, the class became smaller and smaller. In the first grade we had two sections, each with about 40 boys. By the time we came to the final year we were only one section of about 20 boys. The others had dropped out along the way. The system was that you had to pass all subjects. If you didn’t pass, you had another chance to do an examination at the end of the summer vacation. If you didn’t pass that then you had to repeat the whole year. You had to do all the subjects again for the whole year with a completely different set of boys, who were mostly one year younger. I remember that every year we had two or three such repeaters, and of course it was not very pleasant for them. They were considered the dummies. Usually they eventually did drop out, although that wasn’t always the case. Some had a flaw and eventually caught up with the rest. 

The teaching was strictly old-time teaching. The professors came, one after the other, depending on the subject. The curriculum was rigid. There were no choices. There were a couple of optional subjects, but they were taught in the afternoon. The classes were from 8:00 to 1:00, then if you wanted to, you could come back once a twice a week for such optional subjects as shorthand and English, I think. But I hardly remember learning anything as far as English was concerned. There was some feeble attempt at music. I remember playing in a school orchestra for a short time – a violin. I had taken violin lessons. But all of this was not emphasized. The school itself was strictly academic teaching and we had to take all of the subjects: the foreign languages, the German, the mathematics and science, geography, history. The teaching mostly was poor. The professors had no training in child psychology. Very few made attempts to make the subject interesting or to have any human contact with the students. They were cold and distant. On the other hand, we took advantage of some of them, who were cruel disciplinarians, by teasing them and actually making life quite terrible for them.

Of course, there were some exceptions. I want to mention two of the teachers whom I enjoyed and with whom I actually remained in contact all through my school time and long after. The one was Karl Krauss, who taught Latin and French. He was loud and lively and always trying to make things interesting. For example, in Latin he would write little plays about the centurion and the soldiers and let us play the roles and read them aloud. While he was also authoritarian, because that was the type of education he had, at least he made it interesting. And we felt that he was interested in us. As it happened, Karl Krauss later was a refugee and I met him again when he lived in California. We made contact and we remained friends until he died at the age of 90, not too long ago.  The other one was Bernard Steinmetz, a little fellow, who taught history. And that became my favorite subject because he taught history as not just a collection of dates and battles, but emphasized in his lectures the development of cultural phenomena, the connection of various elements of civilization, the importance of great individuals and the connection between history, literature, and other fields. With him, too, I remained in contact later on. The last time I saw him was in Switzerland when we both were there as refugees from the Nazi regime. He died quite a number of years ago.

I did very well in these subjects, also in German, although the teachers of German were usually very nationalistic. I seemed to please them when I wrote essays, so that was another good subject for me. Again, I did not excel in the athletic part, though I liked it and participated. But when it came time to choose teams, I usually was chosen last after all the good players had already been chosen. Our favorite game as boys outside of school was soccer. We played that on vacant lots and we didn’t have a ball. We played with an improvised ball made out of rags bound together tightly. All such activities had nothing to do with school. We had to join other organizations, sports clubs. For a while I belonged to the Jewish sports club [inaudible] Hacora. But then I fell in with the Boy Scouts and this really took up most of my extra-curricular life, so to speak, for a good number of years.

Family recreation consisted of going for walks on Sunday afternoons. Since my father liked to walk more vigorously than my mother, I got into the habit of walking with him on Sunday mornings to the [inaudible] or out in the Vienna woods, and then coming back at noon for the main meal. Usually we would stop at the [in German] – at the sweet shop – and bring home some dessert. My parents eventually allowed me to join the Boy Scouts and that was a good thing for me. I was grown up a spoiled child. My parents were very protective of me, always afraid that something would happen to me, and therefore I could not participate in any of the rougher games as a young boy. The Boy Scouts turned out to be a very good thing. They are very different over there than they are here. It was a group of boys led by an adolescent. In the meetings they would discuss scouting, and then on Sundays they would gather at the streetcar and then take hikes through the Vienna woods.

Later, as I grew older, I would also participate in holiday outings for Easter or for Pentecost. Then they would have camps in the summer. At first my parents had misgivings but afterwards they allowed me to camp for the first time. This was rather primitive. We did our own cooking, which didn’t always turn out well. The leaders, again, were not fathers like they are here, but were young students themselves. Eventually I became I became a Scout Leader myself. This again was an activity only for boys, so I really had no contact with girls until my late teens. 

My father was a sympathizer of the Socialist movement, the Labor movement. I remember that he took me along on some of the traditional marches, particularly the march on the first of May, the Workers Day. [I remember] the red flags and lots of cheering and slogans for the improvement of the working class. So no wonder that I fell in with the Socialist movement myself as I got into my upper teens. I joined the Socialist Grammar School organization, which was a recruiting body for the Socialist academic student organization. This again was affiliated with the whole Socialist movement. In Europe, belonging to a party meant that you really had a complete, separate life to live, because every activity and every interest was taken care of in a part of the organization. There were Socialist sports clubs, Socialist libraries, classes, courses, Socialist newspapers and magazines, Socialist tourist clubs, and so forth and so on. So you really spent most of your life within the party. The same happened then on the other side. The great competing movement was the Christian – the Catholic – movement, under the auspices of the Catholic Church, which comprised the great majority of the Austrian population.

We were revolutionaries in the sense that we dreamed of a utopian world in which there would be equality and room for everybody, and a chance for everybody to have a satisfactory life. We did not engage in terrorism, however. It was a very peaceful situation. After the end of the war, we were very pacifistic and we sang songs that had the refrain of: “Never never do we want war. Never never do we carry arms. We want the brotherhood of all people.” We were against Nationalism and Separatism. We were very idealistic. I might add that the war had brought about great changes in Austria, in Vienna, and also in our lives. Austria had been on the losing end. The big Austrian Empire had been dismembered. Now Vienna was the capital of a very small country of six million people – too big for such a small country. As I became older, I lived through some very hard times. Some economic hard times. There was a tremendous amount of unemployment. Young people, as they finished their training, had very poor chances of getting jobs. That was especially true of the intellectuals, the teachers or lawyers or doctors. There was a great deal of dissatisfaction. There was also actual poverty. I remember seeing people bedding down and sleeping under the bridges of the Danube. There were a lot of beggars and street musicians wandering through the streets.

