More than 200 children able to escape to Belgium with the Kindertransports came from Austria. Among them were Henri Roanne, Fritz Feiler and the siblings Henriette and Erich Derschowitz, whose fate is presented in this exhibition.
The Anschluss
When Austria was incorporated into the German Reich on 12 March 1938, the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien (Jewish Community Vienna, IKG) was the third largest Jewish community in Europe with over 175,000 members. While considerable sections of the Austrian population were positive about the Anschluss, the consequences for the Jewish population were appalling. From then on, people’s lives were marked by violence, disenfranchisement and expropriation.
As early as 18 March 1938, the Gestapo occupied the IKG building, searched the offices and arrested leading members of the community. Six weeks later, Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organisers of the Holocaust, who was head of Division II-112 in the Austrian section of the paramilitary Nazi organisation SS, decreed the reopening of the IKG. From then on, this was no longer the independent representation of the Jewish community, but an executive organ of the National Socialist authorities. With the establishment of the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung (Central Agency for Jewish Emigration) in August 1938, Eichmann imposed a far-reaching change of function: if religious, social and cultural tasks had been the central focus before the ban, the IKG would now become an institution for organising emigration and welfare. Within a very short time, tens of thousands of people turned to the IKG and asked for help with their emigration.
The Department of Child Emigration
Due to the great difficulties in organising the emigration of entire families, the IKG established the Abteilung Kinderauswanderung (Children’s Emigration Department) within the Youth Welfare Department. Rosa Rachel Schwarz, head of the Youth Welfare Department until she escaped to Palestine in March 1940, had a list of children drawn up for whom parents had requested departure, during the first weeks of the IKG’s reopening. About 10,000 applications were received within a short period of time. After the November pogrom of 1938, Rosa Rachel Schwarz and the Children’s Emigration Department faced the immense logistical challenge of organising emigration to countries that were now prepared to accept unaccompanied children.
We were commissioned to get the first children’s train ready. This was an organisational task at which we worked for days and nights without interruption and that needed to be worked out in every detail. We tested the children, they were examined by a doctor, passports were obtained, luggage was specified and checked. It was an indescribable amount of meticulous work, but this was necessary, so that on 10 December 1938, about 700 children, one third of whom were “non-Aryans” and had been selected by the Society of Friends, were able to leave.
The work of Rosa Rachel Schwarz (1888-1978) and her colleagues Lily Reichenfeld (1893-1944 Auschwitz) and Franziska Löw (1916-1997), enabled altogether 2,844 Jewish children to escape persecution with 43 Kindertransports. AS