THE OUTSIDERS by Corbett James

Author:Corbett, James
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Eye Books
Published: 2021-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

2

If there was a hesitancy or lingering sense of complacency on my father’s behalf, he was rudely shaken out of it in autumn 1938. First, came a series of pogroms. Kristallnacht reminded me of an extreme version of Austria’s so-called civil war; the crack of automatic gunfire, the burning of shops and synagogues, and then the next morning an endless phalanx of prisoners marched through the streets to the railway station, where they were sent to their doom.

Next, a special body, the Vermoegensverkehrsstelle or ‘asset transfer office’, was set up by the new regime and made responsible for the transfer of Jewish property to non-Jews. The sudden demand for reparation came as a shock to someone who had never really considered himself Jewish. My father was literally handed a bill for the value of our house and many of our belongings. Soon after, he was told not to come into work any more.

My father remained convinced that this was merely some passing phase in our history, but my Uncle Johannes had seen enough. Within days he and my aunt and cousins had fled Vienna, headed south to Italy, where they were to take the ship to the United States.

We learned later, much later, that they never made it that far. The Italian border had already been closed and the family were interred. Johannes’ leftist past had caught up with him. Did they know about his Jewish past? I never found out. The gold, jewellery and other valuables they had sewn into the linings of their clothing and luggage were confiscated and stolen.

They became among the first inmates at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Austria’s north, where they were separated. Johannes was executed in 1940, and my aunt and cousins sent to Dachau in 1941, where they were murdered two years later.

Auslese und Ausmerze. Our family of eight had become four.

* * *

By then we had left our home and were living lives of itinerants. My father had access to a series of properties around the city which belonged to the railway company as worker accommodation. A sympathetic director had removed them from the books and they were shared out among families in need. We were used to a five-storey townhouse, so these two- and three-roomed apartments, which were damp and cold and in the poorest parts of the city, were a sobering reminder of the new reality we faced. We stayed for six or eight weeks at a time, before moving onto the next one, always under the cover of darkness. Our days were spent being home-schooled by our mother, while father met his connections and friends, trying to find a way out of a city that had become our prison, while searching for places to buy food.

Over the months and years that followed these excursions became shorter and more difficult as the Nazi grip over Vienna grew. They were beholden to paperwork, but we were entitled to none; or rather none that was of any practical use.

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