Hannah Fischer – Escaping to England

“The time from March 1938 until the end of the 1938 school year is unforgettable. Those were my last months in Vienna before emigrating. A lot of students were coming to the school who had been expelled from other schools for being Jewish. At that time, I think there were over 50 children in the class. The children who arrived made a deep impression on me. They were all very depressed because some of them didn’t even know that they were Jewish. They were often from baptized families, raised Christian, and suddenly they were Jewish. I won’t ever be able to forget that. The whole class looked after these children; we took them in completely. But there was already an atmosphere of dissolution; several knew they were going to emigrate. I was just a ‘school for the time being‘ for many of the students. My Latin teacher, Dr. Klein-Löw, was able to flee to England where she worked as a maid. Lydia made it to America. Nelly Szabo, also a friend from school, also fled to America. We were in contact for a good while, but when you don’t ever see each other, you lose touch at some point. Many from my class were able to successfully flee, but not all. Mostly it was better-off families that made it. The poorer families often couldn’t flee. Sometimes they were able to at least send their children away. Like all Jewish children, my brother was also expelled from his school and then had to go to a ‘collection school‘ [Sammelschule] for Jews in the 14th district. My father had bought and worked a piece of property near the Aspanger Airport – this airport has been around since 1912. He bought it there because it was cheap. So, every weekend we went from one side of Vienna to the other, to Essling – that was a long trip. We had to transfer at Schwedenplatz; the wonderful ice-cream parlour that still there was also around back then. Each time we received an ice cream for around 10 groschen. At the end of March 1938 my father was arrested. The neighbour of the property in Essling was a Nazi – we knew that. And this neighbour wanted our property. My father was thus summoned and asked to sign off that he was giving his property to the neighbour. My father refused to give his signature with the argument that he had purchased the property and was on the deed and didn’t see any reason to hand it over to the neighbour. He thought that as a former front-line solider he would naturally be respected by the Nazis. The Nazis respect nothing. The arrested and interned him in the 20th district, in a school on Karajan-Gasse. That’s where Jews were collected and deported to Dachau. My father was on the so-called “Prominent Transport” to the Dachau concentration camp on 1 April 1938. Among the 150 prisoners there were well-known politicians and opponents of the National Socialist regime, as well as Christian Socialists, Monarchists, Social Democrats, Communists, and around 50-60 people of Jewish faith or background. Starting in 1936 my mother began placing Jewish girls in England as maids as part of an organization set up in cooperation with the Jewish Community. In 1938, a few days after the German invasion, our house was searched again. This search differed from the one in 1936 because it was much more brutal. They didn’t hold back slicing open our feather beads and destroying many objects.
All the books were pulled out and partly torn. My brother and I were there. That was an important political education for us. My mother put a packet of paper in my hand and sent me to the toilet. Those papers would have been dangerous for her. I tore up everything and threw it in the toilet; it was gone. So, they didn’t find anything that could have been really dangerous for my mother, but they did find the suitcase with all the documents for the England Action. They confiscated the suitcase because they thought they could make a case for spying or something out of it. Those were Nazi younglings who couldn’t speak English and weren’t very educated anyway. Approximately 14 days after the search my mother was summoned to the district office on Hietzinger-Brücke. She took me along because she thought the Nazis would behave a bit more moderately towards her in the presence of a child. She was afraid, since my father was already imprisoned at this time. We went to the Superior Nazi, and he shouted brutally at my mother: ‘The more of them you place, the better.‘ He behaved the way you would expect from a real Nazi. At the end he said, ‘And it would be best if you just take one of these permits for yourself.‘ My mother took this remark seriously. She immediately applied for a permit, took one of the maid positions for herself, and applied for our exit permits. Today I am convinced that this Nazi wasn’t so malicious and wanted to give us a tip with his last remark. But since there were about two or three other SA officers present in the room, he could only do it in this brutal way. Afterwards my mother asked me to write down what I had experienced there, and somewhere I still have it. My brother and I never saw our father again. When he was released from the concentration camp we were no longer in Austria. My father’s letters from the camp were an upsetting experience for us, since they sounded like this: ‘Dear Liesl, dear children!