Thoughts and Reflections on the Occasion of the 85th Anniversary of the Kristallnacht by a Holocaust Survivor
S. F R A N K L I N S P I R A
After the Horrifying Terrorist Attacks of October 7, the Phrase ‘Never Again’ Takes On New Meaning
The author and his wife, the late magazine editor Marilyn Spira
“Never again!” is a phrase strongly associated with the lessons of the Holocaust. It was used by liberated prisoners from the Konzentrationslager Buchenwald and popularized by Rabbi Meir Kahane in his 1971 book which carried the phrase as its title. The phrase can be taken as a command to avert a second Holocaust as well as a universalist injunction against all forms of genocide.
On October 7, 2023, a series of coordinated attacks resembling the 19th and 20th century Russian pogroms on the Jews was undertaken by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. The seventh was not only the Sabbath but a Jewish holiday and the attacks took place almost fifty years to date from the Yom Kippur War, which began on October 6, 1973. In Israel, the attacks are referred to as השבת השחורה, or Black Saturday, and הטבח בשמחת תורה, or the Simchat Torah Massacre. The terrorists, on the other hand, called it Operation Deluge.
The attacks took place less than one month ahead of the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Novemberpogrome carried out by the NSDAP’s Sturmabteiling, or SA paramilitary, and the Schutzstaffel, or SS paramilitary forces, along with the participation of members of the Hitlerjugend and many ordinary Germans. —Jonathan Spira
The author (left) in an undated photo, with his mother, prior to leaving Vienna
Today is the anniversary of the Novemberpogrome, or Kristallnacht. I was a 14 year-old boy then and my parents and I never thought of emigrating until the Kristallnacht, even though Jews were gradually being deprived of their rights before then. At that point, it became clear that my parents and I could no longer remain in our homeland.
March 13, 1938 was of course the Anschluß. The Austrian Chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, after trying to appease German Chancellor Adolf Hitler, had been forced by Hitler’s machinations a few days earlier to resign so that the Germans could finally bring the Ostmark – Austria’s ancient name which the Germans then gave to Austria – back to the mother country. German troops swept across the Austrian border in response to a non-existent crisis in the Austrian government faked by German Foreign Minister Hermann Goering, encountering, of course, no resistance.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise. We had been reading about what was going on in Germany in the newspapers; reports about some Jews being sent to concentration camps had made headlines for the past couple of years. The Austrian National Socialist Party – which was illegal within Austria – had become bolder and more outspoken. In fact, it turned out that, despite its illegality, a larger percentage of Austrians were members of the party than Germans were in 1938 in the official German National Socialist Party, the NSDAP. So Hitler’s march into Austria had just been a logical step – yet, we and some 200,000 other Jews had remained in our homes in Austria – most of them in Vienna – thinking that, after all, the German Jews had, for the most part, survived since 1933, so it can’t be all that bad. Few thought of emigrating – until that fateful day in November of 1938.
Hans and Paula Spira, the author’s parents, in an undated photo
The Run-Up to Kristallnacht
Yet, even after the Anschluß, Austrian Jews didn’t even remotely expect what was to follow just a few short months later, and the majority didn’t try to find ways of emigrating. Certainly, the ever-present anti-Semitism of the Austrians had become more open, Jews were gradually deprived of many of the privileges they had enjoyed as full, equal citizens, but they still felt that things had to get better and, after all, they might still be considered bearable. O.K., so the Nazis made elderly Jews scrub the streets to remove pre-Anschluß election slogans; so a few rich Jews were dragged off to concentration camps so the Nazis could put pressure on them to “sell” their businesses to Aryans – at ridiculous prices, in order to gain release, and then only on the condition that they would then leave the country.
But these and numerous other manifestations followed one another with such rapidity that the Jewish population could hardly grasp what was happening. Only slowly did Austria’s Jews wake up to the fact that they were not wanted, that they would have no choice – even if they hadn’t been sent to camps yet or otherwise abused – but to think of leaving.
But did what they wanted really matter? What mattered is that no one wanted them. Indeed, there was practically no way of finding asylum. The United States, more so than most European and South American countries, simply stood by its quota system, which made it possible for a minuscule number of Jews to immigrate yearly, with waiting times for some running into several years. So why even plan to emigrate?
Undoubtedly, the Germans – who, by that time, had full control of everything going on in Austria as well – realized this. They had really tried to make it “palatable” (if such a term can be applicable) for the Jews to leave by allowing them to take along many belongings, particularly those pertaining to their trade. So they took the next logical step – to make sure that the Jews would know that they had to get out of the country, and fast. Undoubtedly, this line of thinking led to the horrors of Kristallnacht.
The author, in an undated photo, fishing near the family’s summer home on the Alte Donau, or Old Danube
My family was one of the lucky ones – with the help of many gentiles. My father’s store, Fotohaus Spira-Ritz, was located within walking distance from our apartment and since I helped out in the store, we had gone to work together that day. Shortly after we got there, one of the employees came running in screaming that a synagogue not far from the store was aflame. Then we started getting phone calls from friends’ homes – the men in the family had been picked up for questioning (we know that later on, many were sent to Dachau and Buchenwald).
