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| ISBN-13: | 9781742240954 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNSW Press |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 576 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
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From Vienna to Yogyakarta
The Life of Herb Feith
By Jemma Purdey
University of New South Wales Press Ltd
Copyright © 2011 Jemma PurdeyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74224-095-4
CHAPTER 1
Childhood (1930–45)
THE PORTRAIT ABOVE the station platform was one of the most beautiful he had ever seen–a queen in a tiara, looking down from her regal pose on the relieved faces of all on board the train, including the Feith family from Vienna. It was late March 1939. A journey that started more than a year earlier in their apartment on the Augartenstrasse had led them here to a railway station in Belgium, and in another eight weeks it would end on the other side of the world.
Herb was not yet eight years old when the Nazis stormed Vienna and annexed Austria to the German Third Reich on 12 March 1938. The only child of Jewish parents, both in their late thirties, Herb was raised in a middle-class household just outside the inner ring that circles Vienna's commercial, business and cultural heart. His family lived in Leopoldstadt, home to many from Vienna's Jewish community, which before the March 1938 Anschluss accounted for approximately twenty per cent of the city's population. At the end of his street was Augarten, a large park, and a short tram ride or walk away was central Vienna. The Feiths' apartment was modest but comfortable and large enough for the small family of three, a grandmother, until her death when Herb was six years old, and servant. It overlooked the contained and concreted Danube River. Rigid banks channelled the river through the city and marked the border between the city's inner and outer rings. In the final stages of the Second World War, this part of the river was the last line of battle between the liberating Russian army and the Nazi Wehrmacht, and the buildings on its banks bore the brunt of artillery exchange. The Feiths' apartment was precisely here, on the border between the first and second districts of the city, in a district where successive waves of immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe had settled. Beyond the Augarten were Vienna's renowned park and fairground, Wiener Prater, and the Praterstern, then Vienna's largest railway station. The Russian army targeted infrastructure like the Praterstern as they sought to overrun the Germans in 1945. The Feiths' apartment building situated in this zone was also destroyed.
At weekends Herb went walking with his parents, grandparents and cousins in the mountains and forests outside Vienna. His father accompanied him on foot or by tram to kindergarten and later to school. It was on these trips with his Anglophone father that the foundations for Herb's English language were laid. By all accounts, he had an idyllic early childhood in a loving household. He shared cuddles in his parents' bed on Sunday mornings. His grandmother sewed clothes for his Teddy bear, and the household put on their own Punch and Judy shows for his birthday parties. Herb enjoyed an extended family of first and second cousins and aunts and uncles. Herb's father, Arthur, was a leather salesman who worked for several factories before he opened his own leathergoods store. Herb's mother, Lily (née Schrötter), was a radiographer's assistant. Both of their families, like most Viennese Jews, were social democrats. The Feith family, originally from Germany and Moravia and ethnically Jewish, was agnostic. Herb's maternal grandmother, Marie, who was from Poland and with whom Herb and his parents lived for a time during his childhood, came from a family of rabbis and kept a kosher household. Arthur and Lily chose not to expose Herb to religion until he could think and feel for himself. Herb said he did not become aware of his Jewishness until the Nazis occupied Vienna.
Herb started to suffer nightmares soon after the Nazis first came to Austria. He remembered that the nightmares were connected to air drops of Nazi propaganda leaflets. After the Anschluss, regulations to restrict the movement and activities of Vienna's Jews were immediately passed. They were banned from parks and were referred to only as 'Israel' or 'Sarah'. His father's store, like all Jewish businesses, would have been requisitioned or Aryanised in spring 1938; it is likely that his mother would have lost her job around this time, too. From March 1938 it was clear that Vienna, and potentially all of Europe, was an increasingly unsafe place for Jews. After the Anschluss the Feith family, together with thousands of other Jews, began their attempt to leave Austria.
Arthur and Lily managed fairly well to shelter Herb from the increasingly difficult realities of day-to-day life in Vienna and the political and social climate that was making it impossible for Jews to remain there. His parents and their friends were preoccupied with the quest for visas to enable them to get away. Herb would wonder at the hushed conversations among adults in the kitchen, the steady stream of people coming to ask his father for help with their documents and particularly with their English. Herb's father had lived in England before the outbreak of the First World War and was interned there as an enemy alien for its duration. He spoke English fluently, and friends and family frequently called upon him to assist them with letters of application to countries that might offer them asylum. His knowledge of English and England meant that Arthur was able to help his niece Edith, then 16, to escape to England in late 1938 by advertising her services as a domestic maid in London newspapers. Edith was the daughter of Arthur's sister, Rosa, who was killed in a traffic accident when Edith was only four years old and her brother Leo was 14. Although Arthur Feith's English-language proficiency and contacts in England gave him a potential advantage in this frantic search for refuge outside Nazi-occupied Europe, there is no indication that a British sponsor for the family was ever likely. Ironically, Arthur Feith's status as an enemy alien internee during the First World War might have hindered his chances of being offered refuge in the Second.
