On Nov. 10, 1938 — the morning after Kristallnacht — Nazi stormtroopers raided a Jewish-owned building at Thaliastrasse 115 in Vienna’s 16th District.
With ruthless efficiency, they plundered a family’s jewelry, furs, clothing, porcelain, silverware and treasured keepsakes. Then they ransacked stockrooms filled with a larger inventory of yarn — about a six-month supply for the family’s knit-goods business. Finally, they confiscated the real estate itself, forcing the terrified 60-year-old patriarch of the family to sign over title of the three-story apartment and commercial building worth perhaps a half-million dollars.
The family was mine. The building owner was my maternal grandfather and the events of that day, which I witnessed as a 3-year-old child, have remained fixed in my memory ever since. I bring them up now in light of renewed, worldwide interest in the question of restoring property looted from Jews during the Nazi era. Although there has been a small degree of progress, the road to justice remains strewn with daunting obstacles.
Let me be specific. Amid classic Viennese glitter and hoopla, the Federation of Austrian Jewish Communities has just raised more than $14 million by auctioning the Mauerbach collection — art stolen from Austrian Jews during the Holocaust and held by the Austrian government for decades. Amid great media fanfare and a burst of pious statements, the artworks were finally turned over to Jewish leadership to be auctioned off, with proceeds to go to organizations serving elderly Holocaust survivors and former Austrian resistance fighters.
By all accounts, the two-day sale was a smashing success. Demand for the artwork was described as “phenomenal.” Total proceeds far surpassed expectations and the president of the World Jewish Congress, Edgar Bronfman, hailed the outcome as a historic righting of “an injustice long overdue.”
Hardly. Austrian Holocaust survivors or their heirs — the actual constituency of victims of Nazi criminality — stand to regain nothing. While the Austrian government loosened its grip on some 8,000 pieces of art, it still acts like a pirate hoarding booty regarding all other forms of property. As Vienna attorney Gabriel Lansky told a news reporter covering the art auction: “There’s no restitution law, no way to claim things…What’s not included in the sale is the state’s.”
The 200,000 or so Jews who lived in Austria prior to the Holocaust, mostly in Vienna, experienced one of history’s greatest plunderings. When Austrian Nazis came to power with the Anschluss of 1938, they went on a rampage against the Jewish community, stealing everything they could lay their hands on. Tens of thousands of people became refugees, compelled to leave everything behind and start a new life under wretched conditions of hardship and homelessness. Those who couldn’t find a haven ended up in concentration camps, where some 60,000 died.
For decades since then, survivors have held hope that one day Austria, like postwar Germany, would acknowledge its moral responsibility and render redress. In my family’s case, my maternal aunt — a spunky woman who in 1939 managed to talk the Gestapo into releasing her husband from Dachau — tried to reclaim title to the Thaliastrasse building, or be compensated for its seizure. Over the years, she has sought help from survivor organizations and consulted attorneys in Vienna — only to run up against a truly dazzling wall of excuses and rationalizations: Sorry, it’s too late. Sorry, it’s impossible to trace the building’s ownership. Sorry, no legal mechanism exists to file a claim.
Now, despite the much-heralded recent events, she’s still stuck at square one, as are thousands of survivors like her.
Leadership of the organized Jewish community, worldwide as well as in Austria, must bear some of the blame. There has been too much apathy and neglect. No concerted effort has been made to trace the victims, the stake-holders, and involve them in negotiations with the Austrian government. To be sure, after more than a half century denying culpability, Austria finally established a reparation program this year offering victims a stipend of $6,500. Given the magnitude of the plundering and suffering that Austrian Jews endured, this is a paltry drop in the bucket toward settling an old debt.
Instead of sitting back and basking in the triumph of the Mauerbach auction, major Jewish organizations ought to be pushing on. A strong case can, and should, be made that the return of the artworks establishes a precedent for the return of other forms of property. Unlike the Swiss bank accounts, ownership doesn’t seem murky at all.
In the case of Vienna real estate, old deeds, titles and tax records exist in the municipal archives. During a trip to Vienna a few years ago, it took my aunt less than a day to locate a crucial document. Even when documentation can’t be produced, the presumption ought to lie with any Jewish person who can confirm residency in Austria at the time of the Anschluss. One way or another, they all were victimized.
If the Austrian government continues to resist, an alternate approach has now opened up. Why not channel some of the millions raised by the art sale into a redress fund? The auction grossed some $11 million over and above the original projection of $3.5 million. As a consequence of this windfall, ample funds are on hand to make the intended donations to charity and also underwrite some measure of indemnification to victims.
At the very least, it seems to me, victims should be given some sway in determining disposition of the auction’s unexpected surplus. The present-day Austrian Jewish community, numbering only 8,000 persons, most of whom made their way to Vienna from Eastern Europe during the Cold War, is not representative of the prewar Austrian Jewish community. Thousands of people with much closer links to the darkness and tumult, the mayhem and sacking that descended upon Vienna in 1938 — former refugees and concentration camp survivors and their children — are scattered throughout the United States and Israel. For too long now, they have been shut out from justice. Unless someone acts now, they still will be.