How to Live on a Dangerous Planet
My father’s father was from Poland. My father’s mother was from Hungary. My father was born in Vienna, Austria. A few months after my father’s 12th birthday, Adolf Hitler annexed Austria in what is known today as the Anschluss but was also known at the time as the blumenkrieg because of the flowers with which thousands of Austrians greeted the Nazi troops who marched into their country to make it part of a greater German reich. The diplomatic world effectively yawned. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain pronounced on the floor of Parliament that the response to the events called for “cool judgment,” which meant almost none at all and even less in the way of action.
Eight months later, weeks before my father’s bar mitzvah, his synagogue was one of the thousands that were burned, and his father was among the 30,000 Jews arrested on the night of Nov. 9, known as kristallnacht for the broken glass of vandalized shopkeepers’ windows. My father, who did not outwardly dwell on his experiences during the Holocaust and the war, sent each of his children and later also his grandchildren notes each year on Nov. 9 to remind them of what happened that night.
During the course of the years that followed, almost three dozen of my father’s aunts and uncles and cousins were murdered by the Nazis. One aunt and her family had the particular misfortune of living in the town in Poland that we in the West call Auschwitz. But my dad was fortunate in that his father’s brother was living in the United States and had connections and resources sufficient to engineer an escape for my grandparents and my father. The circumstances enabling him to secure entry visas for the family of three have always been clouded in some mystery, but suffice it to say that the response of the United States to these refugees was, as it was to many others less fortunate, hardly welcoming. Getting them in took persuasion and something rather different from luck.
My father arrived in New York after a harrowing escape from Austria and a hungry trek across Italy to the port of Genoa in December 1939. He wore his only pair of long pants on the voyage across but the pants, were made of wood fibers and shrank terribly when exposed to the spray of the ocean crossing. He noted the Statue of Liberty as they sailed into New York harbor, but just as great an impression was left by the sign towering in the distance, over Brooklyn, I think, that advertised Wrigley’s gum.