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  Introduction

  Asylum is an extraordinarily tense, painful, dramatic–and at times almost miraculous–account of an Austrian-Jewish writer’s persecution, flight and rescue, first in Vienna and then in wartime France. It was written at the time of the actual events: drafted in hiding in a convent in the Dordogne from 1943 to 1944 and finally completed after the end of the War in Europe, in 1945.

  The account is the memoir of Moriz Scheyer, who before being driven out of Vienna in 1938 was the arts page editor for one of the city’s principal newspapers, the Neues Wiener Tagblatt. As such, he was a personal friend of Stefan Zweig, acquainted with Arthur Schnitzler, Gustav Mahler and Bruno Walter, and himself the author of several volumes of essays and travel writings. So, despite his own protestation that this is not ‘a literary work’, it is a recollection of the Holocaust by a prominent, published writer.

  The manuscript was discovered by chance–by my brother and myself–in the loft of my father, Konrad Singer, Scheyer’s stepson, when he was in the process of moving house at the age of eighty-nine. Scheyer seems to have made some attempt at publication: what we found was a typescript, contained in a folder inscribed with the address of Stefan Zweig’s first wife, in America. However, Scheyer died in 1949 and my father, who inherited his original typescript, did not pursue publication; indeed, he strongly disliked the book and its intensely ‘anti-German’ sentiments, and believed himself to have destroyed it. The typescript that I came upon was, it seems, a carbon copy kept by my grandmother–Scheyer’s wife, Margarethe (Grete)–and had found its way into the loft amongst other of her possessions.

  Scheyer’s memoir has a number of unique features, even among Holocaust survivors’ accounts. First, as noted, it was written at the time, with the events fresh and raw; almost a diary, it rivets the reader with the actual perspectives and minute details of those days. Secondly–just because of the events that happened to him–it covers an unusually wide range of experiences: the Anschluss in Austria; Paris during the ‘phoney war’ and under German Occupation; the Exodus from Paris; life in two different French concentration camps; an attempt to escape to Switzerland; contact with the Resistance in the Unoccupied Zone; and, finally, a dramatic rescue, and clandestine life in a convent in the Dordogne. Thirdly, there is the distinctive voice: Scheyer, who had been a serious Viennese literary journalist, dissects what is happening to him with a relentlessly acerbic critique.

  The text that follows is a faithful–unedited–translation of Moriz Scheyer’s typescript, which was written in German and entitled, simply, ‘Ein Ueberlebender’ (A Survivor). I have kept footnotes to a minimum but have added relevant biographical notes in an appendix of ‘People mentioned in the text’, as well as an epilogue giving further information on the narrative’s events and its characters’ subsequent history, and a summary of Moriz Scheyer’s life and career.

  P. N. Singer, London, 2016

  Moriz Scheyer in 1937. This is the only surviving image of Scheyer from the 1930s and is reproduced from his press pass for the Vienna Opera.

  Grete (Margarethe) Scheyer, painted in 1923 by the Austrian artist Anton Faistauer, probably at Salzburg.

  Sláva Kolářová, the Scheyers’ Czech-born housekeeper and faithful companion throughout their wartime experiences.

  Title page of Scheyer’s original manuscript, which he entitled EIN UEBERLEBENDER (A Survivor).

  Asylum

  Written in hiding at the Convent of Labarde, Dordogne, 1943–44, and revised at Labarde in 1945

  * CHARACTERS (AND ORGANISATIONS) identified with an asterisk are noted with brief biographies in the Appendix ‘People mentioned in the text.’

  Foreword

  THIS BOOK HAS NOTHING to do with ‘literature’ as normally understood: the circumstances of its composition preclude that from the outset.

  To begin with, there was everything that happened to me before November 1942, the date when I found refuge in the Franciscan Convent of Labarde. It was while I was in hiding there that two friends, Pierre Vorms* and the great writer Jean Cassou*–who had himself just come out of prison–finally persuaded me to undertake the project. Even then, though, our salvation from the Germans was still a long way off. The Gestapo headhunters were going to their sport more energetically–and the fate of any Jew that they tracked down was more gruesome–than ever.

  There were many times when, even if by good fortune I managed some work on this book, I did not know whether I would be delivered into the clutches of the Germans the very next day. Many times when I was forced suddenly to suspend work for an indefinite period–to bundle the papers up hastily so as not to put the Sisters of the Convent in serious danger. Many times when–to put it bluntly–the end seemed to be before me. In such circumstances you do not think in terms of creating literature out of all this material, or of having a ‘good story’. If I did have such thoughts, indeed, I would hardly deserve to have survived the persecution.

  It may be that the way in which the words, the sentences, the pages of which this book consists have been put together is the result of a certain intellectual effort. But their content, their essence, has a quite different source. And that source is a profound emotional anguish. An anguish in which the wretched sufferer is able only to keep repeating the same, stammering question: How could it all have happened?

  Any answer to this question would have to address the guilty–all the guilty–and would entail an appropriate punishment. In this case, however, a true ‘day of reckoning’ of that kind is highly unlikely: the more time passes, the less importance the world will attach to such a notion. People will have more important concerns than the responsibility for war crimes in general, and the suffering of the Jews in particular.