‘ Then a large portion would be cut out and at the bottom it would say: ‘Greetings and kisses from your father, Bela‘. I can’t imagine what my father could have written conscious of the fact that he was imprisoned in a concentration camp, what he wouldn’t have been allowed to write. We sent packages to him in the concentration camp in Dachau. Maybe he wrote that he received the packages. I don’t know. But in any case, it was something that very powerfully demonstrated the nature of the new regime. When I went to school, I saw Jews in the city centre that had to wash the streets, I experienced the population’s reaction and took the open threats seriously. It was a clear signal for everyone that wanted to know. It wasn’t difficult to see that fleeing was necessary, even if we didn’t leave the country readily and happily. There was also a drop of melancholy and fear. Fear of what they future may bring and, of course, fear for our father. Rafael and I left for London shortly before our thirteenth birthday. Our mother brought us to the Westbahnhof train station. I can remember, I still have this feeling very strongly within in, I knew very well back then: I am coming back! We knew our mother was coming two, three weeks after us, but we didn’t know that she sent us earlier because she was afraid the war would break out and we’d be doomed. Many children went on the Kindertransports to England without their parents and never saw them again. Luckily, we weren’t as clever as we are now. My mother dismantled the apartment but didn’t along take any furniture, only linens and such things. She distributed some of the things from our apartment amongst friends, since it was clear my father wouldn’t be allowed to enter the apartment if he got released. My mother came two or three weeks after as, after depositing a permit for my father at the English Embassy. Maybe my father was released from Dachau because of the permit, but when he was back in Vienna – that was in July of August 1939 – the British Embassy didn’t officially exist anymore. Officially they were on holiday – since that was time for holidays – but they never returned since war was foreseeable. For some time, my father stayed in Budapest illegally, but was then deported and returned to Vienna. In Vienna he lived with other Jews in a so-called ‘collection apartment‘ [Sammelwohnung]. Since the Jews had their apartments taken from them, many Jewish families lived together in one apartment. I think my father was in the 2nd district. In September 1940 he was able to board one of four ships attempting to reach Palestine illegally. In the Romanian Danube port of Tulcea the passengers were relocated to three ocean steamships. Instead of the envisaged 150 passengers, there were – on the “Atlantic” for example – 18,000 fleeing passengers. The journey was very dramatic. The crew went on strike, demanded more wages, but nevertheless, after more than three months, my father reached port at Haifa. But after a short stay in the Alith internment camp near Hafia, the British transported the refugees – who had narrowly escaped death – to Mauritius by ship. Mauritius was horrible. The people had lost everything and knew nothing about their relatives. Many died of tropical diseases. On Mauritius my father made a piece of land arable, dug a garden, and cultivated plants he found there. He at least knew we were in England and therefore in relative safety. In London we were picked up by the ‘Jewish Committee For Refugee Children‘ and brought to Deal. Deal is a small city on the coast near Dover. There was a children’s home run by a Mr. Howard. Mr. Howard was the headmaster of a single-grade rural school. He had a large house with a big garden. He lived in the house, which was called ‘The Glack,‘ with his wife, his two children, and he took in refugee children whose parents were paying, as well as ones like us, who were sent by the committee. He made a big difference between those children whose parents were paying and those who were from the committee. Those of us from the committee had to help around the house and in the garden; the others were relieved of this duty. I did laundry, made beds, and occasionally helped in the kitchen; Rafael worked in the garden. That annoyed us, of course. Mr. Howard was a very authoritarian figure. He took delight in bringing us to his school to demonstrate how he reigned over a horde of children there. He hit children on the finger in front of us, also to show us what happens when we don’t obey. Mrs. Howard was a somewhat friendlier woman, who tried to fulfil our wishes, like in terms of food, for example. In the children’s home there was also a dance class, which Mr. Howard organized with the dance director for the local youth. Because more boys than girls came, we girls from the home also had to go to the class. We didn’t want to, we were still too young. But the worst was when Mr. Howard would do us the “honour” and ask us to dance. He was a heavy pipe-smoker and stank of smoke, so I have the worst memories of dancing with him. That cast out any desire to dance for the rest of my life. My brother never had any English lessons in school in Vienna. I had had three years of English and could communicate. My brother, who in England took on his second name, Erwin, because instead of Rafael he was always called Ralf, which annoyed him, didn’t speak for two months. He spoke German but didn’t say a single English word. After two months he spoke perfect English. Exactly at this point we started going to the ‘Central School,‘ the main school in town. My brother went to the boys’ school, and I went to the girls’ school.
