{"id":38976,"date":"2022-06-03T01:37:53","date_gmt":"2022-06-03T08:37:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=38976"},"modified":"2022-06-01T06:48:30","modified_gmt":"2022-06-01T13:48:30","slug":"letters-from-vienna-1938","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2022\/06\/03\/letters-from-vienna-1938\/","title":{"rendered":"Letters from Vienna, 1938"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jan Cherniavsky, Elspeth Rogers Cherniavsky and Gaby Bettelheim, Austria, 1922. (photo from Alix Morgan)<\/em><\/p>\n

The Anschluss, Evian Conference, Munich Agreement and Kristallnacht: 1938 was a watershed year in Holocaust history. These events marked a turning point in the lives of the Jews of Europe and on the international stage, where political decisions made by Western democracies would reverberate for generations to come.<\/p>\n

Some have argued that the genocide of European Jewry \u201cstarted with the washing of the streets\u201d of Vienna in the weeks immediately following Anschluss.[1] They assert a \u201ccritical correlation between these events and the genocide that lay ahead.\u201d[2] Appreciating what transpired on the streets of Vienna after Anschluss and understanding how those events paved the road to genocide is imperative in the study of the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

For Canadian students learning about these events eight decades later, it can be difficult to grasp the horror, fear and disbelief felt by Austrian Jews as they were brought under Nazi rule, overnight. One meaningful way to convey their experience is through primary sources. Personal letters, diaries and photographs from the time can evoke the range of emotions felt by Jewish individuals and families as they struggled to comprehend and respond to the events of 1938.<\/p>\n

In 2021, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre was privileged to receive a donation of personal letters which do just this. The donation, arranged with assistance from Elspeth Rogers Cherniavsky\u2019s grandchildren, Alix Cherniavsky Morgan and Nick Gudewill, comprises 39 pages of correspondence written by Elspeth to her mother, in Vancouver, during Elspeth\u2019s visit to Vienna in May and June 1938. With clarity and compassion, the letters give a firsthand account of the circumstances facing dozens of Elspeth\u2019s Jewish friends.<\/p>\n

Elspeth Rogers Cherniavsky<\/strong><\/p>\n

Elspeth Rogers was born in Vancouver in 1900 and grew up in her family\u2019s mansion, Gabriola House, which still stands on Davie Street. She attended Crofton House School, volunteered with Alexandra Orphanage and, in her leisure time, rode her horse in Stanley Park.<\/p>\n

Elspeth\u2019s father, prominent Vancouver industrialist B.T. Rogers, founded B.C. Sugar Refining Co Ltd. (now known as Rogers Sugar) in 1890. The B.C. Sugar factory remains a Vancouver landmark, its origins and history linked to the completion of the cross-continental Canadian Pacific Railway and the expansion of industry in Vancouver. Elspeth\u2019s mother, Mary Isabella Rogers, was born into the Angus family of Victoria. She became a leading patron of music in Vancouver in the first half of the 20th century and is credited as the de facto founder of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.[3]<\/p>\n

Elspeth\u2019s connection to Jewish social circles in Vienna came through her husband, Jan Cherniavsky, whom she wed on June 1, 1922, at St Paul\u2019s Anglican Church on Jervis Street, in the high society event of the season.[4] Jan was a classical pianist with the internationally renowned Cherniavsky Trio of musical brothers: Leo, Jan and Mischel Cherniavsky.<\/p>\n

Their father, Abraham Cherniavsky, harnessed his young sons\u2019 musical talents to secure the family\u2019s passage out of Russia, with its antisemitic restrictions, at the turn of the century. The Cherniavskys moved to Vienna in 1904 to study music and gain the support of influential people there. The Bettelheim family of Vienna quickly embraced the Cherniavsky Trio and promoted them in Vienna\u2019s music circles. The Bettelheims used their connections in England to facilitate the trio\u2019s move to London in 1906, launching their international career.[5]<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a>
The Cherniavsky Trio: Jan, Mischel and Leo photographed in Minsk, 1904. (photo from Alix Morgan)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Throughout his life, Jan Cherniavsky returned to Vienna frequently and maintained his boyhood friendship with the Bettelheim family, particularly with Karl Bettelheim, who was closest in age to Jan. After Jan married Elspeth, he immediately took her to Vienna to meet Karl and Karl\u2019s wife Gaby.<\/p>\n