  But that does not make it any less necessary to pose the question–and to keep posing the question ‘How could it all have happened?’ even if all one may hope to achieve by doing so is to stir the conscience, the thoughts, the anger of just a few individuals. There is, too, an inescapable duty to bear witness, to play one’s part, however modest that may be. This book has no ambition beyond that of recording the witness of a Jewish refugee.

  I have absolutely no pretension to be a historian. If I touch upon wider events, I do so only inasfar as I experienced them myself. It would be wrong, too, to characterise the work as a ‘memoir’: my own life is only of importance to the extent that it was dragged into the stream of world events–the opposite of the case with a memoir.

  Besides, memoirs aim to be as ‘interesting’ as possible. I have made no attempt to be interesting–only to be truthful. Nor have I been principally concerned with accounts of external events–even with the description of atrocities–but rather with the attempt to express an internal condition: a state of the soul. My deepest desire has been to portray the mental misery that the German persecution created in us Jews. Even among the survivors, many–so many–have carried on, but with their souls broken: maimed for life.

  I know that I will provoke the criticism in some quarters that I talk too much about Jewish refugees–as though nobody else existed, as though others had not suffered too.

  It is abs
olutely true that others–innumerable others–were made to suffer, no less than we. And I have not failed to make mention of that. I myself happen to be both a refugee and a Jew; and one who bears witness must bear witness to his own personal experiences. But there is another point, too; and that is that whatever those others were made to suffer at least had some connection–direct or indirect–with the War. Their treatment at the hands of Germany was unprecedented and absolutely without justification. But, for all that they suffered, at least it was not the case that their freedom, their existence, their lives, were forfeit–forfeit from the very outset–simply by virtue of their birth. Even Hitler did not have the audacity to question whether they were actually human beings.

  Whereas Goebbels, Hitler’s official cultural spokesman, stated quite baldly in a speech immediately after the ‘Advent’ of the Third Reich: ‘If I am asked whether the Jews are not also human beings, I can only reply: are not bugs also animals?’

  What was perpetrated against the Jews, moreover, had nothing to do with the War. The project was undertaken long before the War, and would have been carried out systematically–in accordance with a clearly laid-out programme of extermination–even if there had been no War. And it was perpetrated against unarmed, defenceless people, who were unable to mobilise themselves, unable to resist. Perpetrated against powerless victims, who had already been deprived of their rights, despised, insulted, and humiliated in both body and soul. Perpetrated as a result of the impetuosity–as cowardly as it was crazy–of a madman, with the willing, happy participation of his ‘Comrades of the People’.

  It was perpetrated, too, without the civilised world daring to demand that it be stopped, or at least daring to make clear its abhorrence. Only later, much later–only when it was already far too late–did we begin to get all those fine expressions of solidarity, which came in the context of general war propaganda. And, while it was being perpetrated, states which had every opportunity to do so, and could have done so without cost, failed in their duty to open their gates to the persecuted. The granting of a visa was a process invariably attended with all manner of obstacles, restrictions, provisos and caveats, before–through a grate in the wall, reluctantly, like alms to a troublesome beggar–the document was finally dispensed. Or not dispensed, as the case might be. The lowliest consular official was suddenly a god.

  No: others had to undergo all kinds of trials, certainly. But our journey of spiritual misery–to speak of nothing else–was without parallel. You have to have been a refugee yourself, to have lived as a Jew under the sign of the Swastika, to know what that really meant. And whatever anyone might say with regard to that… it would still be too little.

  How could it all have happened? We survivors–we who went through it–we, surely, have the right to keep asking that question. While at the same time bearing witness–in our name, and in that of the silenced six million. The martyrs: men, women and children, whom the ‘Führer’–the Leader of his murderous Germany–hounded to their deaths.

  If this book had the effect of making a few of those who were spared the fate of being refugees, of being Jewish, in the Hitler era, ask themselves the question, How could it all have happened?, that would be the best reparation I could receive–the greatest achievement of my life.

  1

  The ‘Anschluss’

  ON 7TH FEBRUARY 1938 COUNT G., of the Bundeskanzler’s office, had lunch with me in my apartment in the Mariahilferstrasse in Vienna.

  It was shortly after Schuschnigg’s* return from Berchtesgaden. Count G. gave us an account of the reception that Schuschnigg had been accorded: how Hitler had first of all kept the Austrian Chancellor waiting for hours in an antechamber; how, in response to any mild attempt at counter-argument, he had resorted to shouting in the most vulgar way imaginable; how Schuschnigg, a hardened smoker, had not been allowed to touch a cigarette for the entire duration; and how, that evening, by the time he arrived in Salzburg, he was in such a state of nervous collapse that he had to break his onward journey to Vienna.

  G. ended his account with these words: ‘There can be no doubt about it. In spite of any assurances to the contrary from Hitler, we are going to be swallowed up by the Germans. Still, we should have at least a year till that happens.’

  That was the 7th of February.

