The author researched her family’s history, beginning in their homeland, Austria. She wanted to uncover their experiences during the war. I found some of her assessments to be naïve or a bit distant, in the same way as she found some of her relative’s assessments to be less fraught than she had expected. Perhaps it is an Austrian trait to withhold a little emotion.
The prevailing attitude of the author’s family members seemed to be that they would be afforded greater latitude when Hitler rose to power. They had fought for Austria. They had excellent contacts. However, they lacked a grasp of the seriousness of the situation to come. Perhaps the idea that they would not be as badly treated should not have appeased them. They should have been affronted for those that would be treated more poorly. Like Germans who didn’t think Hitler would be so bad if you were a “good German”, or “a good Jew”, they thought they were good Austrians and would be afforded advantages that others would be refused. Even when their rights were curtailed, they found optimism. They were forced out of their apartment, but the apartment they were given was larger and had better plumbing. They thought maybe they would like this Hitler. Things soon changed and so did their attitudes.
After the war ended, many family members never returned and were never heard from again. Eventually, when those who survived discovered the fate of the missing relatives, they learned many had been brutalized and murdered, many had suffered far worse than they had, and they had not had a picnic. The story Anna tells does not seem as horrific as some I have read in the past, however. Perhaps, because several members of her family were in Theresienstadt, the model camp, they had a better lifestyle than those in the death camps. Perhaps her family members had greater forbearance and could withstand the horror around them. Perhaps they simply had more good fortune since those family members did survive and were not sent to the more brutal Concentration Camps. Perhaps the experience in Austria was different than the one in Poland and France and other conquered countries.
From around 1938, when Anna describes the Anschluss, as Germany invades and conquers Austria, until the close, she tries to uncover the family’s secret history. She learned how those who considered themselves true Aryans caused the countries that Germany conquered to descend into a maelstrom of hate and prejudice against all Jews, no matter how slight the relationship. Jews were blamed for all the ills of the people and had to be removed from society. She learned who was deported and who hid in plain sight. She learned how they got through the war. The rest of Germany watched in silence, as their neighbors disappeared. Some watched in fear, since retaliation was brutal, but some completely supported the heinous and brutal Nazi regime and participated in gathering the spoils of war.
I was surprised that the surviving family members returned to Vienna when the war ended. It was their country, they believed, and they wanted to remain. That attitude differs from the victims in most other books I have read on the subject. In most cases, returning victims found their property was gone, their “Aryan” neighbors could not face them and didn’t want to, they were resented, and many times, victimized again. They felt unwelcome. They wanted to go to a country that would welcome them where they could start over to rebuild their broken lives. They did not want to stay with those that had vilified them.
Greed, anti-Semitism and hate for those not purely Aryan, governed the behavior of the Germans in the Nazi Party. They blamed everyone but themselves for their own failures, and wanted what the more successful had achieved without working for it. They needed a scapegoat to explain away their own shortcomings. Of course there were other external influences that caused World War II, such as a failed economy, but that dire state was the result of another unsuccessful war they started, World War I.
I thought that the book was very relevant today, politically, which is unsettling. As our country, the United States, experiences chaos and violence and the media is either silent or promoting it, and the people who are guilty accuse the innocent of causing the problems, I fear we are sliding into the maelstrom without a hope of stopping. Since the news is not accurately reporting violent events, calling them peaceful, they are encouraging it. They appear to be sanctioning the mayhem and protests against innocent victims. They are sanctimonious and think they are better and know better than the factions they are protesting against. It seems all too familiar, as the disenchanted run wild and rampage. Have the Brown Shirts come to America?
This book was given to me by librarything.com