'We had a boy of 17 with us in the holidays, one of the dearest people I've ever known. He was asked to write the enclosed for someone in Canada, & did it in the hope that it might help people to understand that the persecution is not made up of isolated pogroms, but of a fear that is continual & unremitting. I am sending it because perhaps it will give some idea of the background from which Mr Feller will have come.'
- Letter to the Dean of the Society of the Sacred Mission from Marjorie Milne, 1939.A full transcript of the following account is available below.
The account of Otto T. is included among the papers of the Society of the Sacred Mission, an Anglican religious order whose archive is deposited here at the Borthwick. In 1938-9 the Society worked with Miss Marjorie Milne of Scarborough, and others, to arrange safe haven to England for the Fellers, a Jewish family from Vienna.
Transcript.
(1)
By
O.T. a Viennese boy of 17.
I
write this because I see how few people can know what happens in
Germany
now. I know very well what the
unemployed have to suffer but I was in
Germany
and know that it is not to compare with the sufferings of the German
Jews. What I tell here I have seen with my own
eyes.
The
German Jew has not the chance to get even a little occasional work,
they
have not the possibility to go elsewhere because all money is taken from
them,
and they are no minute sure they will not be imprisoned without the least
reason
just because they are Jews. The Jew
without friends or relations in
other
countries is practically condemned to die.
Have you realised this till
now?
Can you as Christ watch this?
I
was living for a long time from the Jewish poor kitchen; sometimes the
Nazis
enjoyed to ruin all this kitchen; then all many thousand people had
nothing
to eat for a few days. You can say also
an unemployed can have nothing
to
eat for a few days, but can this happen to him? At 11 o’clock night, 10
S.S.
men come into a Jew’s flat, awaken him and force him to come with them.
He
is brought to a cellar with other Jews.
Here S.S. men take out their
revolver,
the Jews have to face the wall. After a
minute one shoots into the
air,
and then the Jews half-dead of his horror can go again.
On
the day that Rath was killed 15,000 Jews, only in Vienna, were imprisoned.
Anybody
who was seen without a swastika was imprisoned on this day. After
being
beaten awfully they were imprisoned.
First in schools and other official
buildings. The prisons were all full. They were so many in one room that they
could
not move one step. (I say not more than
absolutely happened). 8 hours
they
stood like this, then about the half was sent to a concentration camp, the
other
were falling on the floor to sleep on the wood but they could not because
(2)
the
S.S. came and forced them to pray Jewish prayers, 5 days they get nothing
to
eat and slept on the floor. A few
died. One killed himself springing out
of
a window. The S.S. officer said “If
anyone try to escape like this man,
every
tenth will be shot.” On the 7th
day came the Gestapo. In all cross-
questionings
the Jew had to face the wall not knowing what happened behind him.
(All
this has no sense and happens only to make the Jew nearly mad with nervous-
ness). The half went also to concentration camps,
the other were imprisoned
2-8
weeks. In concentration camps people are
kept 3-18 months. One third
never
come back. There was no family of my
many Jewish friends in which some
person
had not been arrested. Many got a letter
“If you want the coffin of your
son,
send 700 marks to concentration camp. Dachan [sic].”
The coffin came sealed and
no
one could see of what he died.
Imagine
a 70 years old man jumping over a chair, 50 times, 100 times so
long
as laughing Nazis enjoy it.
Imagine
a 70 years old man loading old iron (which Goering collected for guns)
on
a car while the jeering Nazis throw it down on the other side.
Imagine
the mentality of the human being who can say after 50 strokes with
a
riding-whip – “It could have been worse.”
What
shall I tell more? I could tell for
hours only what I have seen.
Horror,
horror, horror. I do not want to bring
hate between the Germans and
the
English, the most Germans have no idea of all this. The only people who
know
it are the Jews and the S.S. men and the others of Hitler’s troops who get
the
salary of an officer of the army only for beating Jews.
However
large the need for help is here in England, strong and soon the
help
is not less necessary there. The
unemployed themselves realise this and
collect
money for refugees. I know people who
spent two-thirds of their
possession
for refugees.
(3)
This
boy’s uncle was let out of a concentration camp because someone had
procured
him a ticket for Shanghai where he is going with Otto’s parents. They
have
no prospects whatever there; are allowed to take no money, and not even
the
knitting-machine with which latterly they had earned a little. They may
not
be allowed to land at Shanghai where there have been boat-loads of them
landed
already. God help them.
Strangely
enough Otto has no bitterness about it all, and says Hitler’s
policy
is understandable. He also says of the
tormentors – “They are only
boys. They do not realise how terrible are the
things they do.” I wish I
could
believe that. But it can’t be only the
young. We couldn’t find a
guarantor
for a man some months ago and he was sent back to a concentration camp
and
was at last let out to have his feet cut off as they’d been so mutilated
in
the camp. And there are too many like
this for it all to be done by the
hard,
unimaginative young.
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