Andrea Hirsch - My father's story
My father, Hans Hirsch wrote an account of his first 30 years. Here is a version which I have much abbreviated.
“I was born on 17th September 1924, in Vienna. Then at 9 months old, my mother and I joined my father Heinrich in Velden am Worthersee where he was establishing a dental clinic. My father could not have picked a better location: a long warm lake, a garden with a chestnut tree and a lime tree.
But the politics of Germany were going to have a profound effect upon my life. On 12th March 1938 German troops entered Austria. Hitler visited Austria to great acclaim. Swastika flags appeared on every house. I do not know when I realised that my father was Jewish, but it must have been around this time. Before this I often came out with anti-Semitism at home, which I could not fail to have absorbed from my school mates and the constant repeated catch phrases of the Nazi propaganda machine.
My father was not allowed to continue to work and thus there was no more income. My new status was ‘Mischling’, or Half-Jew or -Aryan. I managed to carry on at school because I did not look Jewish. I was a good gymnast and I kept out of trouble. Some of the professors at school had disappeared. Lessons started with “Heil Hitler”, and one could detect variable enthusiasm from the different teachers.
Arrangements were made to move to Vienna to share the flat of my Uncle Karl. Great efforts were made to find a way to emigrate - finding a sponsor in America with the same surname, learning crafts, or training as a butler.
On 9 November 1938, which came to be known as ‘Kristallnacht’, I was skating at the Vienna Ice skating club, and came home to find everyone very pleased to see me safely back. My father was extremely worried. Next day I cycled to my Grandparents’ home, and saw utter devastation - the broken windows of Jewish shops.
The Quakers had an office in Vienna and were responsible for finding and transporting about 70 boys of Jewish descent and Christian religion to go to England. I was one of those boys. Family photographs were taken, new clothes bought and we were waved off with a mass of hankies. We had numbers on strings round our necks. When we arrived in Harwich, I remember the beautifully served cups of tea with milk. We boarded a train which took us to Liverpool Street Station. Here we were sorted out and the boys destined for Riversmead in Lancashire came together for the first time. Riversmead was specially set up for the boys and combined school and home.
The teachers were mostly refugees from Austria and Germany, but we were taught in English. We joined the scout movement enthusiastically and participated in sports competitions and I excelled in the High Jump. “Only time and the height of the stands apparently prevented him from breaking world records” the local paper reported.
After the start of the war, communication with our parents stopped, our position in the local community changed, and previous friendly sympathy changed to suspicion. We had become ‘Enemy Aliens’. Our German teachers were interned, and we got new English staff. We have recently learnt that at least one of them was a conscientious objector doing ‘work of national importance’. In the spring of 1941 the first communication arrived from my father in Shanghai. It was good to hear he was safe. I communicated with my mother via the Red Cross. One could only write 25 words. When I reached the age of 16 I had to attend a tribunal to assess my status as an enemy alien. I was declared a ‘Refugee from Nazi oppression’.
It was 1945, and I followed the progress of the Red Army by reading the Blackburn evening paper. In England we celebrated VE day on the 8th and 9th May, and very soon afterwards the first communication arrived from my mother. In the East, the war lasted longer and it was only in August that communication with my father (who had eventually escaped to Shanghai) could be resumed. He only arrived back in Vienna in 1947.
My mother came to visit in 1948. I left my mother as a 14 year old child and saw her again as a grown man of 23. My meeting with her was a pleasure without problems because I was not going to return to Austria. Not so for my poor sister who had left her at the age of 7. She met her mother – a stranger to her. She had forgotten how to speak German and was expected to return. She was collected by my father in 1949. I had received my Certificate of Naturalisation in March 1948. Having received my British passport, I travelled to Austria during the summer holidays in 1949. The water of the lake was warm and there was lots of sunshine. It was a perfect whole family reunion after a fragmentation of 10 years.
Submitted by Andrea Hirsch
Swindon, Wiltshire
