Harry Bibring, Vienna, 1938:

"It was perfectly OK to try & obtain Jewish property by purchasing it at a peppercorn price. There was actually an official place in Vienna called the Vermögensverkehrsstelle where a Nazi could go & say, “I’d like to buy a tailor’s shop”, or,“I’d like to buy a flat”, or whatever. I picked up some documents in the '70s in the Austrian State Archives: a man wished to buy my father’s shop for 5,000 Reichsmark, about £200. It was argued that my father’s shop was in debt. That wasn’t surprising, because he hasn’t any customers since the Anschluss.

If it had happened, my whole life would have been different. Because my father would have lost his shop to these people. I don’t know why it didn’t go through. If it had gone through, the shop would have survived the war. I would have come back after the war, got my father’s shop back, possibly lived in Vienna. Follow in his footsteps. That’s a possibility. But because that didn’t happen, on Kristallnacht it was destroyed.

What happened was this: on November 10 my father disappeared. The last employee that my father still had working for him, a non-Jewish man, a family friend, he phoned up & said my father hadn’t arrived at the shop. We found out afterwards that my father was arrested, together with other men from our block, from surrounding blocks. They were transported by a van to a jail, & locked up for 10 days. 12 to a cell. Fed on bread & water under the cell flap. No exercise whatsoever, except to bring them out for the wardens to amuse themselves & abuse them in various ways. We didn’t know any of that.

Later that same day, Nazis came to our flat. And took my mother, [sister] Gerti & me, initially to the headquarters of the local Nazi Party. There were eventually about 30 women & children in this room.

We were then marched through the streets for about an hour, flanked front, back & sideways with guards. And brought to a flat way out from where we lived. Some woman’s flat, a Jewish woman, living alone, in a large flat. She wasn’t told we were coming. We were told we had to stay there until further notice.

We were actually relieved. I think all of us expected, although none of us said it, that we were being marched to a train station to go to a concentration camp. This was happening all over the city, though we didn’t know at that time. We stayed there for some time & had to find a way of getting food.

Eventually Gerti was sent out to buy food. She was told where the local shops were. She took all the money that the old woman had in the flat & that other people had in their purses. She came back with a load of root vegetables, which was clever because they aren't perishable. Every root vegetable that you could think of. So we were all stuck there.

After about ten days, somebody came & told us to go home. And when we were going home, we met my father coming from this prison—which we didn’t know he was in—from the opposite direction.

We were reunited outside the front door. The scene is indescribable: a happy & sad scene. My father told us what happened to him, & we told him what had happened to us. It was then that he cleaned himself up & went to the shop & found it was totally destroyed. Not a pair of trousers left from his shop. Everything that was breakable was broken.

It was also the point when my father told us that he was thinking of emigrating. Because now he can’t earn any money. There’s not much in the bank anymore. So talk started about emigrating."

Harry & his sister Gerti came to Britain on a Kindertransport in March 1939. Very sadly, their mother Lea was murdered in Majdanek concentration camp & their father Michael was murdered in unknown circumstances in 1940.

Harry Bibring BEM

Memories

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