My father’s store was considered fairly safe, since his partner, Franz Ritz, a gentile, was one of the most wonderful people we knew. So when, routinely, some Nazis in and out of uniform would come in to demand to know if there were any Jews around, he could easily get rid of them. But, we agreed, it would still be best for my father, Hans, to leave the store.
Of course, he couldn’t return home – we knew from our neighbors how dangerous this was, particularly for heads of family (at the time, women and children were generally not arrested). So we decided he should take the trolley car out to a relative in the suburbs, a relative who was married to a non-Jew and had adopted his sister-in-law’s son, a “pure” Aryan. This proved to be a good idea – while mixed marriages, at the time, were not yet molested too much, the young boy, being quite visible in the yard in his Hitler Youth uniform, completely stopped inquisitive Nazis from looking any farther.
My father remained there for about a day while my mother and I stayed home. We were fortunate, too – the superintendent of the building in which we lived – this was the first person asked by the Nazis in their search for Jewish victims – emphatically told various search parties that she wouldn’t have any Jews living there and that they shouldn’t bother her.
Not until we heard the news broadcasts and read the newspapers did we fully grasp what had happened – and that many of our friends and neighbors hadn’t been that fortunate.
Many pseudo-historians call the Kristallnacht the beginning of the Holocaust. I don’t think it was – it didn’t even come close to the concept of the Endlösung, or Final Solution, which was formulated many months later in Wannsee and would make Germany and Austria Judenrein. Yet, it was meant to give – and did give – the Jews in Germany and Austria a clear signal – get out or face consequences, though no one even remotely expected the consequences to be what they ultimately were.
Since we have all heard and read so much about the Kristallnacht and the many events that followed, I will try to tell you only about my immediate family’s fate after the first seven or eight months of the German annexation of Austria.
Kindertransport statue, Liverpool Station, the railroad station where the author arrived from Vienna in 1939
Encouraging Jews to Emigrate
I had been attending the Amerlinggymnasium, in which about 15% of the students were Jewish. Within a couple of months after the Anschluß, the Jewish students were transferred to a few overcrowded Jewish schools in the second district of Vienna, the mostly-Jewish Leopoldstadt. Going to and leaving school was always dangerous; young hoodlums would try to stir up trouble, sometimes beating up Jewish students. Parents such as mine who could afford it sent their children to the few private schools allowed to accept non-Aryans, but this, too, was soon prohibited, so I was out of school at age 14.
As part of the encouragement to emigrate, the Germans wanted the Jews to learn trades to enable them to get visas – some countries (though not the U.S.) would readily issue visas to skilled laborers – electricians, bakers, bricklayers and so on. The Jewish Gemeinde, or community, was allowed to set up courses taught by experts on every conceivable trade so that the “unskilled” ones – the lawyers, doctors, government employees – would have no excuse to remain behind. My father, who after a career as a bank executive now owned a camera store and also was an experienced and award-winning photographer, taught several courses on processing film; a friend of ours, a portrait photographer, taught his specialty and I took a course with him. Just to become more diversified, I also enrolled in a course learning how to manufacture cosmetics – everything from soap and toothpaste to over-the-counter medications. Tens of thousands of others followed suit. Many of our friends went to the American consulate to look up namesakes in the phone books of major cities and to ask potential or hoped-for prospects to send them the necessary “affidavit of support” so they could at least apply for an American visa, even if they expected a long waiting time.
The author (left) with Bernard Danis, a close friend
We were luckier. We discovered a real, though long-forgotten, relative in Chicago – a great grand uncle who had once been a Hungarian consul in the United States. But he proved to be too old to issue an affidavit – the grantor of an affidavit had to prove that his income is substantial enough so that if the sponsored people came to the U.S. and could not support themselves, he would be able to fully support them. Fortunately, his son-in-law, a successful Chicago attorney – I was impressed by the statement in his affidavit that his income in 1938 had exceeded $20,000 per year – issued affidavits for my parents and me and one or two other equally remotely related families in Vienna.
Having not registered with the U.S. consulate until late 1938 due to my father’s reluctance to even consider leaving Austria, all we could hope for was to be placed on the waiting list, with a chance to get a visa about 18 months later. [Author’s note: this was relatively favorable, considering that those born in Poland, though living in Austria, had a waiting time of many years because the Polish quota had been filled up before the others.]
For months we tried to find a means of leaving Austria for an interim stay somewhere. Then we heard that we could advertise in British newspapers under certain conditions and explain our predicament. We inserted a small classified ad in the Manchester Guardian, which read “Austrian boy, age 14, with affidavit for America, needs temporary home in England.” To our surprise, after a few weeks, a very nice letter from a gentleman in Doncaster, Yorkshire, which is about two hours north of London, arrived, offering to take me into his home. He naïvely offered to pick me up in London the next weekend.
