Our great-aunt Malci was our family’s last living link with Vienna. She was my father’s aunt, an eccentric figure on the fringes of our lives, to whom my two brothers, my sister and I would write monthly letters in schoolbook French, the language we barely had in common. She knew only a few words in English and we spoke no German.
Her full name was Malvine Schickler, and she was the only member of the family to have returned to Vienna after the second world war and stayed. Every few years, she would visit us in London and we three boys would be told to hide away our toy guns as a gesture of discreet compassion for a woman who had survived the Holocaust.
I have a memory of her arriving on our doorstep, a small woman with a crooked nose and protruding, asymmetrical eyes. She looked as if she had dropped in from a different age, dressed in a dark green loden coat, lace-up brown shin boots and an oddly jaunty little Tirolean hunter’s hat of a muddy colour with the rim turned up at the back.
On these visits, Malci was happy enough to sit at our kitchen table, benignly observing the noisy life of a family of four children. She would smile at us, often it seemed on the verge of tears, and try out her handful of English words.
Back in Vienna, she lived in a cramped one-bedroom flat in a seven-storey block in Favoriten, the 10th district, where she led a life of extreme frugality, turning the heating on in winter only on those rare occasions she had visitors.
When we arrived on our first family trip to Vienna in 1975, it was Malci who made arrangements, which resulted in a highly ascetic form of tourism. We slept on heavy-duty metal bunks in a student hostel, and had meals in a college cafeteria.
Later on, when I was working as the Guardian’s correspondent in Warsaw and then Sarajevo, I would pass through Vienna every few months and spend some hours with her. We would typically meet at her apartment and then amble very slowly in the direction of her local Chinese restaurant, stopping every few minutes for her to lean on her walking stick and catch her breath.
The restaurant was dark and wood-panelled, the food was awful, and her plaintive calls for service – “Herr Ober!” – were usually ignored by the surly waiting staff, all of them white Austrian middle-aged men. Vienna was not then a city of immigrants.
One cold autumn day, we walked back to Malci’s flat and she made me tea. We talked in our shared basic French about her early years in Vienna at the beginning of the 20th century, and she took me by surprise by singing a song in Yiddish, a language I had no idea she spoke. In that moment, a different person appeared, a glimpse of Malci as she had been before the war, with a flicker of joy in her eyes.
There were pictures of a boy and a girl in wooden frames in her living room, Mordechaj and Chana, children she had lost many years before. Mordechaj was a handsome lad, with dark blond hair and a robust build. I was vaguely aware that he had been killed in the war, but unsure of the details. Nor had I any idea what had become of Chana, also a beautiful child, with a wide smile below a head of thick auburn curls. My probing was gently deflected and I learned nothing at all about their father, Elias.
I came away from her Vienna apartment aware I had glimpsed a fragment of an untold story, but it was another two decades before I would be able to piece the rest together from scraps I found in the Vienna archives. That is where she had left her mark.
After Hitler’s annexation of Austria, the Anschluss, our grandpa Leo advertised my dad, Robert, in the Manchester Guardian, appealing for “a kind person who will educate my intelligent boy”. Robert was one of about 80 children who appeared in the paper’s small ads, and it helped save his life. A couple in Wales saw the ad and offered to foster him. Once a means of escape had been found for their son, Leo and my grandmother Erna were able to find their own way out of Vienna, again through the Manchester Guardian small ads, advertising themselves as domestic workers. Erna got a job as a maid, Leo secured a visa as an agricultural labourer.
Through the ads, scores of Viennese Jewish children were able to reach safety, though in many cases their parents waited too long to join them, hoping they could salvage their homes and businesses, and found themselves trapped. The more I learned about the other stories from the Manchester Guardian ads, the more I admired Leo for thinking clearly and quickly, and thereby saving his immediate family.
But Malci had taken a different path: she had stayed in Europe and resisted. The story of the Jews in the Holocaust is usually told as a binary tale, of murder or survival, and those were the alternatives for many of the children in the Guardian ads and their parents. Yet there was a third path: active defiance. It was the road not often taken, and even less frequently remembered. But it was the road that Malci took.