I don’t know exactly what already has been covered, so there may be some repetition. I will try to remember some of my teenage years when I went to the upper level of the gymnasium. We had a friendship group. Some of the young fellows who had been with me in the Boy Scouts, and also some girls that we had become acquainted with. I might mention here that my relationship with girls was a very difficult one, and I remained for many years very awkward and shy about making acquaintance with girls, even on a casual basis. The reason probably was that I didn’t have any sisters and that all my schooling had been just with boys without any coeducation. Even the teachers. We never had any female teacher. But we did get some friends of girls and we formed a little group, which met in our homes once a week or so for singing or for planning trips. And then on Sunday we met at the terminal of the streetcar line to do some hiking. We also got involved with some other groups, the Jungen Vereinen, which was kind of a romantic type of thing that was heavily into folk dancing and singing. Even though we didn’t quite fit the pattern of the German folk thing, we tried to do our best to participate. And at the same time we all seemed to have a tendency toward the Socialist movement.

I studied quite a bit the writings of Socialist theoreticians and attended all the lectures of local leaders like Otto Bauer and others, Max Adler for example. I went to night school, in particular [inaudible] night school, of which there were several. Later I taught some of these night schools. So I went to classes in sociology, psychology, political theory, international relations, all subjects that were neglected in our gymnasium curriculum. They dealt mostly with the past, prior to, let’s say… the middle of the 19th century. Teachers seemed to strictly avoid getting involved in more up-to-date things. So we were left on our own to deal with the problems that were close to us and that involved us personally, including relationships with other people – relationships with the opposite sex. 

Sexual problems were never discussed in school, except the boys among ourselves. We told ourselves dirty stories – dirty jokes. Some laughed about their supposed sexual exploits. We passed pornographic literature that was privately printed. It was strictly forbidden to do that. We passed them from boy to boy. Sometimes during dull classes in order to break a little bit the monotony. So not a successful introduction into sexual relations. As I said, I had a hard time having a closer relationship with girls. So this group, while some of our boys became very intimate with some of our girls, I just remained a friend of everybody. I tried to become friendly with one of the girls named Margaret. A young lady who played the piano, I remember. I took violin lessons and I tried to visit her in her home to play together. She accompanied me. I was not very good and eventually she dropped me for another fellow who was a little bit older and also was a better violin player. It was not until I was in the last year of high school, in the [German] in the eighth grade – that means about 18 years old – that I was able to form a friendship with a girl by the name of Filonke [?] and exchanged for the first time kisses with her. We were on a little camp in the winter run by the Social Student Movement. 

As far as other pastimes were concerned, from the Boy Scout background, we had kind of a retained a puritan outlook on life. We refrained from smoking or drinking alcoholic beverages for a long time. Eventually I learned how to dance, but I never became very good at that either. I dreamed of a more ideal, an idealistic relationship. On the one hand, we were very open and outspoken about sexual relations. But on the other hand, I was very much inhibited and sort of didn’t make the connection between theory and a more personal relationship.

Then came the time to decide what I would study. You must remember that in America, young people can take quite some time to decide about their careers. In Europe, once you have finished the Matura, and go on to a school of higher education, it is actually a professional school – a graduate school. And you pretty well have to decide what track you are going to take. This is one reason why so many who haven’t made the right decision drop out. And there are a lot of people who finish but never get their higher degree from a university. As an 18 year old you had to decide if you were going to attend the School of Medicine, the School of Law, the Technical University, the Commercial University, the University of Art. These are all different schools. I had a hard time making up my mind. My father very much wanted me to study medicine. He himself was a frustrated medical person. He had wanted to become a doctor, but couldn’t for financial reasons. He had remained a kind of amateur physician. Every Sunday he would visit the coffee house in Vienna where the medical students would hang out – a very specific coffee house, open to a certain type of public. Some of them studied there; some of them had their mail delivered there. And there he would read the medical journals, which were all subscribed there, and he took great pride when the people would address him as “Herr Doctor.” I did attend some lectures. I dropped in on some anatomy lectures. I also visited lectures in law and in various other fields. I wasn’t too enthusiastic about any of them, but I finally decided about majoring in German, and history, and that included also a minor in geography. Not so much because I was particularly eager to delve into research on these subjects, but because I felt I would be a good teacher. I was an extrovert, a leader of people. So you had to teach a group of subjects to be a gymnasium professor; this is what I had thought that I would do. I mention that somehow, perhaps to overcompensate for my lack of athletic prowess. I very early became a sort of leader of other kids. 

After the First World War, the schools were also under the influence of the more liberal, more Socialistic spirit and we had students that were elected to a student council and so forth. I immediately became the class representative and later became the student body president and had negotiations with the principals, who got in trouble, and also with teachers who couldn’t see these things. That seemed to be something that appealed to me very much. Then, of course, because of my experience with the Roten Partei – the Socialist version of the Boy Scouts, in which I was a leader for several years. Not only with the kids, but also a district leader, which meant that I trained and supervised the leaders. This seemed to be something that appealed to me and something that I could do fairly well. I also began some public speaking. I spoke to the youth groups of other Workers Groups. I lectured in some of their educational activities and began to get some credulity. Now, this was carried on in my student… my university years. Of course, I did not participate in the student course. The student courses were mainly for the Catholic oriented and then for the German Nationalistic oriented students. They were the playgrounds of conservative politics and also were breeding grounds for the later Nazis. I did really not study an awful lot. I just did what was absolutely essential, and my major activities were outside of the university.