I accepted his offer, explaining it would take a few months before I could leave. I had to wait for an officially authorized children’s transport, a Kindertransport, which eventually materialized and, it almost seemed like a miracle, flawlessly transported me and many other unaccompanied children by train to Belgium, then by ferry to England. Leaving my tearful parents at home, I felt quite uneasy about having been saved.
Around the same time that I started to make efforts to leave Austria, my father contacted a cousin, Marietta Lennard, living in England, with a request similar to that of mine mentioned in the advertisement. British regulations required the warrantor of a refugee to put up a sum of money guaranteeing that the refugee would not become a burden to the government. The cousin, at first, wasn’t willing to do so, but my father was able to arrange to have some money smuggled to her (this was routinely done by South American consulates, at exorbitant exchange rates) and she finally issued the necessary guarantees.
My father followed me to England a few weeks after I had left, just before the Germans attacked Poland. He lived in London by himself.
The author, reading a newspaper at home in Vienna, prior to being forced to flee the city
Visas, Smuggled Funds, and Kindnesses Shown
There was no way we could find for my mother, Paula, to leave. But to our relief, in February 1940, she received her U.S. visa and, while my father and I were still in England, she sailed for New York. Having no money, she accepted a job as a housemaid with a Jewish family who treated her quite shabbily.
My own stay in England proved to be an experience I will never forget. My sponsor was a young teacher in a mining town, with a very small income, a wife and a child. Yet, he unselfishly shared his not always adequate meals with me for about ten months. During my stay, I attended the Percy Jackson Grammar School where I was not only the only Jewish student, but the first Jew most of the other kids had ever seen. I recall that after getting to know me a little, one student told me that I wasn’t at all like Shylock, the only Jew he knew about. But all the students and teachers were cordial and helpful. Also, in the same town, I met an English priest who had adopted an entire Jewish family – including a grandmother and two children – into his modest home.
By comparison, the Orthodox Jewish community in the nearby larger city of Doncaster, where I tried to attend Hebrew School, made me feel like an intruder. They said very directly that it served the assimilated Austrian and German Jews right to have Hitler do to them what he does.
Meanwhile, my father lived modestly in London trying to make some money – illegally (he was not allowed to openly work). His experiences with many British people were similar to mine. To give just one example, when he ate in a modest restaurant and was about to leave, the waiter brought him a large dessert. My father protested that he didn’t order it and couldn’t afford it. The waiter said that the man at the next table, who had already left, saw that he was a refugee, had ordered the dessert and paid for his entire meal.
The author, in an undated photo, on a balcony at the family’s home in Vienna, prior to being forced to flee his native land
My father and I were united in July of 1940 and sailed together to the United States via Canada, where, for the first time in almost a year, we met my mother, after crossing the U.S. border on July 14, 1940. The first item on our agenda was to try to get my grandmother, my mother’s mother, to the U.S. We were finally able to borrow enough money to buy her a visa for Cuba (one could buy visas for many Central and South American countries if one had the money available outside Germany) and pay for her passage. We would worry later about how to get her to New York. Before my grandmother could sail, the United States had become involved in the war.
Instead of sailing to Cuba, my grandmother was deported to Theresienstadt where she died after a short time. Her last months had been somewhat lightened by the food parcels my father’s Viennese business partner continued to send her.
I don’t know if we have learned much from what happened between 1933 and 1945. We, who had lived – often for many generations – in Austria or Germany, believed that the Jews had made too much progress to again be thrown out the way their ancestors had been so many times in the past. The Jews in the United States – with a few notable exceptions – rationalized that these Central European Jews were none of their business. In a way, they were isolationists, just as much as most non-Jewish Americans of the late 1930s.
It’s true that the majority of non-Jews in Germany – and, even more so in Austria – not only didn’t help the Jews, but were glad to see them suffer (or even helped make them suffer more). Yet, in my own experience, I can say that my family and I survived unmolested, thanks to the help of a few very brave and unselfish gentiles. I, at least, owe my life to a gentile Englishman who just wanted to help a Jewish boy, even though he couldn’t afford it. And there were so many others in England who did the same – many of my acquaintances survived only because they found temporary asylum in England.
We should also remember – as much as we may dislike admitting it – that the United States, including a large part of its Jewish population, saw no urgency in helping their fellow Jews in Central Europe. But then I must admit that, between 1933 and 1938, while Austria was independent, the Austrian Jews weren’t exactly jumping to the aid of the German Jews either.
So much could have been done for so many if just the Jews in other lands had acted more quickly when they learned what was happening.
Jonathan Spira, the author’s son, contributed to this essay. It was originally written by the author in 1988 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht. The author died in 2007 after a long illness.
Jonathan Spira is the Editorial Director of the online magazine Frequent Business Traveler and may be contacted at yourjerusalem@gmail.com.
(Photo credit: Accura Media Group)
