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"I´m
not a document..."
Dear
Amos - Dear Egon
Official
Coverage
Interviewees
Emigration
USA
They
are all my parents
Press
release
Aknowledgements
Festivals
Distribution
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AUFBAU
FRIDAY, October 11, 1996
AMERICA`S
ONLY GERMAN - JEWISH PUBLICATION
FOUNDED IN 1934
"They
are All My Parents"
By Monica J. Strauss
A
Personal Response to the Film "Emigration, N.Y. - The Story
of an Expulsion"
"They are all my parents,"
I think, as I watch twelve Austrian-Jewish-Americans describe their
experiences of the "Anschluß", "Kristallnacht",
and eventual refuge in New York in Egon Humer's documentary film
Emigration, N.Y. screened at the New York Film Festival on October
8. And I am grateful that a filmmaker—and an Austrian one at
that—was inspired to record the particular plight of this group
of refugees so culturally bound to the country that banished them
that even sixty years later most of them have not made their peace
with the shock of that rapture.
For this daughter of Austrian-Jewish refugees who settled in New
York, it has always been hard to understand why my parents and their
friends, cut off from their past by the great abyss of the Holocaust,
would still choose to look at the world through "Austrian"
eyes.
Why did they continue to devote themselves so assiduously to the
Austrian language, music, and cuisine, not to mention the ineffable
niceties of Austrian etiquette and style, after that culture had
betrayed them within hours of the "Anschluß". I had little
faith in their assurances that they had really belonged there; that
before those fateful days of March 1938, anti-semitism had affected
them very little.
But the degree of the Austrian
Jews' assimilation was amply confirmed in the documentary film Emigration,
N.Y. For the first time I understood the difference between the
predicament of the Austrian as opposed to the German Jew. Whereas
those living in Germany under Hitler experienced a gradual disenfranchisement
over a period of years, the Jews in Austria became victims overnight,
trapped in the Nazi nightmare, within moments of the arrival of
the Germans in the capital.
On the screen, Gertrude Kurth cannot emphasize enough the "Begeisterung"
with which the troops were greeted. And then she recalls her own
thoughts at that moment: "I grew up here and only now do I
realize how much I was hated." Surprise at the speed with which
that hatred manifested itself is reflected in the testimony of all
the men and women that follow as they describe the betrayal of trusted
shopkeepers, the derision of fellow students, the rejection by long-time
colleagues. And for those who were children at the time, like Lisa
Grad and Doris Orgel, there was the added element of shame —
the pathetic fear that the immediate and brutal separation from
their classmates could only be ascribed to something they, or their
parents, must have done.
The reactions of shock and disbelief on the screen gave me a clue
to the behaviour of my parents' generation. So abrupt and absolute
must have been the break between their relatively carefree youth
and the period of flight and immigration, that they could only look
back on it as a cultural aberration—at least from a distance.
And so in Kew Gardens, Forest Hills, Long Island, and the upper
West Side, pockets of Austrian culture continued to thrive among
those expelled from its source. Even the end of the war and the
revelations of the Holocaust did not diminish the nostalgia for
their own "Vormärz." But, eventually, as they began to
prosper, the temptation to re-visit the scene of the crime, to experience
in situ the idiom in which they still conducted their lives, could
no longer be resisted. And there in Austria, like the refugees in
the film, they were confronted by the irrevocable nature of their
loss.
Although many of those in the film speak openly of the horrors of
the war years, and, with particular poignancy, of their fears as
children, they retain a detachment that kept me from being overwhelmed.
There were only three moments when the emotional temperature rose
perceptibly and two of them occur when Doris Orgel and Gertrude
Kurth describe the intensity of their emotion on first re-visiting
Austria. Orgel, who thought she had put her past behind her, grows
dizzy homesickness after inhaling the smell of a cyclamen, a fragrance
remembered from childhood. Kurth, momentarily overcome by the beauty
of the lake and mountains at Mondsee, finds herself unable to suppress
feelings of loss. "I am happy to be in America," she says,
but adds wistfully "Heimat is Austria". Then, taken aback
by her own susceptibility, she forces herself to remember that those
around her may be the very ones who murdered Jews. The confusing
amalgam of attraction and repulsion that held these women my childhood.
And I confess that it also made me—a member of the next generation—prone
to illusions. On my first visit to Vienna a few years ago, it was
all so familiar, so comforting — the sound of those gentle
Austrian diminutives, the taste of my mother's dishes in the restaurants,
the sight of streets and places that had played a part in family
history. But this was no Heimat —all signs of my family had
been effaced and the effacement was still unacknowledged.
Today, nearly 60 years after the "Anschluß" impelled in
part by the aftermath of the Waldheim affair, the Austrians are
making some amends. There is a limited, but better-than-nothing
attempt at "Wiedergutmachung" the Jewish Museum has been
re-situated to the center of Vienna with a bookstore offering the
unvanished truth for all who care to look at it, and in a few weeks,
at the Mauerbach art auctions, works stolen from Nazi victims will
be sold to benefit the Federation of Austrian Jewish Communities.
It is a start, but still, very little, very late.
lf I saw the' reflection of my parents' mixed feelings in many of
the people in Humer's film, there was one person who did not look
back. For Amos Vogel, Vienna is categorically "the city of
the dead." And yet the great emotional satisfaction Vogel admits
to in collaborating on this project which "brought together
in friendship the child of a compromised generation and one of its
victims," indicates a third direction for survivors that is
neither the ambivalence of nostalgia nor the dead end of rejection.
Monica
J. Strauss is an art historian; her Austrian parents emigrated
to England in 1939 and came to the US in 1946.
Meine
"Zigeuner" Mutter | Leon Askin | Matura
| Intifada
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