What if my father was an optimist, a romantic, one who insisted that man is innately good? What if he saw only what he wanted to see, made excuses for himself as well as for other people? What if my father had not himself experienced the voracious appetite that Jew haters had for hating Jews. While others thought that a cultured, civilized nation, the birthplace of Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms, could never be seduced by the likes of Hitler and the Nazi movement, my father knew better. Often as a boy he had been the scapegoat of bullies who taunted him on his way to school, rubbing pork into his face and screaming, ”That’s for you, Jew boy.”
My parents, upper middle class Jews, enjoyed a life of privilege and ease in the enchanted city of Vienna. One day, as my father was walking home from synagogue, a group of chassidim were standing on the street discussing politics. With no provocation, a gang of young thugs appeared from behind a store and pounced on the elderly men wearing black top-coats with tzi-tzit. They kicked and stomped the bewildered chassidim. My father came home and told my mother of what he witnessed. He was sure, no, convinced that the Jews of Austria would not be spared. Against the advice of many of his relatives and friends he decided to leave Vienna and travel to the U.S., leaving my mother, brother and me in Austria.
“I will send for you as soon as I arrive in New York,” he assured my mother. When he arrived, he sent us false papers claiming that we were U.S. citizens. Among those papers, he included a birth certificate of my grandfather’s American birth. He acquired it by taking an old Bible that he bought in a used bookstore, wrote a false family tree and asked the clerk in the records bureau for a birth certificate for his father-in-law. This fortunate whim saved our lives and landed us in a POW camp where we waited out the war.
