Holocaust survivor Inge Woolf with her mother Grete Ponger in 1944. Photo / Supplied
To escape certain death, 4-year-old Inge Woolf and her Jewish parents fled Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938 before starting a new life in New Zealand.
The rise of antisemitism and the roots of the Holocaust underpin what happened in my life. I was nearly 4 when the Nazis marched into Vienna on March 15, 1938. The childhood memory that dominates my entire being, and after all these years still causes me to have a physical reaction of fear in the pit of my stomach, is the sight of our happy neighbours hanging out swastikas from every available apartment window in the street to welcome Hitler’s army. I can still see the laughing, excited faces of the people we formerly thought of as friends.
I must have picked up from my family the knowledge that for Jews this was a terrifying day. From the same window, where I could only just see above the windowsill, I remember one night seeing brown-shirted men running along the street and somehow knowing that they were out to get us.
One night after the Nazis came to power in Austria, there came a knock on the door in the middle of the night. That must have been terrifying for the adults of the family. Brown Shirts were there and they demanded that Paul and Teddy, my mother’s brothers, go and open the shop at 11 Nordwestbahnstr 19. Everything was looted that night by the Nazis, without any recompense. My family became poor overnight, and it was all quite legal. The motorbike shop was then sold by the Nazis to Alexander Freytag on January 9, 1939 for 3760 reichsmarks. The sale price was not paid to my family, but to the state, as evidenced by the document we still have of the sale.
Politically aware, my father had a profound understanding of what was happening. Coming from Czechoslovakia, he had been through pogroms in his youth. These were particularly bad in 1918 when former soldiers had roamed the countryside looking for Jewish shops to rob. All this was firmly in my father’s mind after the Nazis arrived in Austria. He had a good idea of what might be coming, although he could not have imagined the enormity of the Holocaust.
Upon hearing the Austrian chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg saying goodbye and handing over power to Hitler on the radio, Daddy asked the family, “What are we waiting for?” He immediately began preparations for us to leave our home, our friends and our family. I am unsure if he knew where we were going, but he knew we could not stay in Austria. I believe he saved us and was instrumental in saving those of our family who survived.
We moved to Prague. Daddy was still a Czechoslovakian citizen. The Sudetenland had not yet been annexed by Hitler so Prague was probably the obvious choice. We lived frugally in an apartment on 18 Jilska Street while Daddy tried to earn some money selling small cosmetic items door to door. But he knew we were still not safe and he used the time there to put together the documents necessary for us to leave. Although our stay was temporary – we were in Prague for about a year – I had learned to speak enough Czech to be the translator for my mother.
Pragmatism was obviously crucial to ensuring our best chance of escape. My parents decided to convert to Christianity. It had become clear that things were getting dire for Jews, and a Lutheran church in Myjava, near my father’s birthplace of Krajné, was converting Jews to try to save their lives, giving them papers that said they were Lutheran.
On April 27, 1938, I knelt between my parents in that dark church and was baptised. My parents bought me a small gold cross to wear after we converted. They never discussed that day. It must have been a tough decision to convert, even though we were not religious.
Much later, here in New Zealand, long after we had come back to our Jewish roots, my mother was amazed when I told her I remembered the conversion. My brother, Johnny, born after the war, was even more amazed when he discovered a record of the conversion at the church. He had travelled to Slovakia with some old papers my mother had given him to search out what had happened to our family and found that the trail led to that church. He didn’t know how to break the news to me and was very relieved when I told him I knew but had never wanted to upset our mother by talking about something she obviously did not want to have revealed to the family.
We had little money, having lost everything when we left Vienna, but my parents set out to give me some fun in Prague. My mother’s brothers had also escaped. Karl had made his way to Palestine before Hitler arrived in Vienna. I don’t know their exact route, but Paul and Teddy escaped largely on foot, trekking by night to avoid being captured and slipping through the border. Teddy’s fiancée, my aunt Bertl, who was Polish and had no current passport, was still in Vienna. She could not cross the border with us, and I suspect the trek Paul and Teddy had taken was too difficult for her. My parents hatched a plan. It was perilous to return to Vienna, with escalating antisemitism and increasing restrictions being brought against the Jewish population there, and it was illegal to use someone else’s passport.
But Bertl looked a little like my mother, with the same dark colouring. The Nazis had a warped idea of what Jews looked like, an ugly caricature of an often stooped, hook-nosed, olive-skinned person with dark eyes and a sly look. My father was the opposite of this image – he was tall and thin, and had fair skin and blue eyes. And he had a Czech passport. So Daddy returned to Vienna and, using my mother’s passport, he and his future sister-in-law Bertl posed as husband and wife and crossed the border into Czechoslovakia, a trip that was filled with danger. And that was how Bertl joined my parents and me, Paul and Teddy in Prague for Christmas of 1938.
