Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mother's Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind by Julie Metz

Author:Julie Metz [Metz, Julie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Women, History, Jewish, Social Science, Jewish Studies, Holocaust
ISBN: 9781982128005
Google: CPztDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2021-04-06T07:00:00+00:00

— THE WAY OUT —

MOST VIENNESE JEWS looked for emigration assistance at the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde. But the IKG focused most of its effort helping younger people, the next generation of Jews, who could more easily join the workforce in whatever country they landed. As I saw during my visit in 2012, the IKG, in an attempt to normalize the desperate situation, offered retraining programs, and published brochures about the options for emigration, including countries like China that did not require a visa. However practical and optimistic the brochures were, the reality was that the IKG now operated under the authority of Adolf Eichmann.

Though experienced as a businessman, Julius was no longer young. With his weak heart he would not be able to do any physical labor. His wife hadn’t worked since their marriage. His daughter was still a child. Julius was a private and self-sufficient man by nature and, perhaps, after Jakob Ehrlich’s arrest and disappearance, he no longer trusted the IKG. This might explain why the IKG had no record of my grandfather when I visited in 2012.

Every day, would-be emigrants petitioned for passports at the Rothschild Palace—now transformed into Nazi headquarters. In photographs of the lines, so long that they wrapped around the entire city block, men and women are bundled against the cold—frigid winter had blown in—waiting their turn to plead their case. And this was just the first part of a long opaque process. If you were lucky enough to be issued a passport you then had to visit individual embassies to request a visa. Only then could you apply for an exit permit, which, after paying various “atonement” taxes and exit fees, would allow you to leave the country, with nothing left in your pocket. Julius joined those lines, waiting and waiting for a turn to fill out forms. The Nazis loved their paperwork—it gave legitimacy to their policies—and Adolf Eichmann wasn’t interested in making Jewish emigration easy.

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