First of all, I concurrently was accepted and attended for two years the Guggeshe Institute, which was a training institution for public school teachers. That was introduced by the Socialist Educational Administration and supposed to be very progressive. They had the ideas there of democratic spirit, learning through working, participation by the student. These were all very novel ideas, of course.
I went to this training at the same time that I was at university. The same time, I was a Roten Partei leader, and also I would secretly address gatherings of the various Socialist grouping[s]. Not on strict, political strategies and techniques, but on all educational topics – what Socialism is and what the future world is all about, what are good books, and what are good plays. What are progressive writers and topics of this kind? During those years I eventually managed to have more intimate friendships with young women, and made hasty and hesitant attempts, which led to one – my first real involvement. That was Nina. She was a little bit older than I was and was much more world-wise and mature. Looking back, I felt that I acted in this relationship in an immature way and it very shortly developed into a lot of crisis and broke up eventually and left quite a wound. For a long time I was not able to form other relationships in which I could [inaudible] myself equally. I did have several girlfriends but all of them found eventually that I was an exploiter and dropped them. I was not really in a position to love them in the way that they should be loved. 

The employment situation and the economic situation did not improve. We had the Depression. We had inflation. My parents lost all their savings and started over again, but they did not suffer materially. The trouble was that they were too much involved with me. They didn’t have any other hobbies or interests except me. While I was in my training, I still lived at home, which was not very good. It didn’t occur to me to move out. It just wasn’t done. It was not part of the lifestyle over there. So I was restricted in the fact that when I knew that I was coming home late, for example, or wanted to not come home at all one night, that my parents would sit up and worry about me. It really was not a very good situation. I wish that they had some other way of distracting themselves besides me. It weighed heavily on me as a burden. Also my mother particularly was jealous of the young women that I would bring home. She was more the domineering type as my father was the yielding and gentle type – probably too gentle, but that’s the way it was.

I eventually graduated. I got my PhD degree in German with a minor in History. This was not at all in preparation for anything or a qualification for a job. This was an academic distinction. In order to be able to teach at a gymnasium, you had to go for another series of very long and involved examinations, which were much down to earth and really went over the whole subject matter and gave in a detailed way. And this I let go for a while. Of course in the meantime I had received a license to teach at the public schools. But there were no jobs. For several years I lived a freelance existence. I began to write for the Socialist daily – the Arbeiter Zeitung. I was not an employee. I depended on the editor of the cultural department, so to speak, to give me assignments. I would come from time to time and ask, “Is there anything for me?” And he would send me to attend a lecture or a museum opening, an educational film showing or something like that. Occasionally I would read a book and write a review. I would turn that in and ask, “Is there anything else?”

Even though it was never a steady income, I still lived at home. There were also some spinoffs from lectures. I began to write for other Socialist publications – the monthly, Mein Kampf, which was a theoretical publication. And a monthly that was published by the kinderfreund, the educational publication of the Socialist branch [inaudible]. So this brings me about to the age of 23. I got my PhD when I was not quite 23, short by a month or so. Here I will stop for a day at the age of 23.

To backtrack a little bit: the monthly publication was not Mein Kampf, but was called Der Kampf.  So nothing to do with Hitler’s autobiography. Speaking of the relationship with Germany, we of course were very much influenced in Austria by what happened next door in Germany – particularly by the German depression and the very grave inflation. As schoolboys we collected German money, paper money, such as a half million Mark note, or a million Mark, ten million Mark. We also collected what was called notegen, which was the currency printed by various cities like Hamburg, Berlin, or Koln, so that the people could have something with which to buy groceries. This is just an indication of how bad things were over there. We also had contact with the Socialist movement in Germany – different from Austria. The Moderate Socialists were divided there and also they had to contend with a very large and militant Communist party. That, of course, split the opposition to the developing radical Nationalism sentiment, which was already visible. 

In Austria itself there was always a German Nationalist movement called RoseDeutch, which wanted unification of Austria with Germany. However, there was there a minority, particularly strong amongst the academics – the students – who were still fighting duels and parading on Saturday at the university near [inaudible], in their colored bands and caps. They were German and nationalistically oriented. We, the Socialist movement, also had our organization, and several times it came to actual physical fights, which resulted in the closure of the university. We had a funny relic from medieval times, which was academic freedom – academische frieheit – which meant that the university grounds stood outside the jurisdiction of the local police. Socialist students and Jewish students sometimes could be beaten bloody and hurt seriously, and the police would stand outside and could not enter to keep order.

The Austrian situation – the political and the ideological situation – continued to be the struggle between the two parties, neither of which was particularly radical. But among the younger academics (intellectuals), we had our own youth movement, which seemed to be in conflict with the party of regulars who worked in the local precincts and tried to get out the vote (and usually did), and with the workers who were organized in the union. We had a more utopian idea of dreams for a better society and peace. We looked to Russia as a kind of model until we heard about the totalitarian excesses and then turned us off as far as Russia was concerned. The Austrian Communist party was always legal but never amounted too much. It could never even send one delegate to the Austrian parliament.

Relationships at home: my parents, as I mentioned before, were too much involved with me. And on the other had, I didn’t see eye-to-eye, as far as lifestyle was concerned, with my parents. My parents, and especially my mother, had hopes that I would rise up in society and become at least a member of the upper middle class. They were rather disgruntled that I mingled with people who didn’t quite live up to this. Our group that I ran around with did not include many people who were destined for a wealthy future. My friend Bertl Fischer, who had come with me to the gymnasium, and I remained close friends for a long time. He also was involved in the Socialist movement, but not to the extent that I was. He was much more retiring and came from a quite poor family who lived in a poorer neighborhood. He started in natural sciences. I think his PhD is in Botany. Also he attended the pedagogic institute with me for two years in order to get a certificate to teach in public schools. 

After the matura examination, we went on a trip together, which meant a [inaudible] outing, actually. We were clad in shorts and had a pack on our backs and took a train to the western part of Austria. We made our way through Switzerland and tried either to walk or to hitch rides. We tried to sleep with the famers, in barns, or else we stayed in youth hostels. Often on such occasions we met other young men, some of them belonging to evangelical religious groups. But they were friendly. Eventually we took a train from western Switzerland, I think Geneva, and landed in Paris. There, of course, we didn’t quite fit into the urban situation with our shorts and our backpacks. We found quarters through a Boy Scout leader whom we had met on the train at one of the Parisian YMCAs. Strangely enough, they were not quite equipped for visitors, but we slept on the mats in the gym and in the morning we could jump into the pool there. We ate many of our meals in the cafeteria there, which was quite reasonable. The idea had been to get as far as possible with as little money as possible.

