Chapter Four - Jewish Families from Vienna in the Southern Caribbean During the Shoah

Summary

This chapter deals with the history of some Jewish families from Vienna who escaped to Colombia, the reasons for their escape from Austria and the choice of exile. It also addresses their routes through Europe and across the Atlantic as well as their integration. First, we will consider the dimension of the Shoah by citing scientific literature, on the one hand, and by resorting to interviews of Shoah survivors. All the survivors who were interviewed by us were children of different ages (15, 9, 4) when they had to escape from their home country. This way, we can see through the eyes of children their experience of antisemitism, hatred, persecution and discrimination, but also the flight itself and the integration into exile. The sections follow a chronological order based on the biographies of Shoah survivors. This chapter also explores the daily-life, micro-historical content, including marriage, birth, school and work, which are connected with the macro-historical content of geopolitics, World War II and antisemitism.

One of the objectives of the Nazi regime was the total extermination of Jews in Europe (Holocaust or Shoah). More than six million children, women and men identified as “Jews” by National Socialist Germany (not all people who were identified as Jews by Nazis were really Jews) were killed between 1933 and 1945 (systematically from 1941 to 1945). About half of them died from the effects of toxic gases in Nazi death camps built mainly in what are now Poland and Belarus. Others were shot by execution commandos or died in concentration camps as a result of forced labor, hunger, cold, exhaustion or disease (Götz and Grüner 2008, 13-15). Along with Jews, communists, social democrats, Roma, Shinto, Yenish people, people with genetic disorders or mental illnesses, twins, homosexuals and prisoners of war were persecuted, deported, killed or abused for medical “experiments.” These crimes were committed by both male and female members of the SS and other NS criminal organizations. Only a minority of the persecuted managed to survive by hiding or fleeing into exile. According to the Alsatian writer Adrienne Thomas (1897–1980), who fled from the Gurs concentration camp in France to the United States, it was “always flight, but never emigration” (Paul 1988, 147).

Only around 400,000 people marked as “Jews” managed to flee from the German Reich between 1933 and 1945 (Heim 2019, 14).