The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [99]
Vienna, 14th March 1938. View along the Ringstrasse from the Parliament and Opera towards the Palais Ephrussi
Sometimes it is possible to get people out of police-stations with money. Viktor helps a couple of cousins who need to get across the border to Czechoslovakia, but he and Emmy seem incapable of a decision. Friends tell them to go. It is Viktor who has frozen. He cannot leave this house, his father’s and grandfather’s house. He cannot leave the bank. He cannot just leave his library.
Others have left the household. Who wants to be associated with the Jews? There are three servants left. The cook and Anna, who make sure that there is still coffee for the Baron and Baroness, and the porter, Herr Kirchner, who has the little room by the gate and no known family.
The city is metamorphosing hour by hour as more German army personnel appear, men in uniforms on every street corner. The currency is now the Reichsmark. Jude is painted on Jewish-owned shops, and customers are targeted if they are seen going in or coming out. The huge Schiffmann department store, owned by four Jewish brothers, is systematically emptied by the SA as crowds look on.
People are disappearing. It is increasingly difficult to know where anyone is. On Wednesday 16th March, Pips’s old friend, the writer Egon Friedell, jumps out of the window of his flat when he sees storm-troopers arrive and question the porter in his apartment building. There are 160 suicides of Jews in March and April. Jews are dismissed from theatres and orchestras. All state and municipal employees have been sacked; 183 Jewish teachers have lost their jobs. All Jewish lawyers and public prosecutors are relieved of office.
In these days, the wild quality of release, the helping yourself to Jewish property, the random beatings of Jews on the streets change into something more steely. It becomes clear that there has been a lot of planning and that there are orders. On Friday 18th March, two days after his arrival in Vienna, the young SS lieutenant Adolf Eichmann takes matters personally in hand by participating in a raid on the IKG in the Seitenstettgasse during which documents linking the Jewish community to the Schuschnigg plebiscite campaign are confiscated. This is followed by the confiscation of the IKG library and archive itself. Eichmann is concerned to get the best material of Judaica and Hebraica for the planned Institute for Research into the Jewish Question.
It becomes clear that there are plans for the Jews of Vienna. On 31st March Jewish organisations are no longer recognised under public law. The chaplain of the little English church is baptising Jews. If you convert, you may have more options for escape. There are queues outside the presbytery. He curtails instruction into the Christian faith to ten minutes to help more desperate people.
On 9th April Hitler returns to Vienna. His motorcade goes through the city and onto the Ring. At noon Goebbels steps out onto the balcony of the Rathaus, the Town Hall that now stands in Adolf Hitler Platz, to declaim the results of the plebiscite. ‘I proclaim the day of the Greater German Reich’: 99.75 per cent have voted yes to legitimise the Anschluss.
On 23rd April a boycott of Jewish shops is announced. That same day the Gestapo arrive at the Palais Ephrussi.
25. ‘A NEVER-TO-BE-REPEATED OPPORTUNITY’
How can I write about this time? I read memoirs, the journals of Musil, look at the photographs of the crowds on this day, the following day, the day after that. I read the Vienna newspapers. On Tuesday the Hermansky bakery is baking Aryan bread. On Wednesday Jewish lawyers are sacked. On Thursday non-Aryans are excluded from the football club Schwarz-Rot. Goebbels gives out free radios on Friday. Aryan razor blades are on sale.
I have Viktor’s passport with its stamps