We met some people we knew, colleagues from school, who travelled in style and probably were ashamed of being seen with us. We did a lot of sightseeing, of course. We were refused tickets to the opera as we lined up at the cashier’s window because we lacked proper dress. But we were still admitted at night to the [words in French] to standing room, from where we watched the show. Then our trip continued again by train, by trying to hitch rides, into the Rheinland and through southern Germany and eventually back to Vienna. We did other trips like this and also trips with other people of shorter duration. This was the way to get to know the Alps, and Germany and Switzerland

The thing I mentioned before, that after I received my PhD, that this did not allow me to teach in the gymnasium and I had to struggle in what was called the [words in German] – the special examinations that had that potential. While I was doing that, I was writing for a newspaper, the Arbeiter Zeitung and other publications; getting passes to the libraries, the Socialist libraries (everything was arranged by parties); giving talks to other such groups, the youth groups, Socialist youth organizations and so forth. It was impossible, then, to find a job teaching. The city didn’t hire any teachers because of tight financial circumstances, so this was a very undesirable situation, not to have a regular job. I did work, and in fact I found myself some kind of a name. People recognized me because of the paper and the exposure at lectures and so forth. Still, I felt that somehow I was deprived of a regular income, a regular job, or what might be called tenure. This went on for three years until finally the group with whom I had received the certificate to teach in public schools was called in and given an assignment. It was not just the regular tenured teacher but only as [inaudible] teachers, which meant that… here we would call it substitute teachers. That means that we were assigned to a certain school and from there we were sent out to substitute for teachers who were sick or otherwise not able to do their jobs. This was not a very pleasant experience for me, because not always was I sent to a school where I could really function well. I remember one school, a so-called Billeke Schul.  I don’t know. It was for boys who did not go to grammar school, so mostly boys of the working class or the real poor. I had to substitute for a teacher who had taught, among other things, handicrafts – manual training

At one time I spent a number of weeks at a girls’ Billeke Schul for girls from 11 to 14 years, which was quite pleasant and I had a good rapport with the teaching staff. The teaching was pleasant and I did get into mathematics and so forth. However, that also came to an end and I was again sent around, a few days here, a few days there. This came to an end a year later. I worked less than a year in this capacity because then came the political change in Austria that had been brewing for some time. Hitler had come to power in Germany and this had a great impact on Austria next door. The nationalist element felt that their day would be coming. They actually had to wait a few more years. 

In the meantime, what it did was to help the reactionary forces in Austria – the second part of the party made of the Catholic church – and represented the business interests and especially the countryside, the farmers to come to power under the leadership of [Engelbert Dollfuss?], who assumed the position of Chancellor, which is like Prime Minister. But as soon as he had this position, he engineered a coup and became a dictator by force of arms. I must say here that the political party had all of these many organizations taking care of all the needs in life. But they also had their paramilitary arm. They had their own military power, so to speak. Socialists had the so-called futsbund. Then there were several such forces on the conservative side. They would march in formation. They would wear uniforms. They would have maneuvers. Their purpose was to protect the meetings of their parties, their gatherings. They were to be ready when some kind of a violent change would be forced on them. 

Now, this violent change did take place. It came to kind of a civil war, but the Socialists were no match for the paramilitary forces of the Conservatives plus the Army. Engelbert Dollfuss, the Chancellor, now had command of the Army. After a few days of bloody fighting in the streets of Vienna, the Socialists were dispersed and a one-party system was established. There were casualties. Houses were destroyed, particularly some of the giant, public housing projects that had been erected all through the Socialist administration of the city of Vienna. The main Socialist leaders were arrested. Some of them fled the country and lived in exile. This was in 1934. Some of the people were also arrested and sent to a kind of a milder concentration camp in the south of Vienna. This meant for me the end of the whole Socialist world in which I had circulated quite a bit. There was no more newspaper; there was no more magazine. No more jobs and so forth. We did assemble. We continued as friendship clubs and met in coffee houses, but it had to be private affairs rather than organized affairs

I later found that the Arbeiter Zeitung, the Socialist party newspaper, had been taken over by a workers wing – let’s say a left wing of the Conservative movement – and began publishing again. And foolishly enough, I offered my services and I did work for just a short time for them, mainly doing reviews of books and films and things like that. I endured some vicious criticism from Socialists for working for the paper, though I felt that what I was doing was professional work and not about politics. And besides, I was trying to help forces that might lead the movement toward a more liberal direction. But anyhow, it wasn’t worth it and I soon quit. This left me in a very distasteful situation of trying to earn some money by giving private tutoring lessons to students in grammar school by helping with a daycare center for kids in public schools. This didn’t last very long because these people in the daycare centers had to be certified by the public school administration, and they refused to certify me because of my political background. Incidentally, after a year, after the change of government, I was fired from my public school position and with me [and] two or three others. Our record was particularly black as far as previous association with the Socialist movement was concerned, so in spite of all efforts, I could not be rehired. My father paid a lawyer – a Catholic, Conservative lawyer with supposedly very good connections in the present system. He paid him a lot of money, which he collected without giving a receipt, just cash, and never did anything. That is the way things were in those days. 

I also did some other things that were strange. I was a visiting companion to an old, rich lady in the aristocratic wing of the society, living in a fancy apartment in the center, right across from the opera house. I went regularly in the afternoons to read to her or discuss art and literature with her, and have tea served by her regular woman companion, and get paid for it. All of this wasn’t satisfactory and what I should have done was get ready to emigrate. But the strange situation was that it just wasn’t done. You stayed where you were even though the situation was bad and apparently there was no chance that it would get any better. There was hardly any reason to wait for something to happen in the private sector. One thing that happened was that now, since the Socialist activity and concerns were, for the time at least, banned, my interests turned more and more to Jewish affairs. It wasn’t that I became particularly religious. I had a religious period as a young teenager. After the bar mitzvah, I trained regularly for a while, but I became more a spectator than a participator. I visited synagogues – for example the central synagogue. They had a very famous chief rabbi there who was renowned for his Zionist leanings and his wonderful sermons. I would visit on Yom Kippur some little Hassidic shul to study the atmosphere. But I was a spectator and not a participant. Now Jewish gatherings were the only gatherings available to many of us, and I became interested and began to study some Jewish history. I became acquainted with the Zionist movement. I found that the Zionist movement in Vienna was very badly split according to ideological lines. There was a left wing and moderate, and also a right wing movement. The right wing, the so-called “revisionist” movement, had its own youth organization as had the others. They wore uniforms and marched around and looked like little storm troopers.