I remember that Christmas gathering well. Uncle Paul, my mother’s oldest brother, was dressed up as Saint Nicholas. I don’t know who played the role of his offsider Krampus, but Krampus was there. He was scary and, as was traditional, armed with a carpet beater. (It was made of cane and used to beat the dust out of carpets and rugs when they were hung on the line for cleaning – no vacuum cleaners in those days.) I knew Krampus was very ready to beat naughty children, so when Saint Nicholas asked my parents if I had been a good little girl, I was very relieved when they quickly told him I was very good and he rewarded me with lots of sweets and chocolate.
Yet this fun and semblance of normality were short-lived. After being in Prague for less than a year, the Germans invaded and occupied the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia on March 15, 1939. My parents needed to get us all to safety and managed to get tourist visas to go on holiday to England.
They spent the last of their money on a return flight on Deutsche Luft Hansa (DLH) at a time when, my mother said, “only film stars flew”. The plan was to look like we were an Austrian family simply going on vacation and then to seek refuge on arrival.
As we only used the outgoing leg of the ticket, my father wrote to DLH soon after arrival in England and requested that the refund on the return leg should be paid to a family friend in Berlin. We still have the DLH reply that they couldn’t give us a refund because of Austria’s foreign currency laws. With that letter, Mummy tried to redeem the return flight when she saw a Lufthansa office in Melbourne in the late 1980s, to no avail.
Our flight to freedom left from Berlin. Imagine the decision to travel to the heart of Nazi Germany with a small 4-year-old. It was a bold journey and as such, I guess my parents thought that they were unlikely to arouse suspicions. After all, who would expect three Jews to willingly travel to Berlin? On the last day we would be able to use our passports, we set off on the first leg of our trip – a train journey from Prague to Berlin.
The train was full of military personnel. I remember seeing them all dressed in their different uniforms. We were the only civilians in the carriage, carrying just a bag each as if we were tourists. We wore our finest clothes, as you did when you travelled in those days. My mother had on a smart hat, jauntily tilted to one side. I was wearing my best travelling outfit and the small gold cross on a delicate chain that my parents had bought me to complete the picture. But I know now that should some authority have scrutinised our papers, recent conversion to Christianity would not have saved us.
My parents told me to be a very good girl, to lie down and try to sleep because they did not want any attention to be drawn to us. It must have been a terrifying journey for them and, although they tried to maintain a brave front, that fear was transferred to me as I lay down on the seat, trying to get to sleep, and watching the last snow of winter still clinging to the embankments flashing by as the train sped through the night. Mummy later told me that “our hearts were in our boots”. I was scared too and do not remember arriving in Berlin.
My next memory is being on the plane, destined for Croydon in England. We were above the clouds. I thought we must be in heaven and I was on the lookout for God and the angels hiding among all that billowing white fluffy stuff. It was quite a disappointment that they didn’t appear.
Like something out of a suspense movie trying to maintain the anticipation, the plane couldn’t land at Croydon Airport as there was fog over the runway. In a terrifying turn of events, we flew back across the English Channel and landed in Amsterdam. The airline put us up for the night in the best hotel, the Amstel. It was full of affluent guests . . . and three Jewish refugees escaping Hitler. For my parents, it was a harrowing night. They ordered room service. I remember the fish supper being served on a silver salver covered by a silver cloche to keep it warm. In the eyes of a 4-year-old, not used to such opulence, it was very impressive. The excitement for me was only marred when a fishbone got stuck in my throat, and I coughed and coughed and made myself sick – and brought up the bone.
The next day we boarded the plane again and this time made it to England, on March 29, 1939. We were so lucky. We arrived at a time when tensions were mounting and suspicions abounded regarding those arriving from continental Europe. Not only did we manage to escape the Nazis, as by then they were in Czechoslovakia, but we entered the United Kingdom just before harsher immigration rules instituted on April 1, 1939 required all Czech visitors to have a new kind of visa. We were also given refugee status, something not afforded to all of the hundreds of refugees arriving that week at Croydon airport.
Two days after arriving, my family had found support from the British Committee for Refugees and then the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia. Documented in their records is the following narrative: “Mr Ponger came to this country to save his life. He is a Jew. The immigration officer let him in because he was compassionate with their people”. It was only later that I comprehended the kindness and power held by the immigration officer who allowed us refuge.
Extract from Resilience: A story of persecution, escape, survival and triumph by Inge Woolf. Published by the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand on April 11. RRP: $35.