This diminutive woman, the subject of our wry smiles and eye-rolls for her oddball appearance and her grumbling about her health and modernity, had lived the life of a giant, vast in its courage and suffering.
* * *
Malci and Leo were the only survivors of five children, their three siblings having been taken by tuberculosis and pneumonia. Malci followed Leo to trade school to learn bookkeeping, so they could both help in the family’s radio shop, but when she was 21 she rebelled, steering precipitously off the road that had been laid out for her.
She met a man 11 years her senior, called Elias Mayer Schickler, a man of mystery, an immigrant from a city in Galicia – the easternmost corner of the Austro-Hungarian realm – that is now in western Ukraine. When Malci met Elias, he was a war veteran with a silver medal for courage in the service of the emperor, and a communist activist, calling for revolution in the wreckage of empire. He was also the single father of two toddlers and was in need of a partner.
The children’s mother, Hudi, had come with him from Galicia, but had been committed to a psychiatric hospital in Vienna in 1921, after she was discovered wandering the streets with no shoes, claiming to hear voices saying her children had been murdered, either by Elias or “society” in general.
Two-year-old Chana and Mordechaj, who was not yet one, were still alive, but now motherless. Malci and Elias married in May 1922, quite possibly on the prompting of the party, which required Elias’s services. A few weeks before their wedding, they formally renounced their Judaic faith and declared themselves konfessionslos, without religion, though their real shared faith was communism.
Within the space of a few months, Malci had transformed from a single young bookkeeper destined to work in the family business, to a desperately poor stepmother of two with a husband who turned out to be only a passing presence in her life.
Elias is recorded as being resident in Vienna until 1923, when the authorities listed him as having “left for Palestine”. There are no records of Elias arriving in the British-run territory, however. He had headed west instead, making a fleeting appearance in Belgian police immigration files in Antwerp in the mid-1920s, before featuring in a string of French articles from 1928, which recounted his arrest and expulsion as a suspected Bolshevik agent.
According to the Paris police, Elias was “one of Moscow’s most important agents”. He had been caught “in the company of his mistress”, a certain Mademoiselle Jablonowska, and in possession of incriminating documents. The account in Le Matin described him as a “major player” and claimed that members of the French Communist party’s central committee “trembled under his iron rod”. He was taken to the German border and expelled, and after that Elias disappeared.
I could find no trace of him in the databases of Holocaust survivors or victims. As a secret agent, he could easily have changed his name and disappeared, or just as feasibly been executed like many of his Comintern comrades, on orders of his paranoid masters in Moscow.
The whole story took me by surprise. When I was growing up, Elias had been a name without an accompanying narrative. He was just Malci’s husband who died. Nothing more was said about him, and indeed that entire generation of our family was barely mentioned by my dad. We were led to believe they were people of little consequence, but here was Elias making the news in all the French dailies. We seemed to have a spy in the family, albeit a rather unsuccessful one.
Malci held on to the name Schickler to the end of her life – I wrote the name dozens of times on letters and postcards without a clue about its dark, mysterious weight. Whether she held on to it out of loyalty or administrative convenience, I have no idea. Chana and Mordechaj both dumped it as soon as they reached adulthood and reverted to their biological mother’s name, Sorger.
Malci brought the children up in her adopted Marxist faith, sending them off to Young Pioneers, communist scouts, from the age of eight. Both of them would devote their short adult lives to communism. After the Anschluss, Chana secured a UK visa as a maid to a family in Glasgow, and stayed in Britain for the duration of the war, marrying another refugee, a comrade from Czechoslovakia, in Manchester in 1940.
In late 1938 and early 1939, the circumstances of Vienna’s Jews slipped from intolerable to lethal. More and more Jewish men were being arrested and sent to Dachau. Fewer and fewer were coming back. The cost of exit permits kept rising as the savings of Jewish families dwindled and, one by one, the escape routes closed.