During the 1920s and \u201930s, Jan and Elspeth lived alternately in Vancouver, London and Vienna, as dictated by the international performance schedule of the Cherniavsky Trio. Elspeth and Jan rented a flat in Vienna and lived for a time there with their children. With the Cherniavsky connections in the music world and the Rogers family connections in the sugar industry, Jan and Elspeth amassed a large circle of Jewish friends in Vienna, including composers, performers, sugar refinery magnates, timber products manufacturers, academics, art collectors, lawyers, doctors and engineers.<\/p>\n

Letters from Vienna<\/strong><\/p>\n

Elspeth and Jan were living in England in the spring of 1938 when Nazi Germany annexed Austria. Disturbing news reports of mob violence and persecution compelled the Cherniavskys to travel to Vienna to check on the well-being of their many Jewish friends there, particularly Karl Bettleheim.<\/p>\n

Elspeth, by her own description, had always been \u201cmortally afraid about everything\u201d[6] and was particularly trepidatious about visiting Vienna during this \u201creign of terror\u201d with a husband who was Jewish by birth. But the couple was determined to see their friends and offer what help they could. As Canadians, the Cherniavskys hoped their citizenship would protect them and possibly allow them to assist their friends in their urgent search for a means to flee the Nazis.<\/p>\n

So it was that eight weeks after Anschluss, in May 1938, Elspeth and Jan Cherniavsky arrived in Vienna by car. On May 29, 1938, Elspeth wrote home to her mother in Vancouver describing the scene that met them in Vienna:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a mad-house in Vienna and we began to feel, after a few days, that we were losing our senses too\u2026. Hitler\u2019s photograph is everywhere until it stinks and swastikas cover everything. Streicher\u2019s paper, Der Sturmer, on sale at every corner and the pictures in it make you sick\u2026. I walk for blocks to look for a shop that is not marked \u2018Aricshes Gesch\u00e4fft\u2019 [Aryan business].\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike Nazi Germany, where the persecution of Jews evolved over a period of five years, daily life for Austrian Jews changed overnight and their fate was far worse. Anti-Jewish laws rendered Austrian Jews stateless, subjecting them to random arrest and dehumanizing attacks, and denying them protection of the police and the rule of law. The scale of the violence, both planned and spontaneous, and the alarming number of ordinary Austrian citizens who turned against Jews, created an atmosphere of terror in which Austrian Jews, as observed by Elspeth, felt \u201cabsolutely trapped and hunted.\u201d Elspeth wrote in her letter of June 6, 1938:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we got to Germany, everything seemed peaceful in comparison to Austria. People didn\u2019t Heil Hitler quite so avidly as in Wien\u2026. After five years the people in Germany must be a little tired & yet I believe they are starting there on another wave of persecution. But think how violent it is in Vienna to do in two-and-a-half months what it took five years to do in Germany.\u201d<\/p>\n

Upon reaching Vienna, the Cherniavskys went immediately to Karl Bettelheim\u2019s flat. Karl could no longer practise law, his car was confiscated and his assets registered with the Nazi authorities in anticipation of expropriation. Though he had lived his entire life in Vienna and fought for Austria-Hungary in the First World War, Karl lived in fear of being visited by the SS, molested in the streets or arrested in a raid. He told Elspeth, \u201che never thought that he would feel like a criminal and a fugitive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Karl\u2019s despair and hopelessness radiate from the pages of Elspeth\u2019s letters, as he spoke frequently of suicide. Understanding that his life in Austria was over, Karl was desperate to get himself and his teenaged daughter out of the German Reich, even though it would mean leaving everything behind. But it was \u201calmost impossible\u201d to find a country that would accept Jewish refugees and unlikely for Karl to muster the financial resources to support himself in a new country, with the crippling flight tax imposed on fleeing Jews.<\/p>\n

Elspeth and Jan visited many of their friends in Vienna and found them in a similar state of anguish and panic:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can\u2019t do anything much, it is true, but we can talk over prospects and perhaps some suggestions\u2026. It was like going from one death bed scene to another, some had lost everything already and felt the worst was over and those that hadn\u2019t waited for it to come\u2026. It is like seeing people drowning slowly (only I think that is too human a way to describe it) and not doing much to help them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elspeth\u2019s letters are filled with stories of their friends\u2019 public humiliation and social isolation: taken from their homes and forced to clean the streets, ousted from their professions, arrested and jailed without warrant, robbed of their assets and businesses, prohibited from public spaces and even turned on by their neighbours and employees.<\/p>\n