LL-L "Help needed" 2003.08.01 (02) [E]

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From: thomas byro <thbyro at earthlink.net>
Subject: LL-L "Help needed" 2003.07.31 (07) [E/German]

Ron and Lowlanders

I am not responding to a posting but I need help in a personal matter.  It
has to do with my deceased mother.  She never liked speaking about her past
but she let up and told my father many things several years before she died.
One incident that she mentioned concerned the time when she worked as a
nurse at the Buestenstift hospital in Austria.  She said that one of the
nurses in her unit had married a Jewish doctor but had been forced to
divorce him because if she did not, they would both be tossed into a
concentration camp.  Unfortunately, to complicate matters, she had just had
his baby.  Her fellow nurses concluded that the Nazis would murder the baby.
My mother then volunteered to carry the baby to safety in Switzerland.  To
do so, she sewed padding into her rucksack for the baby and hiked over high
mountain trails known by few and successfully brought the baby to safety in
Switzerland.

I have many reasons to think that this doctor may have been my mother's
husband and the baby hers.  I may have a half brother or sister somewhere
out in the world that I would like to know about.I don't know any names it
must have been an unusual occurrence for a lone woman to come down from the
high mountain passes, leaving a baby.Where could I begin an inquiry?

Tom Byro

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Help needed

Hi, Thomas!

I am indulging you here a bit with a non-Lowlandic thread, because I know
this is important to you, and someone on the List may be able to give you
some pointers.

Have you considered contacting the Red Cross?  That organization was and is
instrumental in locating persons missing in war situations, and they have
vast archives.

> She said that one of the nurses in her unit had married a Jewish doctor
but had
> been forced to divorce him because if she did not, they would both be
tossed
> into a concentration camp.

That did not usually happen, unless the "Aryan" spouse had something else
against them, such as "sedicion," for instance membership in an outlawed
organization, such as the communist or the social democrat parties, or being
of largely "non-Aryan" or "non-Germanic" descent themselves.  Older folks
told me several stories of such "mixed" marriages.  The "Aryan" spouses
would be subjected to repeated "meetings" at police stations or Nazi party
headquarters, with the aim to make them file for divorce.  There were some
known instances of these spouses refusing to do so despite constant
harrassment, threads and penalties (such as having to feed their Jewish
spouses who were not entitled to employment and food rations).  There was
one such case in our neighborhood, where on top of it, the couple had been
moved from their apartment to a tiny basement studio apartment.  The
neighbors would seem indifferent during the day.  However, on an almost
regular basis, the couple would hear soft knocks on their door late at night
or early in the morning, never at a predictable time, and would find sacks
of food and sometimes even some ration cards on their doorstep.  This is how
many people were saved, very hard though this was.  However, in many cases
(perhaps the majority?) the "non-Aryans" eventually gave in, and their
spouses would promptly vanish.  When I last visited my now deceased mother,
we talked about this, and she revealed that a second cousin of hers had been
in this situation.  With one or two exceptions, her relatives, including her
siblings, shunned her as a result, and after the war she lived and died in
almost total isolation.   My mother talked about her with a sense of disgust
and shame.  Of course my first reaction was similar, but a sense of
compassion then kicked in, and I suggested that perhaps it was not our place
to judge, because we don't know how we would act under such pressure,
especially in the face of constant threads.  We'd all like to think that we
would have taken the heroic road.  But how many of us would have been able
to?

I wish you luck with your inquiry.

Reinhard/Ron

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