Living as they were in a largely Jewish neighbourhood, it is unlikely that Herb would have encountered the humiliation, violence and degradation heaped on Jews daily in other parts of the city. Herb testified that he remained largely untouched by his parents' anxieties as they did their best to maintain normal life at home. As he remembered it, 'somehow my parents seemed to have protected me ... didn't have much sense of horror.' In a postcard Arthur wrote while visiting Austria in 1977, he reminds Herb of a visit they made to Lainzer Tiergarten, a nature reserve, 'shortly before emigration'. Rather than being sheltered and protected, Herb recalled that in the weeks before their departure from Vienna he took a walk alone at night through the snow and found propaganda pamphlets dropped by the German forces. That Arthur and Lily would have let Herb out alone, particularly at night, during this time is remarkable and perhaps doubtful. The story reveals, however, that Herb remembered feeling a level of security or, at least, that he had little awareness of the social and political atmosphere and of the fear and expectations of Jews and other Viennese in 1938–39. Herb's memories of his childhood were, not surprisingly, vague. He did, however, have a clear memory of being wrenched from school on the day the city's synagogues were set alight in what became known as Kristallnacht, 9–10 November 1938, a week after his eighth birthday. That evening his mother held him up to the window to watch the city burn and asked him never to forget what he was witnessing. Herb was then moved to a new school with only Jewish students, and he suddenly realised that his life was changing. Days were filled with movement, plans, the assembling of documents, letter-writing and petitioning, packing and posting. Despite the unsettling, dangerous and anxious times after Kristallnacht, Herb's grades at his new school on the Börsegasse in Vienna's central old town matched the high standards he had reached at his previous one.
Months earlier, on 11 July 1938, at the time of the thirty-nation Evian Conference to discuss the problem of Europe's involuntary emigrants, the Feiths lodged their applications for visas with the Australian Embassy in Vienna. Demand for visas from Jews in Vienna was extremely heavy. In the three weeks after Anschluss, the Australian Consul in Vienna received 10 000 visa applications. By April 1938, after a blitz against Jewish businesses, 50 000 Viennese Jews had registered for emigration to foreign lands. Several members of the Feith and Schrötter families managed to escape to France, including Herb's cousin Leo and his family and Arthur's oldest sister Ida and her daughter Lily. Although Arthur and Lily Feith had lodged their application for admission to Australia in July, they had not found an Australian sponsor to act as their guarantor by the time of Kristallnacht.
* * *
On the Feiths' Application for Admission of Relatives and Friends to Australia, dated 24 November 1938, is the note 'Form 47 sent direct from Vienna to Canberra on 11/7/38', indicating the date they had first lodged an application for a visa to Australia. Ten months later, on 3 April 1939, they were issued the visa by the British Consul in Vienna, and they were finally on their way. The Feiths stopped in Brussels briefly, just long enough for one of Lily's sisters, Lotte, to come from Paris to say goodbye. They all understood that it could be a very long time before they would meet again. The farewells in Vienna before embarking on their journey into exile were overshadowed with a great sense of foreboding. His uncle Ludwig gave Herb a parcel of sausages for the trip, and another relative passed him a more precious talisman, a watch. No one knew what would become of those left behind, and all were very aware of how lucky the family of three was to gain visas for Australia. It was already April 1939; every day the realisation that time was running out–that the door was quickly closing for Jews trying to leave Nazi-occupied Europe–became more acute. It was particularly difficult for families and couples to gain entry to a country that was safe from Europe's dangerous political situation. As Herb once described it, they knew it was very possibly a matter of life and death.
From Brussels they travelled to London, where the family stayed for several days in a Jewish hostel awaiting the departure of their ship, SS Oronsay, from Southampton for passage to Australia. Eight-year-old Herb, perhaps for the first time, felt a great sense of loss for what he was leaving and fear for what lay ahead. After washing one morning in the communal bathroom at the hostel, Herb realised that he had removed his newly bequeathed watch and left it behind. When he returned to find it, the watch was gone, presumably stolen. Herb was inconsolable. Although he was never one to be attached to possessions, the watch represented a life and family left behind and the prospect of an unknown future across oceans. Like so many refugees, the Feiths set out from Europe with very few possessions–certificates of marriage, school enrolments, births and graduations and a few photographs. Herb's watch, a gift of great significance for any boy, and its loss, represented so much more at the time of his exile.
The Oronsay sailed to Australia via several ports, including Gibraltar, Marseilles, Naples, Port Said, Suez, Aden and Colombo. Passengers could disembark for a short while at each port, which, for a young boy must have been a great adventure. The Feiths were, nevertheless, exasperated by the heat of the Middle East and South Asia and Herb, having heard stories of the ritual dunking of passengers as they crossed the Equator, fretted until they had passed into the Southern Hemisphere without incident. It is likely the Feiths knew some of their fellow passengers aboard the Oronsay. They may have met the Jaruslawsky family from Berlin, who were also bound for Melbourne and had the same visa sponsor. Their ship called at Perth and Adelaide before reaching their destination, Melbourne's Station Pier, on 29 May 1939.