Malci and Mordechaj moved to France with the help of party contacts, who found them a room in Paris. Mordechaj took the less conspicuously Jewish name of Martin, and went to vocational school, which led to jobs in a series of electronics factories around Paris that supported them both. In the spring of 1940, with the Germans closing in on Paris, they moved again, this time heading south to Tarbes, near the Spanish border, where Mordechaj found work at a Renault plant.
With the fall of the capital and the establishment of the collaborationist state of Vichy France in the southern half of the country, both mother and son made the decision to resist. They joined the Österreichische Freiheitsfront, the Austrian Liberation Front, a network of Austrian communists run from Paris and Brussels, and were assigned to a cell centred on Lyon. It was led by the Czechoslovak-born Oskar Grossmann, a leading figure in the Austrian Communist party who had fought in the Spanish civil war. His second-in-command was Paul Kessler, the master-fixer of their circle, who organised safe accommodation, weapons caches, forged identity documents and ration cards. Kessler was a quiet but charismatic leader who had persuaded Malci and Mordechaj to follow him to Paris and then to Lyon. Malci trusted him unquestioningly, and in return he watched over her wellbeing during the war and long after.
The Austrian network, about 130-strong, became an important arm of the French resistance, in particular of the communist faction, the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP). The Austrians’ language skills were a valuable asset, allowing them to eavesdrop on the Germans, and they found jobs in Wehrmacht and SS offices, posing as French workers.
Tilly Marek, a fellow member of the Grossmann-Kessler group, described the stress involved in remembering your légende, your cover story. “Everyone who lived illegally in the time of fascism and fought against it knows the many difficulties and dangers connected with the issues of accommodation and personal data alone, the sheer nervous strain of living abroad over many years, with different names, different dates of birth, parents, professions and biographies, quite apart from the burden of making sure you did a good job, fulfilling your mission,” Marek wrote in notes she made after war, which I found on a handful of typewritten pages in the archives.
Mordechaj was already juggling a few different names. He had traded Schickler for Sorger, and went by the name Martin in France, while his family, friends and comrades called him Motti, a diminutive form of Mordechaj. In addition, the resistance gave him forged identity papers in the name of a Frenchman, André Vandroux, a monteur (machine fitter or installer) from Lille.
All these layers of identity were not enough to stop him being caught. Under the Vichy regime, the hunt for Jews was steadily ramped up under Nazi pressure, and police raids in Lyon became increasingly common. Those deemed to be suspicious were ordered to lower their trousers to show whether or not they were circumcised.
Mordechaj was swept up in a raid and sent to the Gurs concentration camp, originally established by the pre-war French government for political prisoners and members of the International Brigade fleeing Franco’s forces in Spain. Gurs was a miserable place built on a swamp, and in the rain it became a morass of mud.
After a few months, Mordechaj and another comrade managed to escape, almost certainly with the help of the local Basque resistance. Security at Gurs was lackadaisical, and local workers were allowed to come and go, offering a way out for inmates disguised as Basques in a phalanx of departing labourers.
Once he returned to the Grossmann-Kessler group, Mordechaj was assigned to a unit known as TA, for Travail Allemand, “German work”. It involved infiltrating Nazi institutions, the most likely way in the resistance to get yourself killed. “Being one of the infiltrators was an act of death-defying courage,” Tilly Marek wrote. The Gestapo automatically executed anyone caught in such a role.
In 1942, Mordechaj was ordered back into the heart of the Reich. Playing the role of André Vandroux from Lille, he registered at a German-run recruitment centre as a French migrant labourer looking for work, and was sent to the Hermann Göring steelworks in Linz, one of the biggest industrial concerns in Austria, which had become vital to the Nazi war effort.
Malci stayed behind and hid in a nunnery, the Couvent Saint-Régis in Aubenas, 100 miles south of Lyon. In her roll-call of the Austrian network, Marek listed my great-aunt, but gave little idea of her role, nor did she give much clue of what she did herself, but from her notes it seems clear women like Malci and Marek were the connective tissue of the resistance. They carried messages and took care of logistics, as it was less suspicious for women to be seen out on the street than men. Theirs were less spectacular than many of the men’s missions, but hardly less dangerous.
