March 12, 1938: Germany invades Austria. Fred Barschak was 7.

Lorries with Nazis shouting & screaming. Windows smashed. On Saturday a completely different scene: elderly Jews scrubbing the pavements & marvellous shouts of ‘At last, Hitler’s found work for the Jews!"

The first change was: we were thrown out of school a month & a half later. Instead we went to these…to some other schools organised by the Kultusgemeinde. You learnt English or French or Hebrew, depending where you thought you were going to. There was a feeling of fear.

Fred's family ran the Restaurant-Hotel Barschak.

You must understand: I might not have heard much in an ordinary household, but this was a place where people came to be together. It was the centre for Polish Jewry & the Landsmannschaft. 

The conversation you heard was not what a normal eight year old is hearing: ‘By the way, Feuchtwanger—he’s got visas for Argentina. So & so has this. Then, in a hushed voice I’m not supposed to hear: ‘Sie nicht mehr leben’—they’ve committed suicide. There were 650 suicides in this period. The Jewish population in Vienna was about 193,000 then. 

So you knew perhaps a little more about what was going on than you would expect to. At the same time, somehow the children, especially children, were carrying on living normal lives. The older boys had much more fear. I wasn't yet aware of the dangers we were in: what they could do & what they were doing. 

I knew it all on Kristallnacht. I saw with my own eyes. I saw Mr Rakower, married to my father’s niece, came back from Dachau with one eye down here, not up there, beaten black & blue.

I saw other things. Just after the Anschluss, when Jews could still play in the parks, I was playing ball in the park & there were lots of SA & SS. The SA were the brown shirts. The SS wore black uniforms. Very smart. I call them demonic. Suddenly the ball went right past me & rolled up at the feet of one of the SS men. I went to get the ball. The SS man didn’t do anything. 

The SA were much rougher than the SS. The SS preserved their cruelties for much more important things. I came back & Felsenberg, this older boy, got hold of me & said: ‘Listen, don’t worry about the brown shirts, they'll only beat you. But be careful of the black shirts. They can kill you.’

Then in June, with that in mind there suddenly appeared through the swing doors of our hotel, two months later, two SS men. 

I was standing by my father. He said ‘Steh still’ ‘Stand still’, meaning, ‘don’t panic’. Nothing to panic about. ‘Good morning, can I help you?’ 

One of them, with a narrow waist, a somewhat elongated face & glasses, simply said: ‘We’ve heard you serve an excellent chopped liver & we’d like to try some.’ ‘Wir haben gehört, Sie haben eine ausgezeichnete gahackte Leber hier. Wir möchten es probieren. My father said: ‘Nehmen sie Platz bitte’, pointing to the restaurant. 

Then he said to me: ‘Run upstairs’ & he added something, which I didn’t understand at the time: ‘They’re not here just for the chopped liver.’ There’s a book & on page 200-202 there’s a full account of the visit of Eichmann to four hotels. One was ours. 

He wanted to take them over because he was decanting all the Jews from the provinces, stripping them of their goods then making sure they emigrated. The policy then was emigration, not extermination—that came later. I can’t prove it, but I just have the feeling because it said that he always inspected the hotels personally. I believe that was Eichmann, Eichmann asking for chopped liver.