The Unanswered Letter by Faris Cassell

Author:Faris Cassell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regnery History
Published: 2020-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

It’s likely that the evening of November 11 was the night when Martha and Leo returned home after making a miraculous escape from their deportation to Poland. They told Celia only that their train had stopped at some border, where guards would not accept the deportees’ jumble of passports and documentation. Celia didn’t know how her parents managed to break free; Martha and Leo told her that when the locked train doors were opened, they and others ran and later found a train back to Vienna. As they approached Vienna, the sight of smoke shrouding the city and dozens of fires burning shocked them. What could it mean?

The family’s reunion must have been joyous—flowing with tears of relief, disbelief, and new levels of terror. The world had gone mad. Where was the Vienna of symphony and dance, science and philosophy, and friendly police? Perhaps the Bergers recalled the 1934 street battles between impoverished socialists and the government, the decades of groups chafing for unity with Germany, and many groups, including Communists, Nazis, and others, imprisoned for their discontent. There had been warning signs of deep dissatisfaction, angry divisions, and a nation searching for its identity.

As harrowing as Martha and Leo’s deportation was, it probably saved them from far worse. Across Germany and Austria during Kristallnacht, Nazis destroyed, looted, ransacked, or burned more than a thousand synagogues—all but one of the twenty-four in Vienna—along with seventy prayer and study houses, and four thousand Jewish shops. Nearly two thousand Jewish apartments in Vienna’s First District alone were aryanized. Nazis arrested sixty-five hundred Viennese Jews and deported nearly half to camps. At least twenty-seven Jews were murdered and another eighty-eight seriously injured. Six hundred eighty Viennese Jews committed suicide.

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