There were a third of a million Jews in France at the start of the war. Three-quarters of them survived, compared to only 55% of Jews in Belgium and 20% in the Netherlands. That striking statistic is due in significant part to the role of convents and other havens provided by the Catholic church, particularly in Vichy France.
At the steelworks in Linz, Mordechaj’s mission was to collect information, sound out workers for signs of dissent, disseminate information about what was happening on the front, and ultimately instigate unrest or acts of sabotage. There were thousands of foreign workers from more than 30 nations working at the plant. Paid migrants like Vandroux worked alongside forced labour, including slave workers from the nearby Mauthausen concentration camp.
The plant is now owned by the Voestalpine company, which has funded research into its wartime past. There is a data entry in the archives for André Vandroux, describing him as a Lille locksmith who was hired as a welder, starting work there on 18 December 1942. His employment stopped abruptly on 10 June 1944.
That was the day the short, fictitious life of André Vandroux came to an end. The Gestapo and the Linz police arrived at the factory, asking for him by name. They knew who he was before they arrived. He was bundled into a car and taken to the Linz police station, held for a couple of days and then transferred to the converted Hotel Metropole on Morzinplatz in Vienna, the biggest Gestapo headquarters in Europe outside Berlin.
Malci would die convinced that her stepson had been betrayed by a comrade in Vienna. That was what she told a researcher many decades after the war, but I found out long after she had died that she had been misinformed. Mordechaj had not been the victim of treachery, but of his comrades’ incompetence.
* * *
The real story was waiting silently on the shelves at the Archives of the Austrian Resistance, a small museum behind a modest glass entrance opening on to a courtyard in Vienna’s old city. Inside there is a display of artefacts, including the blue-and-white striped uniform of a concentration camp inmate hanging in a glass box, alongside code books and pictures of fallen resistance fighters.
In the reading room upstairs, an archivist laid down a small pile of buff folders on a table in front of me containing everything they had on the Grossmann-Kessler ring and its demise, including extensive notes by Tilly Marek. There was also Paul Kessler’s prison diary in the same file as letter-headed reports marked Geheime Staatspolizei, the Gestapo, whose job it was to track down and destroy the unit and everyone in it.
By 1943, the Austrian resistance had become sufficiently irritating to the Nazi authorities in France to merit a special operation. A three-man team of Gestapo officers was sent from Vienna to Paris, equipped with files of fingerprints, mugshots and potted biographies of leftwing activists known to the Austrian police. This team was led by Eduard Tucek, who as a Sturmscharführer was relatively junior in the Waffen-SS to lead such an important operation. However, he had earned a reputation for his brutal interrogation methods in Vienna, and in June 1944, he brought off a coup.
A courier called Paula Draxler, a former nurse volunteer with the International Brigade in Spain, arrived in Paris from Lyon on that summer day carrying a handbag with a false bottom. Draxler’s partner, a leading member of the Austrian resistance in France, had entrusted her with delivering secret documents to contacts in the French capital. But in a fatal breach of secrecy rules, he had included a list of names, cover names and addresses of agents in Austria.
Draxler’s train was delayed, so she missed her first rendezvous with her contact. The directive in such circumstances was to come back at the same appointed hour the next day. But in a second violation of basic tradecraft, the “hapless” Draxler, as Marek called her, went instead to a safe house run by the network, which had already been discovered and was being watched by Tucek’s team.
“She ran right into their arms,” Marek’s report notes. “From the material that was found on her person, the Gestapo were able to get a lead on the whole Lyon group, and through that they were able to destroy the work of the TA resistance effort.”
Paula Draxler was tortured “in a bestial fashion”, and when she was confronted with the fact that her capture had led to a string of arrests of her comrades, she took her own life by throwing herself out of the window of a toilet in Gestapo headquarters.