So, I did find friends and acquaintances in the Zionist movement. I began to find what the situation in Palestine was all about, which was then English mandate. I considered immigration to Palestine because I didn’t see any future in Vienna as it was. Of course, it wasn’t easy to go to Palestine. The British came down on immigration and only very few people were granted visas to go, and most of those were reserved for people who had been very active in the Zionist movement. I also began to study Hebrew a little bit, but didn’t take it too seriously. What helped me in this Jewish orientation was Berthold Fischer and I and couple of other people got acquainted with a young American rabbi by the name of Zuckerman and his wife, who were studying there for a while before going back to America. They had been in Palestine. Arthur Zuckerman was a Reform rabbi and we formed a kind of a circle around him and met regularly, and he began to give us some idea of the Jewish situation in the United States. Over time we became acquainted with the various branches of the Jewish religion and life in America: the Orthodox, the Conservative, and the Reform. Particularly I was attracted to the theology of the Reform movement, which he represented. He explained to us the concept of Liberal Religion – the predominance of the prophetic moral ideas as opposed to the rituals and the observances of dietary laws and things like that. We were quite impressed. He finally returned to the United States.

In this time, as I got more contact with the Jewish groups, I was invited to speak before a group of Jewish young women. It was in this group that I met Erna. We met, of course, very often, and did all sorts of things together. We went wandering and made trips and hikes and so forth. We were married about a year later after I had just met her. Apparently this is what I had been waiting for all these years. Something else happened. There was a ray of hope as far as professional work was concerned. I learned by accident that in Graz, which is the second largest city in Austria, there was a Jewish community. This community operated a grade school. There was a vacancy. Not having anything better to look for I applied for this job. I took a trip to Graz to introduce myself personally and I got the job. 

So in the middle of the school year, 1935, I went down there and started teaching. It was a two-room school. The only other person there was the principal, an older man. And I was the other teacher. So we each divided the four grades among ourselves. I took the littler kids and he took the older kids. I also had to teach religion to the Jewish high school students of Graz. They would come twice a week in the afternoon to this Jewish school to be taught by me. I should perhaps mention here the religious situation in Austria and in many other countries. Austria had a state church. The Catholic Church was the State Church and was supported by tax money. All the maintenance of churches, priests, and the hierarchy, all of that came out of state money. However, those people who were not Catholic also formed one organization supported by tax money, the Kunto Gemeinde. The Viennese Kunto Gemeinde. If you were a Jew, you paid taxes to support this Kunto Gemeinde, which in turn supported all the synagogues and paid the rabbis and cantors and so forth. In Graz also there was the Jewish Kunto Gemeinde, which maintained the synagogue, rabbi, cantor, and the school. The rabbi, incidentally, was an old man, a very noxious man. He was very haughty and arrogant to me and to everybody else, but apparently in this more authoritarian situation, one did not oppose any rabbi. He was an authority figure and so people let it go. 

I felt quite good in Graz. It was a change of environment. I was somebody there – different from my last years in Vienna. I soon became acquainted with many of the Jewish population there. I became quite looked for as a speaker to Jewish youth groups for both the left, the middle, and the right, which was interesting. They wouldn’t have anything to do with one another, but I was accepted as a speaker in all of them. They had also their social life, their dances and music halls. It was quite nice. The only thing was I had to leave Erna in Vienna. She was studying medicine and she was in the last stages of medical study, so I would see her only in the times that I went back visiting by train, which took about five hours one way. She came out once for a longer weekend and I introduced her to the friends I had made in Graz.

The Graz situation was interesting from various points of view. The Jewish community lived very much in a world of itself. Even though I was on the job there for about a year and a half, I made very little contact with non-Jewish people, so it was a ghetto to some extent. Some people were well-heeled members of the community, but they were kind of on an island in a strange world – stuck sticking together religiously and socially. Graz tried to imitate Vienna culturally, but of course to a much lesser extent. It had an opera house, which played both stage and musical productions. One of the highlights of the year was the summer festivals at the top of the Schlossberg. Schlossberg is a hill on which there was a fortress, a very customary arrangement in old cities. In the courtyard they played outdoor operas in the warmer seasons. I remember seeing Beethoven’s Fidelio and it was a very impressive spectacle. Graz has quite beautiful surroundings and there is a lot of occasion for promenades. Also for hikes on the weekends, on Sundays, which I often took with some friends. 

The situation in Graz was out-of-the-way and one felt the tremor of the times less. You have to remember that this was during the Schuschnigg period, when Austria was a fascist state. It was also a time when the Hitler regime was already active next door in Germany. Yet Graz seemed to be somehow far away from those things. 

Erna and I were married in the winter, around Christmastime, in Vienna. I took off from school when the winter vacation began. Then we were married on the day after Christmas Day, the 26th, which is a holiday in Austria – a local saint’s day. The wedding was a “quickie” wedding, so to speak, in the central synagogue – the Zeiten Shtetten Temple. But it was in a side room, not in the main sanctuary. I remember that it came after a very sumptuous wedding in the sanctuary and we had to wait for the masses of people to leave the sanctuary. Apparently it was a real society wedding with lots and lots of people in attendance, whereas ours was only attended by a small group – our parents, close relatives, and a few friends. It was over in a short time, even though it took place in an Orthodox framework – with prayer shawls and heads covered and so forth. Then we went to the photographer to have our pictures taken nearby. Then out to Ernest Pellen’s home, which was a small apartment in the public housing project of the Vienna community. There some friends had been gathered for a meal. But we left very soon to get to the train. We went by train to the Semmering, the famous pass, which gives access from the plains of central Austria into the Alpine region. This is about halfway between Vienna and Graz. We stayed there during the rest of this winter vacation until New Years Day. We did some skiing. I had sent the skis ahead. It was a very nice, quiet way to have a honeymoon. Then we continued on to Graz, where we lodged in a rented room with a little old lady, a widow, who had a big apartment. We had two rooms, very big, with high ceilings and kind of cold, with elegance of “days gone by.”

