![]() For, while my mother was unpacking furniture, dishes and clothes, some anti-Semite painted “Grünspan” on our door. The district Leopoldstadt had been declared Jewish ghetto, and this was where a flat was allocated to us. Which didn’t alter the fact that we had to leave our flat after a few months. There were only two alternatives: to get jostled, fist on eye, bloody nose – or a swastika on the lapel. It was a simple, primitive protection: a small pin on the shirt or blouse, and we went unmolested. When we ventured out into the street again, we, too, wore swastikas, for anybody who didn’t was suspect and bound to be abused. We stayed at home when Hitler’s troops marched into the country. I was to understand the reason for these words very much later. Who could guess that these lodgings were luxurious compared with those awaiting us in the years to follow? After we had heard the words of Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg – “God protect Austria” – in the radio on 11 March 1938, my mother told me that we had to expect hard times from then on. Our second flat in the Brunhildengasse nearby wasn’t much better. We were poor, there was only a kitchenette, which made my mother very angry. But there were worlds between the imperial glory of the castle and our small flat. My father was one of hundreds of thousands jobless people in the late 1920s, while my mother earned our money as an employee of the Creditanstalt bank, from which we could barely live.Īt first in a municipal flat in the Johnstraße in the district Fünfhaus in Vienna, not far from Schönbrunn. ![]() She seemed to be his superior in every way, and therefore everything had rested on her shoulders even while he was alive. My mother never talked much about him and when she did, not really in a positive sense. My father died when I was one year old probably as a result of appendicitis. BETWEEN HITLER YOUTH AND THE STAR OF DAVID (excerpt)
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