Australia and the refugee problem, 1938
Australia's representative at the Evian Conference of 6–13 July 1938, Thomas White, Minister for Trade and Customs, submitted his report to the government shortly after he returned to Australia. Meanwhile, as the Feith family and thousands of others knocked on the door of the Australian and other embassies and consulates in Vienna, the Australian Government did not respond to White's report for several months. On 21 September 1938, when asked about refugees in the House of Representatives, the Minister for the Interior, John McEwen, stalled further: 'The Government has not yet had an opportunity to consider the report submitted by the Minister.'
In May 1938 the Australian Government had fixed its quota of Jewish refugees at 300 per month, with preference to be given to German and Austrian Jews. It also lowered the sum of money refugees (with guarantors) were required to hold from £500 to £50. The Evian Conference in July did nothing to alter the Australian Government's position. Australia and the other nations at the Conference failed to recognise the gravity of the situation of Europe's Jews at that time. It was not until 1 December 1938, after Kristallnacht, that the Australian Government finally announced it would accept a total of 15 000 Jews over a period of three years. However, it was also quick to stress that these admissions would be highly conditional. McEwen told the House of Representatives:
In arriving at the figure of 15 000 over a period of three years, the Government has been influenced by the necessity that the standards of living should not be disturbed ... [it] will approve of only the admission of those classes whose entry into Australia will not disturb existing labour conditions ... Although the refugee problem is one quite apart from the general question of immigration, in that it deals with the specific question of the amelioration of the conditions of oppressed people, at the same time it is essential that it should be considered in relation to the general question of immigration ... [and] should conform to the same principles as those governing the entry of white aliens generally ...
Desperate as is the need of many of these unfortunate people, it is not the intention of the Government to issue permits for entry influenced by the necessity of individual cases. On the contrary, it is felt that it will be possible for Australia to play its part amongst the nations of the world, in absorbing its reasonable quota of these people, while at the same time selecting those who will become valuable citizens of Australia, and, we trust, patriots of their new home, without this action disturbing industrial conditions in Australia.
McEwen's repeated statements here and elsewhere that meeting its obligations in terms of the Jewish refugee 'problem' in Europe should cause minimal disruption of economic conditions in Australia were in response to often vitriolic debate in both houses of the Australian Parliament in the preceding months, led by Labor member Senator Armstrong, about the possible threat these refugees posed to the jobs of Australians. Moreover, the concerns expressed in the Parliament, the media and elsewhere in Australia at this time were not restricted to economics but, as one MP put it, with the potential for the 'formation of racial colonies in Australia'.
In late 1938, as the situation became increasingly dire for Jews in Europe, the Australian Government, which had for months been avoiding it, found itself face to face with the issue when the first Jews began arriving on its shores seeking asylum. Their arrival brought to a head critical debate about immigration and 'white aliens'. In October 1938 several passenger ships from Europe carried German and Austrian Jews who did not possess the appropriate admission visas but intended to seek asylum. The Minister for the Interior issued a directive to shipping companies not to allow passengers without landing permits to disembark at Australian ports, saying that a number of passengers, all of them Jewish, were planning to try to stay in Australia. Civil liberties and religious leaders responded by expressing concerns that such a move could be interpreted overseas as an anti-Semitic policy. Perhaps more powerful than the lobbying of these groups, however, were the testimonies of those arriving from Germany and Austria who brought first-hand accounts of Hitler's tyranny. Newspapers, such as Melbourne's Argus, carried reports daily from those on board the arriving ships, including this account of refugees on the Dutch liner Nieuw Holland on 11 October 1938:
Two brothers who were among those without permits said that they owned a timber business in Vienna, which was confiscated when the Germans entered the country. When Hitler came to Vienna storm troopers were given three days to do whatever they liked to the Jews. Jews walking in the streets were accosted by the troopers, if they admitted that they were Jews they were beaten with rubber truncheons. If they attempted to defend themselves the troopers would draw knives and inflict even more serious injuries. Jews found in an amusement park were forced to run and jump obstacles until they were exhausted. Their faces were then blackened with boot polish and they were forced to lie down in pools of water about the park until they paid a 'fine' of five shillings. Their hair was then cropped and they were released.
One night the brothers, accompanied by their father, aged 63 years, and by their mother, aged 58 years, were walking in the street when a band of troopers accosted them, and after assaulting them arrested the whole family and took them to barracks, where they were subjected to further punishment before being locked in the cells. They were so severely injured that they were unable to eat for three days.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from From Vienna to Yogyakarta by Jemma Purdey. Copyright © 2011 Jemma Purdey. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,Introduction,
PART 1,
1 Childhood (1930–45),
2 Youth (1945–51),
PART 2,
3 Going up: Indonesia (1951–53),
4 Engaging Indonesia (1953–56),
PART 3,
5 Cornell years (1957–60),
6 Young scholar at work (1961–65),
7 Indonesia's cataclysm (1965–69),
PART 4,
8 The professorial years (1969–77),
9 Imagining peace (1978–90),
PART 5,
10 Retirement, 'repatterning' and renewal (1991–2001),
Requiem,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Glossary,
Index,