The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [104]
Rosenberg is installed in his new Viennese office with Ignace’s carefully calibrated hymn to Jewish pride in Zion – his lifetime bet on assimilation – above his head: the grandiose, gilded picture of Esther crowned as Queen of Israel. Above him to his left is the painting of the destruction of the enemies of Zion. But there are to be no Jews in Zionstrasse.
On 25th April there is a ceremonial reopening of the university. Students in lederhosen flank the steps up to the main entrance as Gauleiter Joseph Bürckel arrives. A quota system has been introduced. Only 2 per cent of the university students and faculty will be allowed to be Jewish: from now on, Jewish students can only enter with a permit; 153 of the Medical School’s faculty of 197 have been dismissed.
On 26th April Hermann Göring commences his ‘transfer-the-wealth’ campaign. Every Jew with assets of more than 5,000 Reichsmarks is obligated to tell the authorities or be arrested.
The next morning the Gestapo arrive at the Ephrussi Bank. They spend three days looking at the bank’s records. Under the new regulations – regulations that are now thirty-six hours old – the business has to be offered first to any Aryan shareholders. The business also has to be offered at a discount. This means that Herr Steinhausser, Viktor’s colleague for twenty-eight years, is asked if he wants to buy out his Jewish colleagues.
It is only six weeks since the planned plebiscite.
Yes, he says, in a post-war interview on his role at the bank, of course he bought them out. ‘They needed cash for the “Reichsflucht-steuer”, the Reich flight tax . . . they offered me their shares urgently, because this was the fastest way to get cash. The price, Ephrussi and Wiener’s price to get out, was “totally appropriate” . . . it was 508,000 Reichsmarks . . . plus the 40,000 Aryanisation tax of course.’
So, on 12th August 1938, Ephrussi and Co. is taken off the business register. In the records it says, singularly, ERASED. Three months later the name is changed to Bankhaus CA Steinhausser. Under its new name it is revalued, and under its new Gentile ownership is worth six times as much as under Jewish ownership.
There is no longer a Palais Ephrussi and there is no longer an Ephrussi Bank in Vienna. The Ephrussi family has been cleansed from the city.
It is on this visit that I go to the Jewish archive in Vienna, the one seized by Eichmann, to check up on the details of a marriage. I look through a ledger to find Viktor, and there is an official red stamp across his first name. It reads ‘Israel’. An edict decreed that all Jews had to take new names. Someone has gone through every single name in the lists of Viennese Jews and stamped them: ‘Israel’ for the men, ‘Sara’ for the women.
I am wrong. The family is not erased, but written over. And, finally, it is this that makes me cry.
26. ‘GOOD FOR A SINGLE JOURNEY’
What do Viktor and Emmy and Rudolf need to do to leave the Ostmark of the German Reich? They can queue outside as many embassies or consulates as they like – the answer is the same. Quotas have already been filled. There are enough refugees, émigrés, needy Jews in England to keep the lists closed for years to come. These queues are dangerous because they are patrolled by SS, by local police, by those who might hold a grudge. There is the endless pulse of fear that any of those police trucks could pick you up and take you to Dachau.
They need enough money to pay all the inventive taxes, pay for the many punitive permits to emigrate. They need to have an assets declaration of what they owned on 27th April 1938. This is collected