“She had a four-year-old daughter,” Marek noted drily, in conclusion.
Days after Draxler’s arrest, the Gestapo arrived at the Hermann Göring steelworks looking for André Vandroux.
In the archives, I found the official account of Mordechaj’s last few months in a letter from Gestapo headquarters in the Hotel Metropole. The letter, dated 13 October 1944, is from Gestapo Kriminal Kommissar SS-Obersturmbannführer Karl Höfler, an Austrian policeman who was put in charge of the Gestapo department devoted to smashing the “leftist opposition”. Höfler cut a slightly stooped figure according to the description in the US military intelligence files; he was an ambitious man, proud of having smashed a young leftist group with the help of his preferred method of torture, a variant of what we now know as waterboarding. His letter was addressed to the chief physician of the Steinhof sanatorium, a certain Dr Huber, and concerned the case of “Martin Israel Sorger”. The Gestapo bureaucracy had automatically stripped him of the name he was born with and – as with all Jews – inserted the generic Hebrew middle name.
Höfler described Mordechaj as a “blacksmith’s assistant, stateless, Jewish, single, former Linz resident, high security prisoner”. By the time of his transfer to prison, he had been in Gestapo custody for more than three months and was barely alive. Höfler asked Huber to keep him breathing. “He suffers from diphtheria. Please keep me informed of his progress by telephone. Since Mr Sorger is an important political prisoner, can I ask you to make sure he is kept secure and to monitor him as far as conditions allow?”
The next entry on the file was a message to the Gestapo from the infectious diseases section at the Steinhof to say Mordechaj had died 22 days after he was admitted. The cause of death was: “Paralysis of the heart muscle. Toxic diphtheria.” A postwar affidavit in the same file, signed by Paul Kessler, the group’s second-in-command who survived the war, confirmed that before delivering him to the Steinhof, the Gestapo had tortured Mordechaj continuously for four months.
The Hotel Metropole on Morzinplatz is long gone. It was bombed in the war and the wreckage was demolished in an effort to eradicate any memory of it. The police lock-up where Gestapo detainees were held is still there, though, a great white wedding cake of a building alongside the canal, distinctive for its round turret on one corner.
Höfler, the Gestapo officer in charge of Mordechaj’s torture, successfully hid after the war until an amnesty for ex-Nazis was proclaimed in 1957, when he reappeared and got his old job back as a detective in the Austrian police.
Tucek, the man who tracked down, tortured and killed Mordechaj and his comrades, also escaped any real reckoning. A Viennese-born policeman who welcomed the Nazis and integrated seamlessly into the Gestapo, Tucek truly relished torture. One of his victims recalled him giving a lecture on the finer points of his craft as he whipped her until her flesh came away in strips, and then submerged her in a bathtub full of iced water, keeping her on the point of drowning. After the war, he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment by a French military court, but served only one. The Austrian state paid his legal fees.
No wonder Malci felt there had never been accountability in Austria. One day towards the end of her life, as she was catching her breath on one of our slow walks to that dire Chinese restaurant, she looked around her neighbourhood and announced: “Ils ne changeront jamais. Ils sont toujours les mêmes” (They will never change. They are still the same). In Malci’s eyes, they were the same people who had been content for her and everyone she loved simply to disappear.
* * *
For Malci and other survivors, liberation had been double edged. It brought freedom and devastating news at the same time. She finally emerged from two years in hiding in early September 1944, to learn that Mordechaj was still barely alive in the Gestapo cells in Vienna. Malci would have known he was being tortured, and would have heard about his death on 17 October. Vienna was not liberated for another five months, so she had to wait in a refugee camp in France before she could go home to search for his body.
Malci was condemned to outlive almost everyone she loved. Her stepdaughter, Chana, whom she had raised from the age of two, had moved to Prague after the war with the Czechoslovak man she had married in Manchester, Helmut Gustav Legler. They were loyal Communist party members, and went to China to represent the regime in Prague, by which time Chana was known as Hanna. Their posting was the reason we had Chinese wall hangings at home when growing up. Hanna had given them to Malci, who had passed them on to us. It was another instance of our upbringing amid objects suffused with tragedy of which we were totally unaware.