The English school system in those days was arranged so that they taught much less in the girls’ school than in the boys’ school. For example, girls didn’t learn any algebra in Math, whereas Erwin was plagued with algebra. But I was able to help him since I had learned well in Vienna. My German and History teacher, Miss Billings, took an interest in me and took me under her wing. She gave me books and I still have one from her today. She made my stay there more bearable since we were really unhappy in that house. Our mother was in London, but she worked in a household and couldn’t visit us. We of course complained to her in our letters, but it didn’t do anything, she couldn’t have us with her; it would have been impossible. On our thirteenth birthday my brother came to me and said, ‘So, Hannah, we’re 13 now, I’m not going to hit you anymore.‘ After a year, our stay in Deal came to a dramatic end. One day my brother had to help in the garden again and something happened that didn’t satisfy Mr. Howard, so he took him to task. Mr. Howard was furious and slapped my brother. We weren’t used to anything like that. Mr. Howard was a small man and my brother, rather large and strong, hit him back. In the end this was very fortunate, since it was the reason, we were sent very quickly to London. However, it was also the end of our life together, since Rafael went to a home for boys and I to a home for girls. Of course, my mother spent her free afternoons with us. She would pick us up from the homes, we’d get something to eat or go for a walk in the park, and then she’d bring us back. It was easy for us children to learn English, but for older people, like my mother, it was a problem. Once, for example, my mother, my brother, and I went out on the street. My mother could speak a little English and had learned more in the meantime, but we could speak it much better. We annoyed her with curse words and she wanted us to stop and said with full conviction, ‘Oh, pipe up!‘ That, of course, added to our amusement since it should have been ‘Pipe down!‘ The so-called Emigranto developed among immigrants. That was a mix of German and English. Mrs. Dr. Gellner, a German, the director of the girls’ home in London, had a mentally disabled son. Michael couldn’t go to school. I became friends with him and began to tutor him. That was the beginning of my pedagogical career. I decided to work with children professionally after having given up my actual wish of becoming a doctor on account of the emigration. After I passed the entrance exams for a public school in Bristol – the Badminton School for Girls and left London, I gave Michael over to my former Latin teacher from Vienna, Mrs. Dr. Klein, who saved herself in 1939 by becoming a maid in London, and she continued to support him. In 1946 she went back to Vienna and became a grammar schoolteacher and a high school principal in Floridsdorf. She was a member of the SPÖ [Social Democratic Party of Austria] party delegation, a member of the SPÖ central committee, a member of the SPÖ district board of the SPÖ Viennna/Leopoldstadt, was the spokesperson of schools in the parliament, and I remained friends with her until her death in 1986. These public schools are not actually public, but rather very expensive schools for the children of the well-off. My school was a renowned and very progressive school. There were several immigrants there, of whom I was initially the youngest. We had many opportunities to play sports; there was a swimming pool, tennis courts, hockey fields, and much more. When the bombings of Bristol became dangerous, the school was evacuated to a former hotel on the north coast of Devonshire, in Lynmouth, a small fishing town.”

Date of Interview: July 2004
Source: Menschenleben