I was soon teaching and I had meetings. I had been elected to some committees. I went to the meetings, but I didn’t stay long because Erna was waiting in that cold place. Otherwise we had a good time in Graz. Erna was accepted very nicely by many people. They were charmed by her. I think she felt that, too. However, she still had to go back to Vienna to finish her final exams for the degree in medicine. So this was a kind of unsettled existence until the end of the school year. In the meantime, when the year did end, I was offered a position as a teacher in the Jewish school in Vienna. I had a great struggle to decide whether I would accept it. First of all, I had already signed a contract with Graz. Secondly, the salary offered me was much lower. On the other hand, Vienna was Vienna. It was the cultural center. It was where most people wanted to live. It also had the university and there was the hope that one could work up to something bigger living in capital city. Finally, after a lot of discussion and inner struggle, I told Graz that I would not be available. There were some angry voices saying that I had treated them badly. In the end things were sort of straightened out. I lost the pay for the summer months, which I would otherwise have received from Graz. 

At the end of the school year we broke up our household (it wasn’t much of a household) in Graz and returned to Vienna. We rented an apartment near the Augarten, the big park that is between the 2nd and 20th district. It was an upstairs apartment in a house with an elevator, decorated in a modern way. I remember that we didn’t really have a bedroom. There were only two rooms. We had couches that could be made into beds, not separate bedrooms. Then we took a very nice summer trip, a simple, low-budget trip to a village in South Tyrol on the border between Austria and Italy. From there spent some brief time in the Italian Alps, and brief visits to [names several Italian towns], and then Verona, where we saw the opera Turandot performed in the old Roman arena. This was quite an experience. Besides the beauty of the opera, to sit on these stone benches surrounded by thousands of Italian people who had come with their big flagons of wine and cheese and salami and bread. To be in the same place where 2000 years earlier Romans had sat to watch the gladiatorial games between wild animals and men, which they seemed to enjoy so much. 

Then it was back to Vienna. I resumed my new job as a teacher in the Jewish school, which was run by the Jewish community – the Kunto Gemeinde. It was then only an elementary school. If I remember correctly, I was one of four teachers, and I taught a combination of third and fourth year students. There was also quite a bit of work with parents. We had meetings with parents. We put on pageants at the Jewish holidays. I remember particularly a Hanukkah pageant in which I was quite involved and which took place in a large hall in Vienna by the Shuchov. It was a very fanciful representation of the Hanukkah story with the boys and the girls in costume, and a big menorah made of cardboard and aluminum paper. I gave it all I could think of. I made some speeches to the parents. There was quite a bit of bickering among the parents, between those who wanted to keep this whole project very Orthodox and others who were miffed by having these rules about what the kids could bring for their morning snack. For example, whether they could bring bread, butter, and salami, which was against the strict dietary laws. Well, these talks were not very elevating, but they kept on.
 
Erna was finishing medical school. I remember her commencement. It was not really a very elevating ceremony, because at the university of Vienna there were so many hundreds and hundreds of students receiving doctors degrees, and other degrees, every year. They put on a ceremony during the year whenever they had a group together. They assembled them in a big hall and the president of the university, the rector, and a couple of other professors came in their full regalia. The beadle with a big mace came. They went through a Latin ceremony and everybody swore to something in Latin. I don’t have any idea. And Erna was now a doctor of medicine. I remember she had a long, dark, black dress on. Afterwards we all walked back home through the park. Then she began working in the children’s hospital as a kind of intern, which was customary in those days. I don’t think there was any salary involved. I kept on teaching and to augment my salary I also did some private tutoring. I remember a little boy.

[I was talking] about my after hours “moonlighting” after my job in the Jewish grade school, which usually was in session only during the morning hours. I had a little boy for a while with whom I did his homework. I also took him on some walks and so forth – a companion-type thing. Later the principal had to work with a slightly retarded girl. He decided she was not able to attend regular school with the other children, so I worked with her. I came to her house several afternoons a week trying to do school work with her. I don’t think it was a very successful job. I had no preparation and no particular liking for this kind of work. It went very slowly. But the whole thing came to an end shortly after the Anschluss. 

I have to go back a little bit before working at the Jewish school to say that I eventually went through the exams. It wasn’t a very glorious thing. I just made it through, barely, and got the certificate to teach in the grammar school. The next step was to do a so-called groberyaar and go as an unpaid kind of a practice teacher. I did that in the grammar school, in which they taught only modern languages and modern math and things like that. I worked there under some teachers doing history and German. It was a very enjoyable activity. I had very good relations with the students. I got a glowing report from the director of the institution, in contrast to the grades on the examinations, which were not very good at all. 

Now was the time to apply for a job, which I did very unsuccessfully. It was, of course, during the Schuschnigg period. Austria was a fascist state with a strong Catholic, conservative, church leaning. There were not good prospects for a Jewish candidate to be given a chance for employment. During one summer, I received a job as the administrator of a summer colony for Jewish children in Payerbach, which was a very beautiful area about two hours train ride south of Vienna, very close in the Alps. We had a large number of children, maybe 80 or so, of various ages up to 14. Boys and girls, sleeping in separate rooms, of course. And several counselors whom I was to supervise. My relationship with Erna didn’t exist yet, but I met a woman, by the name of Ani, who later introduced me to a group of Jewish girls including Erna. We remained on friendly terms with Ani and also with some other friends – her boyfriend and some others. They were all friendly people who eventually became doctors and moved to America. Years and years later we went to New York and met them.