The Leglers returned to Prague in the early 1950s, part of the Czechoslovak Communist party elite, but in 1954, no more than a year or two after their return, Hanna took her own life. When I tracked them down in Germany, Legler’s descendants told me Hanna had been distraught when the Czechoslovak Communist party, to which she had given her lifelong allegiance, turned on the Jews in its ranks.
With Stalin’s encouragement, the party leadership had staged a show trial in November 1952. The 14 defendants, almost all of “Jewish origin” according to the prosecution, pleaded guilty to imperialist-Zionist conspiracy, and 11 of them were hanged in December 1952. The sense of betrayal overwhelmed Hanna.
Her daughter’s suicide was the last twist in the unravelling of Malci’s old life. My brothers, sister and I were her sole reservoir of joy, a burden no child can possibly comprehend or sustain. When she died in 1994, after living on the most meagre rations for decades, she left the four of us thousands of Austrian shillings recorded in little red savings books, and a safe deposit box containing old gold coins.
To obtain access to the box, I had to show an account number, and the password Malci had given me some years before, whose emotional weight I can only now appreciate – the very code that had failed to protect her son: “Martin-André”.
The sole reference to Malci’s death that I could find in the records was in Der Neue Mahnruf (The New Reminder), the newsletter of Austrian communist Holocaust survivors. “The Favoriten district group laments the death of Comrade Malvine Schickler, who has died at the age of 94,” the brief obituary said.
I found no trace of whatever was done with Malci’s ashes, but the records said Mordechaj’s grave was in Vienna’s vast Central Cemetery. I went to pay my respects on a summer day in 2022.
Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert are buried there, and my favourite scene of my favourite movie was filmed along one of the broad lanes that crisscross the sprawling necropolis. At the end of The Third Man, the heroine, Anna, walks towards the hero, Holly, for what seems like an age along the tree-lined path. She finally reaches him, and then keeps walking. I had watched the scene countless times without realising my own family were buried on either side of that lane.
My great-grandparents, Johann and Hermine, were interred near their sons and daughter who had died in childhood, Emil, Eugen and Marianne; Malci’s siblings.
With so few survivors to tend the graves, the Jewish sections of the cemetery are overgrown and full of wildlife. On the way to Mordechaj’s grave, I passed a fawn which stopped foraging long enough to watch me go past. A few steps further, a cock pheasant fluttered into view and then disappeared.
On his headstone, he was plain Motti. He had no more need for the pseudonyms he had taken as camouflage, Martin and André Vandroux. There was a thin layer of pine needles on his white slab and a black clump of what I took for soil and twigs. When I began to clear it away, I saw it was made up of bits of metal and small plates of glass, the remains of a lantern which Malci must have lit when she visited him.
I grew up somehow thinking my family had survived the Holocaust almost unscathed, but that was not true at all. Those who perished – Mordechaj, as well as my grandmother’s father and sister, my step grandmother’s husband, and several others – had simply been edited out of the family narrative, most likely with the intention of preventing pain seeping down the generations. Their lives were never recounted and their pictures did not hang on our walls. Unknowingly, as children we had been among people who daily supported the weight of unmentionable loss.
Beneath Motti’s name there were the dates bracketing his 24 years of life, and a single phrase: Dein Opfer Bleibt Unvergessen: “Your sacrifice will not be forgotten.” It had been forgotten of course, but is now remembered once more. Better late than never, I told his grave, and promised I would hang up Malci and Motti’s pictures when I got home.
• This is an edited extract from I Seek a Kind Person: My Father, Seven Children and the Adverts that Helped Them Escape the Holocaust by Julian Borger, published by John Murray Press on 18 January at £20. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. Julian Borgerwill be discussing his book with Jonathan Freedland for a special Guardian Live event on 16 January. Book tickets here
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