Back from whence we came?

I’m in a plane bumping through the skies toward Juneau, returning from Los Angeles. At my feet is a leather bag containing wafer-thin papers signed by Nazi storm troopers in 1938.

One document informs my grandfather, the Jewish Doctor Rudolf Braun, he is no longer permitted to treat Aryan patients. Another document discharges his Aryan household staff because it is, according to the Third Reich, sullying to work for a Jew.

I carried these documents to LA and to the Austrian consulate. I presented them alongside my birth certificate, my parents’ marriage certificate, my son’s birth certificate, my husband’s death certificate, and other papers produced by other units of government of various type and vintage.

In 2020 Austria passed a law granting citizenship to victims of Nazi persecution and their direct descendants. Unlike most citizenship processes, this one does not require that one speak German, reside in or even visit Austria, take any test, or pay any fees. It is, the country says, a form of reparations, and my kids and I will take it.

My father’s father, die Judische Arzt Rudolf Braun, was a doctor in the village of Piesting in Wiener Neustadt, south of Vienna in the Lower Alps. He took over the practice from his father, who had been a doctor, and his mother, a dentist. My great-grandparents - Gisela and Jakob Braun - had attended University of Vienna medical school together in the 1890s. A retiring doctor in Piesting had given them his practice along with his house. Gisela and Jakob had two sons and a daughter, including my grandfather.

As a young doctor, my grandfather traveled to Germany for an internship, where he met my grandmother Liesel Hertz. It was the early 1930s, and my grandfather observed Hitler’s influence and the rising mood of antisemitism. When Hitler came to power in 1933, they promptly decamped for Austria. My grandfather vowed that if Hitler ever came to Austria, they would leave.

By 1938, my grandparents were living in the house in Piesting and my grandfather had a thriving medical practice. The house had central heating and a stream flowed through the backyard. My grandfather had the first car in the village, which he used to make house calls. My father was three. They named him Peter because the name works in many languages and they weren’t sure where they might end up raising him.

In February my grandfather got word there would be a plebiscite - a vote in Austria - on whether to let Hitler annex the country. My grandfather wrote to an aunt and uncle who lived in the US requesting sponsorship. The US had quotas limiting visas for Austrians, and required applicants to have an American sponsor who pledged to financially support them and provide tax returns as proof of financial capacity. The Breiners, living in Connecticut, came through, and my grandfather secured visas for himself, my grandmother, and my father.

The Nazis served my grandfather another paper. This one states that the Jewish Doctor Rudolf Braun, on account of his impending departure, is donating his car to the Nazi storm troopers. The Nazis specify the make and model of the car, and note that my grandfather is making this gift "freiwillig" - of his own free will. My grandfather signed it at gunpoint.

After the Nazis stole my grandfather’s car, his non-Jewish neighbor Hans Korrer gave my grandfather rides on the back of his motorcycle so he could continue to make house calls to his patients - at great personal risk for abetting a Jew in violating Nazi orders.

My grandparents secured tickets to the US. In July 1938, my father and his parents took a train to the German port city of Hamburg where they departed on the SS Washington for New York City.

The Nazis froze the assets of any Jews leaving the country, which meant my grandparents had to leave their money behind for the Reich. My grandfather came up with a partial workaround.

Before leaving, he arranged for some of their furniture to be shipped - enormous floor-to-ceiling mahogany cabinets with heavy locking doors. He removed the locking mechanisms and chiseled out space behind the locks, then melted gold from his dental practice - used for fillings - and poured it into the hollows before refitting the locks.

Shortly after the furniture arrived in Connecticut, my grandfather bought a house that served as the family home and my grandfather’s first medical office in the US. Although he spoke no English when he arrived, he and my grandmother determined not to speak German. He studied in the library and within three months took and passed his medical boards in English.

My grandparents remained in Connecticut and lived long lives. They spoke in heavily accented English. They relished travel, they collected rocks and coins and stamps, they had a Siamese cat named Cocoa that my grandfather would swing by the base of its tail - “Cocoa loves it, see?” And cocoa did.

My grandmother could be a hard woman. Every summer I would visit for a week and play with my cousin Kim - until my grandmother had an argument with Kim’s mother and never let me play with Kim again.

So I wasn’t surprised that she never forgave Austria. They never owned up to what they did, she said of the Austrians. The Germans in the 1980s when I was growing up were taking account of their past, limiting certain expressions of nationalism and providing apologies - my Oma and I went to her hometown of Muenster as guests of the city to receive an official apology. The Austrians never apologized, she said. They pretend they were victims, but they welcomed Hitler with ticker-tape parades.

Hitler was born in Austria. Historians say Austria represented about 8 percent of the population of the Third Reich, but about 13 percent of the SS, 40 percent of concentration camp personnel, and 70 percent of those running concentration camps. So my grandmother’s grudge may have been reasonable.

Our family’s stories were the backdrop of my life, vague and impressionistic. A few years ago I asked my father if I imagined the Nazi car theft story, and he produced a box from the basement and showed me the document. Today I delivered that document, the fading ink of my young grandfather’s coerced signature, to an Austrian official in Los Angeles.

She was kind. Her job was to photocopy my documents and mail them all to Vienna for evaluation. I wanted her to say, you really knocked this out of the park, but I knew she would be mum, studiously neutral like that mammogram technician who first saw my breast crawling with cancer. I couldn’t help pointing and saying, that’s my dad, and she smiled and nodded at little Peter’s photo on his 1938 visa.

When she finished I asked a few questions about timing and process, not quite ready to leave, substituting delay in the absence of ceremony. I thanked her again and said, “I’m kind of emotional.” She smiled warmly and assured me she would email when she had mailed my documents.

A few years ago I told my family’s story along with several members of Juneau’s Jewish community. One woman’s parents and grandparents had it much worse - they were sent to the camps and barely survived. While conditions for Jews gradually worsened, they simply could not believe it would come to systematic murder of Jews and other “undesirables” - until it was too late to leave.

My grandfather heeded the adage, When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. Hitler showed who he was, and my grandfather believed him. He was lucky to have a US sponsor and the means to leave - but he had a lot to give up. My father said my Opa was a decisive man and never looked back once he made up his mind.

As a daughter of the Holocaust “never again” was emblazoned on my young conscience. I read my first Holocaust memoir at age 9, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. I cried. The Holocaust represented for me the unimaginable coming real, and the exigence of eternal vigilance. Fear of fascism is etched in my epigenetic memory.

I wonder what my Oma and Opa would have made of Austria’s offer of reparations through citizenship, and the idea of Austria as potential shelter from chaos in the US. 

I don’t think Austrians are better or worse than Germans and I don’t think Germans are better or worse than Americans or anyone else. I don’t believe humans now are better or worse than past generations. I believe all humans are susceptible to the same base impulses, to the allure of cult figures, scapegoating and the easy othering of bigotry. I don’t understand the mechanisms that seem to unlock the worst human impulses, or what arrests the slide into cruelty and indifference to others' suffering. 

I was hosted by the best in LA - a friendship that predates my birth

My little dad and my Oma

Thank you for the voluntary gift of your car to the Reich!

A gift to my grandfather, "Our adored beloved Dr. Braun with great thanks"

My father and his cousin in the stream behind the house in Piesting.

Ellis Island Foundation hosts a searchable collection of ships' manifests. Finding it was jolting.