4. The ‘contribution’, amounting in total to 1.2 billion reichsmarks, imposed on Jews as compensation for the damage caused during the Kristallnacht pogrom.
11
WITH HER LETTERS Maria keeps the Klagsbrunns up to date about things that have happened among their acquaintances and in the firm. At one point, because of customers who are behind with their payments, she wishes her former employer were there. “This is a time when you’re urgently needed.” Several times she even regrets having agreed to the purchase. The large number of regular customers aren’t a lot of use to her, she says, because most of them are Jews, and the storage space she had at the freight depot was canceled straight away. She even once accuses Leo of having cheated her since—intentionally or because he forgot—he omitted to delete the obligation to pay the installments, which he’d had entered in the Land Registry, which meant she’d had the authorities on her back for years and was burdened with extra charges. “I can’t understand why you took me for a ride like that when I’ve always been so correct in my dealings with you.”
Apart from that the relationship between her and the family continues to be as warm as ever. Now and then she complains that the Klagsbrunns don’t write often enough and when they do it’s too little. Right at the beginning she’s worried about whether the crates with their effects have arrived because she had the impression that Hofbauer, the forwarding agent charged with dispatching them, seemed lax and money-grubbing. She asks whether a Bauer family has already written to them. “Max regularly asks after you. I think the man misses you a bit.” To Fritzi she sends fashion magazines and a cookery book. She mentions that her boyfriend, Arthur Egger, whom she marries at the end of 1940 or the beginning of 1941, has pains because of his duodenal ulcer. That Egger joined the NSDAP—either to help his chances of promotion with the Deutsche Reichsbahn or because it’s of advantage for her and the firm—we will only learn later from Grete Gabmeier.
From the above-mentioned list drawn up by Maria Pfeiffer of her payments to and for Leopold Klagsbrunn (various tax and health insurance arrears, missed installment payments, dues, lawyers’ fees, back-payment of wages, dispatch charges, travel expenses for the Klagsbrunn family…) it is clear that the purchase price was also used to pay the expenses Leo’s sister Sida and her daughter Franja incurred in connection with their plans to emigrate. Thanks to Grete Gabmeier we know that Franja was an actress in Vienna (and in the studio theater ‘Literatur am Naschmarkt’ that put on plays and reviews by dissident authors) and later on worked as a dental assistant in a small town near London. A postcard to Fritzi in Lisbon has survived, dated October 27, 1938, in which Franja mentions a school in England where she’s applied for a job. “The disadvantage is that there’s no other kind of work I’ll be able to accept. But at the moment I just need to know where I belong.” Between the lines she hints at how unbearable both her own situation and life in general has become in Vienna. “I try keep my spirits up but it is sometimes difficult. On top of everything it’s very cold & gray & windy outside and & that gets me down.”
It remains unknown whether Sida was eventually also allowed to emigrate to Great Britain. And what about Johann Frey, Franja’s father? Had he already died, did he not want to leave, did he live apart from his wife and daughter? Unlike Leo’s friend Max, we didn’t find him in the database of Shoah victims compiled by the Documentary Archive of Austrian Resistance. According to that Maz Bauer was deported to Theresienstadt together with his wife Hermine on July 10, 1942, where she died on February 16, 1943. The date of his death is unknown.
12
LEO IS FIFTY-ONE, Fritzi fifty-two when they arrive in Brazil. Their sons are twenty-five and twenty. They have brought some effects with them from Vienna, linen, clothes, tableware, perhaps a few pieces of furniture and certainly a typewriter, which Leo bought in Vienna shortly before they left. Money? On Mitzi’s list of payments there is, apart from travel expenses of 5300 reichsmarks, which were entirely taken up by tickets for the ship and plane, passports and visas as well as carriage for their luggage, just one such item, from the day of their departure: Paid in cash to Klagsbrunn for the emigration costs for two relatives and travel money for the Klagsbrunn family: 2850.—Certainly none of that will be left by the time they reach Rio. However they manage to establish themselves professionally relatively quickly. Leo, presumably with the help of his brother-in-law, sets up a small firm—Lustra—making chemical products. Whether Fritzi works there too or brings in extra money from some other employment, is unknown. What we do know is that after the end of the war she is at home making aprons and other working clothes; Grete Gabmeier remembers that her aunt sometimes sends Frau Klagsbrunn material that is unobtainable in Brazil, or at least not of the same quality.
Their sons have to give up the idea of continuing their studies in Rio. After their long stay in Lisbon they can speak Portuguese reasonably well, so that they would have no problem following the lectures, but the exams they passed in Vienna are not recognized. They probably also find themselves forced to contribute to the family income as quickly as possible. Until he opens his first photographic studio Kurt, as he will later state, did “casual jobs” (the last in a travel agency). As early as April 1939, hardly a month after their arrival, Peter starts working as a sales representative for three local manufacturers of pharmaceutical products and perfumes, one after the other, then he sells essences used in making perfumes for a US firm. In 1942 he marries Ingeborg Röschen Steuer, who comes from a devout Jewish family.
Inge was the last of her family to escape from Germany. At twenty years old, four or five days before the outbreak of the Second World War. For practical reasons, in order to learn the language during the crossing, she had