Now back to the Jewish school. This lasted for a year and a little more. In the meantime my parents moved out of their apartment in which I had grown up. They moved to another one in the same street. Our apartment had been on the fourth floor. Now they moved to an apartment on the first floor, to what was called the eerstgeshaltz, because my father had developed a heart problem. He had been in a hospital for some time. He had been operated on, although we didn’t know about bypasses in those days, and he was advised to avoid the stairs. There were no elevators in the whole street, so they moved. We moved into their former apartment on the fourth floor. We redecorated and we introduced an indoor faucet, which was quite an improvement. In the meantime, my father had lost his position with the textile firm. The office in Vienna had proved less and less important, and eventually dissolved. However, he did find another job, strange to say, also as a kind of private assistant and accountant to another firm. So he was still working. He liked Erna very much, whereas my mother had a strange and cooler relationship with her. She felt that I had married below our social level and she had been jealous of my female companions anyhow, as mothers of only sons often are. But still we managed to have regular meetings and so forth.

I, on the other hand, never could find much contact with Erna’s parents. They seemed to come from a different world. They lived a life of mostly drudgery. They were actually slaving away, and there was not much chance for sitting down and actually socializing with them in a convivial sense. Besides, their very strict, traditional Orthodoxy made such connection not very feasible. They were shocked, however, to find out about my being so little connected to Jewish customs. Erna had two sisters. I remember them very keenly. They were younger and also lived in a different world. Strange that in our kind of society, age difference made this happen. I had really no contact at all with the two sisters. One of them perished in an attempt to flee illegally from Austria into Palestine. On the way, she did appear somewhere, probably in Yugoslavia. And the other one, in the middle, Sally, now lives in Portland and we see them quite regularly. 

Now comes the traumatic experience of the Anschluss in 1938. By that time our contact with my former friends and acquaintances had sort of dwindled. Probably one of the very few I kept in contact with was Bertold Fischer. He had continued to teach in public schools. He had never lost his job the way I did. That was his main existence. Now, in March 1938 the Germans marched in one day. I remember standing not far from where we lived and watching from the columns of motor vehicles of the German Army and the motorcycles of the military police. The whole thing was moving from the Northeast side of town towards the center. People were standing on the sidewalk, most of them silent. It was a Jewish neighborhood. I understand that in other areas there was jubilation and there was a great deal of rejoicing. In the days immediately before there had been a strange change. We saw many people with swastikas, especially in the university area. To display swastika lapel signs had been forbidden, but suddenly there was something in the air and the people were not afraid anymore of the Austrian authorities. Then we heard on the radio that Schuschnigg had gone to Hitler, and Hitler had [inaudible] and Schuschnigg had to give in. We had also heard that Mussolini had come to his rescue and that this rescue was not feasible. Mussolini, despite all of his bluster, presided over a weak country with a military establishment that was no match at all for the German machine that by that time had been built up. So here now we were. Suddenly the local Nazis were all over the place. Local people put on the uniforms of SS storm troopers and SS police, and put on red swastika armbands. Even though the Austrian Nazis were a minority, they were there now in abundance. They were open and they were loud. They were feeling their power, whereas the others, particularly the Jews but also non-Jews who had been active in the Socialist Party and also in the Conservative Catholic party, fell silent and tried not to be seen.

The papers carried proclamations by the new German regime. The walls were plastered with posters of Hitler. I remember very vividly one proclamation by the Cardinal of Nuremberg – Cardinal Innitzer – in which he told all good Catholic Austrians to obey the new government and be good citizens of the greater Germany. It was signed, “Heil Hitler, Innitzer, Cardinal,” which I considered particularly shocking, compared to the attitude of some of the other religious leaders, like the Bishop of Berlin and the Archbishop of Munich, who made no bones about their displeasure with the Nazi regime. Not to speak of others later, such as Pastor Nemer (?), who was put into a concentration camp. So immediately all of the Austrian dignitaries disappeared. Some of them were arrested. Schuschnigg was arrested for some time, although I don’t think he was treated very badly. Local Nazis took over all the towns and the highest jobs were reserved for those who were sent by the German Nazi party. Austria became the Gaue der Ostmark, so it was just a province of Germany. 

Of course, this was the beginning of the end for the Jews of Austria, and especially of Vienna. Pretty soon Jews were hunted down on the streets and subjected to all kinds of physical mistreatment and also mental humiliation. I was involved in that experience twice, in which young fellows in Nazi uniforms stopped me and asked me if I were Jewish. I said yes. If I had said no, they would have wanted proof, and [to know] why wasn’t I wearing a swastika. Jews were not allowed to wear swastikas. I would have been subject to great misery if I had done so and [I had] been discovered. Some probably did it and got away with it. Anyhow, I was asked to follow him and he collected some other Jewish men, and we were loaded into a truck and taken to the former palace of the Archbishop. It had been turned into a kind of storm trooper barracks. We were ordered to take buckets and mops and rags and scrub the floors. It was a very unnecessary occupation, but it was demeaning and meant to humiliate Jews and show their powerlessness. They made remarks about how Jews had never done any honest work and for the first time they had to do this. Well, that lasted for a few hours and we were let go. 

That happened to me a second time. I was taken with other people to another such former Austrian government building, and there the automotive fleet – a bunch of cars that had been taken away from Jews – were lined up and were now used by the Nazi authorities. We were made to wash those cars. This time it was out of doors with a group of leering Nazi sympathizers around us, especially women who were heaping all kinds of insults and saying such things as, “Here are those guys who are violating our Aryan girls.” Again we were let go, but by that time it had become very, very uncomfortable and I felt that it was time to leave. There were stories that other people who had been dragged away from their homes. We had heard already about concentration camps, especially about Dachau. 

In the meantime, Jewish stores were closed and those that were not closed, like that of my father-in-law, gangs came by and painted the work Juden on the window. The idea was to tell people not to patronize Jewish stores or Jewish businesses. The situation became worse and worse. One interesting sideline is that even though Jews were very quickly eliminated from the whole business of professional life, my own job was not in jeopardy. In fact, my own job, run by the Kunto Gemeinde, had to be enlarged because now Jewish children were not allowed anymore to attend other schools. Suddenly we had a tremendous influx. We were not at first allowed to function. Our building was also taken over by Nazi authorities, so there was no school. We helped a little bit in the offices of the Jewish Kunto Gemeinde. Many people came for documents that they needed to get out, to get past the border. So we were usually copying birth certificates for this kind of thing. Then finally the building was given back and school was about to resume. But before it actually did resume, I had decided to leave the country. There was an opportunity – it turns out it wasn’t much of an opportunity. Some friends of my parents had heard of a man who (with a large amount of money) would help smuggle people across the border into Switzerland. There were three of us men: the son of this friend of my parents, myself, and I have forgotten who the third one was. We said goodbye. I said goodbye to Erna and to my parents. We didn’t know when we would see each other again. Anyhow, she felt it was good if I left, because men were definitely more in danger at that time than women. Later on it didn’t make too much difference. 