  On the evening of 9th March I left my office at the Neues Wiener Tagblatt* to return home. In the Rotenturmstrasse I encountered a group of white-stockinged adolesecent lads, barking ‘Hitler!’ and ‘Sieg Heil!’ alternately. (The white stocking, being a sign of affiliation to the Nazis, was supposedly illegal.) Two policemen on patrol at the corner of Brandstätte and Rotenturmstrasse gave the group clear indication of their approval. Schuschnigg was still the chancellor of Austria. But, even now, both policemen were displaying Swastikas openly on their uniform.

  Near me, an old woman shouted excitedly at the demonstrators: ‘Austria!’1 At this, one of the youths went up to her and laughed in her face: ‘Don’t fret yourself, granny. Your Austria’s had it. Heil Hitler!’ The old woman burst into tears.

  Two days later the ‘Anschluss’ was a fait accompli. Whatever political events took place in between were in a sense no more than directorial details in the staging of the Tragedy of Austria.

  The outrage had been carried out overnight. And all that remained of the famous ‘face of Austria’ was an unpleasant leer. No one could have imagined such a swift transformation possible. Within the physiognomy of Vienna, it was only lifeless objects that retained their previous appearance; but even these appeared somehow changed from within. The very air seemed to have acquired a different taste.

  Everywhere you went there was a rabble. People who suddenly felt they were someone–who saw that this was their chance. People who looked on the Anschluss, first and foremost, as an opportunity to get involved in the witchhunt. Everywhere the triumphant grins of those traitors, with their ‘illegal’ party insignia, hitherto carefully hidden but now worn proudly and openly. Everywhere the vulgar hubbub of a provincial market. In short, there was a gross, ugly ‘Teutonification’ of the city, which felt like a punch in the face. If we were not talking about a terrible catastrophe, the whole thing would have resembled nothing so much as an elaborate festival of bad taste. Language itself became a caricature overnight. In the press, on the radio, in every announcement, a ghastly sort of jargon had already appeared along with the goose-step, emanating from the Nazi mania for neologisms and abbreviations, for Germanification in all things. Austria became ‘the Ostmark’ (Eastern Province); Vienna, the capital of the ‘Lower Danube Area’.

  And for whole weeks the incessant, painful noise of the loudspeakers and chants in the streets. It was quite impossible to escape from them.

  The fact that the great and the good in other countries, who had stood by and observed the shameless Rape of Austria without lifting a finger–the fact that these people attached no significance to such chants as ‘Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil’ or ‘One People–one Empire–one Leader’, was no longer a surprise. That they were totally unaffected by such heroic battle-cries as ‘Jew–perish!’2 or ‘When Jewish blood spurts from the knife’, was quite natural. We were only talking about Jews, after all. The anti-Semitic persecutions in Germany had never previously troubled these ‘representatives of world opinion’. That they were not prepared to take notice of a chant like ‘Today Germany–tomorrow the whole world’, on the other hand–that was something that would cost them dear. They simply refused to take any notice, too, of the fact that–as early as March–high-ranking German officers in Vienna could be heard to declare openly: ‘Now we have got Austria. But in a few months we will be in Prague. After that–well, after that, we shall see.’

  We saw, all right.

  ‘Jew–perish!’ From the first day of the invasion, the ‘Comrades of the People’ started to put this programme into action.

  Bürckel, the first Gauleiter of the ‘Ostmark’, had given an assurance immediately after his arrival in Vi
enna, that the Austrian Jews would feel a much sharper wind blowing than the Germans had. And Seyss-Inquart*–who had hitherto been a supporter of so many ‘non-Aryan’ businesses, and been a charming dinner-guest and bridge-partner in so many Jewish households renowned for their cooking–this same Seyss-Inquart made the following pronouncement at a meeting: ‘We are indebted to our brothers from the Reich for everything. But there is one respect in which they may learn something from us, and that is how to deal with the Jews.’

  Actually, they had nothing to learn in this respect, these brothers from the Reich. And the brothers from the Ostmark had nothing to teach. They were exactly on a par–the Heroes of the North and the Golden Heart of Vienna.

  If, nonetheless, a certain unhappiness began to be felt on the part of the ‘Comrades of the People’ in the Ostmark, then this was only because the ‘Master Race’ from the Reich, quite naturally, kept the lion’s portion of the Jewish booty for themselves, while the Austrian hyenas had to content themselves with the crumbs that fell from the table of the Feast of Aryanisation. They were quite substantial crumbs, to be sure, but they were still only crumbs.

  It would require a separate book to enumerate the crimes perpetrated against the Austrian Jews from the day of the ‘Advent’ up to 15th August 1938, the day on which I was finally able to leave Austria. What a tortuous journey, even to reach the point where finally–after the payment of a sum which the Bandits of the Swastika had the nerve to call a ‘fine for flight from the Reich’, after being robbed down to the shirt on your back, abased and humiliated to the very depths of your soul–where, finally, after all this, you were actually able to have in your hand a passport and a permit to leave the country. From one day to the next I had become an outcast, someone who was fair game: a Jew. Against a Jew, now, everything was permitted, and nothing was forbidden. Or, to look at it another way, nothing was permitted any longer: even my best ‘Aryan’ friends took every imaginable precaution before daring to telephone–or, if they were particularly brave, to visit me in person.