Exile and Destruction: The Fate of Austrian Jews, 1938-1945 (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews 137 point to what might have been an even more fruitful approach to Hitler; namely a reconstruction ofhis "frontline experiences" in the First World War. Meanwhile, Hitlers Wien remains a useful and informative book. Despite its length, it deserves to be translated into English so that it can fmd even more readers. Lawrence Birken Department of History Ball State University Exile and Destruction: The Fate of Austrian Jews, 1938-1945, by Gertrude Schneider. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1995. 234 pp. $55.00. Gertrude Schneider, the editor of the Latvian Jewish Courier and author of The Unfinished Road, Jewish Survivors ofLatvia Look Back as well as two other books on the Holocaust, has tracked the fate of the more than 65,000 Austrian Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust. Simultaneously she recounts her experiences between the Anschluss of Austria by Germany and her return to Vienna after the war. Born Gertrude Hirschhorn in 1928, Mrs. Schneider considers her deportation to Riga, Latvia to have been relatively "fortunate" because 103 people survived among four transports which carried a total of 4,235 Austrian Jews. By contrast, only nine of 9,477 Austrian Jews sent to Minsk, Belorussia survived and just 18 of 4,977 who were sent to Lodz. Of the 6,094 Austrian Jews who were shipped to the death camps of Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Belzec not one survived. Only those 1,563 Jews who survived Theresienstadt, among the 15,351 who were sent there, fared better than the Jews of the four Riga transports. Interspersed among her accounts of which transports went where and how many Jews survived Schneider weaves an often fascinating story ofher life in Vienna up to the time her family was finally deported in February 1942. Remarkably, her family managed to maintain a halfway normal existence in Vienna and even after their arrival in Riga. Their forced departure from Vienna was delayed by her father's indispensable engineering skills which unfortunately induced a sense of false optimism. His procrastination eventually cost him his life. Schneider's sister and mother survived the Holocaust, but not dozens of her more distant relatives. Schneider, and most ofthe other 881 Jewish children who still remained in Vienna in the fall of 1941, enjoyed going to school even though the classrooms were terribly overcrowded. However, the rooms were at least heated and the subjects were stimulating. The children learned songs and folk dancing and put on plays. Their "lives were not at all drab" (p. 52). The discipline was "superb" and she believes that she 138 SHOFAR Fall 1997 Vol. 16, No.1 received an excellent education in her segregated Jewish schools. Life in the Jewish ghetto in Riga was much harsher than it had been in Vienna. Even there, however, Schneider's family was lucky because they were at least allowed to remain together, unlike families which were sent to concentration camps. They, along with other German-speaking Jews from the Altreich and Prague, were also entertained by Viennese Jews "who put on shows and organized concerts and cabarets, mainly on Sunday afternoons when people did not have to go to work" (p. 87). The author reveals that not only were Viennese Jews sent to many different ghettos, work camps, and extermination camps, but the method of apprehending them also varied substantially. Some people were informed oftheir deportation by letter ordering them to report at a school on a specified day, whereas others were arrested in their homes by the police. Early deportations could result from incredibly minor infractions of laws such as the one against Jews attending cinemas. Schneider is understandably indignant over the chilly reception most survivors received when they returned to Vienna after the war as well as with the unwillingness ofthe Austrian government to compensate Jews for their losses. What she does not say, however, is that the Austrian case was far from unique. Austrian gentiles at least did not murder the returnees, in contrast to the fate of literally hundreds of Jews who found their way back to Poland. Even the much-praised Danes, who rescued thousands of Jews by smuggling them into Sweden, did not willingly return Jewish property. And...