So one evening we got on the train. We were dressed like hikers and we spent all night on the train. The next afternoon we came to the town of Landeck in Tirol, which is close to the Swiss border. There we were supposed to wait for the man who had been paid already. But he never turned up. He just pocketed the money and disappeared. So what could we do? We waited at an inn, in a restaurant, until about 3 a.m., and then we decided to go on our own. And we did walk across the border. We were stopped once, I remember, in the middle of the night, when we passed an Austrian (now a German) border post. They examined our papers. These were old Austrian border guards, and since we did have a passport and we didn’t seem to have much else with us except camping material, they let us proceed. We bedded down then in some bushes for the rest of the night. Then by morning, when it became light, we waited for a bus. We were already on the Swiss soil then. The bus took us to the nearest Swiss town – a village, actually. There we turned ourselves in to the local Swiss border patrol. They told us to wait for another bus, but first they had to contact their authorities. 

This was in the canton of Graubünden. Switzerland has a number of cantons, which function like states in the United States. Each canton has its government seat and it has some rights to do some things independently from the others. This was our luck, because canton Graubünden, different from others farther north, had so far been visited by very few refugees. So the seat of the canton, Chur, was contacted, and we got word that we should hop another bus and go to Chur and report there to the police authorities, which we did. The chief of the canton police turned out to be a very nice and friendly man, who apparently understood our situation. He allowed us to stay in Chur and to report to the police from time to time. We were not to engage in any gainful work. So how should we live? Well, he directed us to a man who was the local representative of the Swiss Jewish organization, which in turn was connected with HIAS, the Jewish international welfare organization. They took care of refugees. So we rented a room, the three of us, and contacted this man, who had a clothing store. We learned from him that we would get weekly small sums on which we were able to live. And this is what we did. 

In the first weeks of our Swiss existence, I tried to learn the Swiss dialect. It was very hard for me to understand the Swiss at the beginning, but I got used to it. We got acquainted with a couple of Germans who were also refugees, but they were not sustained by charity. They were in business. They were actors, a man and his wife and another woman. They went around to the villages to put on plays. I helped them and went around with them. The man had a car and it held all his equipment, the costumes and whatever. In this way I got to learn a little bit about the countryside. We visited little villages. I sat through some of the plays. I ate with them and drank with them. It was really quite a valuable education. 

There were other refugees who had also found their ways into this corner of Switzerland. They also were sustained similarly. The man, incidentally – the contact man – he was a very strange man and not very easy to get along. He was apparently very much afraid of having somebody telling him what to do or infringing on his authority. There was another Jewish businessman in town – Mr. Keen, who was very Orthodox – and the two were enemies. One didn’t talk to the other. When we arranged a gathering to celebrate the Jewish holiday, if we invited one, then the other one didn’t come. Mr. Keen was very hospitable and often invited some of us to his house for dinner. 

Now at that time I spoke by telephone to my family in Vienna. The isolation and the repression, outside of those who were actually arrested and taken away, became gradually more severe. My parents and Erna arranged to have things sent to me. In fact, a whole big wooden box of stuff, which contained some of our household goods. Later it turned out that much of it was not usable under the circumstances, and also it was difficult to store. But they didn’t know. Now the question arose: could we get Erna out? Finally, that was arranged. I communicated the detailed directions to follow, the way that we had done it. So Erna left with the wife and the brother of this man who had come with me. They did exactly the same thing and we were reunited in Chur. This was, of course, an occasion for great joy and elation. 

Then we rented an apartment – not an apartment, but a room – with kitchen privileges. It was with an old woman and her not-very-young daughter. It was not a very good arrangement, because the daughter didn’t like Erna and didn’t like somebody else monkeying around in her kitchen. So we found another place, this time with some very nice, simple people. The man was a railroad conductor. They were Romanich, but they did speak some German. We got along fairly well there. Erna could prepare some very simple meals. What do you do the rest of the time? Well, we visited each other. We made a few acquaintances with Swiss Jews. There was a Jewish lady, a doctor of medicine, who had married a non-Jewish man. They lived in an old castle with very intricate furniture, hand-carved. It was a very strange arrangement. It was about an hour and half walk to visit them, which we did several times for tea. I made a couple of trips to Zurich, to the Jewish community there, trying to see about getting a visa to go somewhere else. We knew that Switzerland was not the place where we could stay indefinitely. It was a place of temporary refuge. We were not allowed to work, and getting a job, even if you could get one, meant immediate suspension of your right to stay there any longer.

I might mention that before leaving Vienna, I had registered (and Erna had registered) at the American Consulate for an immigration visa. But here comes the great shame of the behavior of possible immigration countries. It was extremely difficult for Jews to immigrate. Therefore, a part of the guilt of the Holocaust also rests on places like the United States and Canada and Australia for not making it possible for thousands and thousands of Jews to settle, which could have been done very easily without in any way disturbing the common welfare of these countries. America still had a quota law, which meant that you were assigned a visa quota number and could only get an immigration visa when your number was reached. In my case, that would have meant waiting for over a year. Perhaps the smartest thing I did in my life was to not to wait in Vienna for my quota number. Once we were in Switzerland, I tried to see what could be done about this, but there too my quota number went with me. I still had to wait out the time that it took for my quota number to be reached. That was over a year. It was not until November of 1939 that we finally were able to arrange for an immigration visa granted by the American consulate general in Chile. And this was only after many difficulties. The consuls were very uncooperative and made difficulties all along the way. First of all we had to have a sponsor, somebody in America who would vouch for our economic independence and promise that we wouldn’t become welfare recipients. Of course, this was not easy to find, and we didn’t have any relatives [in America]. But Rabbi Zuckerman, to whom I wrote and whom I mentioned before, finally was able to help.