Outlasting the Nazis and Communists: My Life in Vienna and Prague

By Paul Vantoch

When Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, the fate of Paul Vantoch’s Jewish father hung in the balance. To save the family business, Eugen Vantoch divorced his wife and went into hiding only to see, after liberation from the Nazis, Czechoslovakia fall under Stalin’s harsh Communist doctrine.

Paul Vantoch’s book offers a revealing and little-known portrait of the life a Mischling (half-breed) in Prague under German occupation, followed by Soviet ideological tyranny. The tightly woven chronicle tells the unforgettable tale of how Paul helped his father survive Hitler’s systematic extermination of Jews, and how Paul and his mother escaped the Communists.

Paul Vantoch was born June 3, 1925, in Vienna, Austria, to a Jewish father (Eugen Vantoch) and Catholic mother (Maria Kasuhn). The family moved to Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1938 to evade the Nazis, only to see their adopted country invaded by Germany in 1939. They outlasted the Nazis only to see their country taken over by Russia and the imposition of Stalin’s harsh Communist doctrine. Paul later escaped, following his mother to Canada, then emigrated to the United States, where he has resided ever since. He now lives in Oceanside, California.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Vantoch
• Release date: May 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9780988794535

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

I wrote this book at the urging of my friends who wanted to make sure that firsthand memories from World War II would be preserved, because the generation remembering these monumental times is rapidly disappearing. Books even meticulously researched from literature cannot replace impressions gained by being there in person.

The memoir centers on my life during the Nazi and Communist turmoil that plagued the better part of the 20th century. It differs from other memoirs in that happenings are presented in a blunt and unvarnished fashion, without agenda. I did not invent anything to make things more readable or put myself in the heroic stance of a survivor. I was not subsidized nor vetted by any organization which is a sine qua non to sustain objectivity.

From my own experience with relatives, I gained some insights into Nazi psychology, and, combined with historical data, I tried to portray a kaleidoscopic view of the racial craziness permeating the Hitler era, including the Nuremberg Laws, privileged marriages, half-breeds, and the peculiarities of Hitler’s anti-Semitism.

In Vienna, I witnessed the infatuation with the Nazi ideology following the Anschluss (Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938) and while I lived in Prague during the war, I was part of the street scenes and experienced Jewish coffeehouses, deportation scenarios, the Prague uprising, and Communistic economic reforms. I also describe my preparations for escaping from Czechoslovakia, which took me almost five years.

I also hope that my writing may help to curtail distortions of reality often seeping into historical accounts.

All names in the book are of deceased persons or their identities were withheld.

I wish to thank my assistants, Ms. Georgine Whalen, Ms. Jeanne Warfield and Ms.Milada Gessman , for their valuable help and suggestions, and the editor, Mr. Larry Edwards.

Paul Vantoch

Oceanside, California

PREFACE

It all started with Hitler. When I was eight years old he assumed power in Germany. From then on I was entangled inextricably into his unrelenting net. Unbeknownst to me, I was classified as a Mischling No. 1 by his Nuremberg Laws passed in 1935. I soon found that he did not like Jews, and that concerned my father.

I was brought up as a Catholic and became aware of my father’s Jewish identity just before Austria was annexed by Germany in 1938. I had some Jewish friends, some anti-Semitic friends, some philo-Semitic friends, and friends of several nationalities. In discussions with them, I was never confrontational and always condoned or concurred with everyone’s opinion, no matter how absurd it may have been, because I wanted to fit in.

Before the war Hitler was adulated by many, including some Jews who marveled how a simple man could become the leader of Germany and achieve the rebirth of a nation. I was impressed by his oratory and decisiveness. Only after the war was over did we learn the full extent of the horrors perpetrated by his regime.

The central theme of my story is the fate of Mischlinge and the people in privileged marriages who teetered on the edge of an abyss during the entire war. Little did we realize, nor would we have believed, that the survival of Jews in privileged marriages and of their offspring was virtually guaranteed by a decree in which Hitler expressed his clear wishes and which he made public through Hermann Göring’s directive of December 28, 1938.

Hitler’s success was not of his own doing; he was helped by the German people who were conditioned to consider democracy and culture mutually exclusive. They believed racial purity to be a prerequisite for developing a successful national government and that racial pollution was evil. Friedrich Nietzsche professed anti-Christianity, invented the Uebermensch, and called for a new order in Europe, albeit he opposed anti-Semitism. Even Thomas Mann, the prominent writer and anti-Nazi, wrote in the ’30s that democracy is alien to the German character. So German thinking had been well fertilized with all ingredients of Nazi theories long before Hitler ever appeared on the scene.

He just had to repeat what was already ingrained in the minds of most Germans.

Hitler’s demise came as a big relief for everybody and brought an end to his racial lunacy.

CHAPTER I: Vienna

1. Early childhood with Uncle Willy

When I was eight or ten years old, I heard my mother mention the word Malleurchen when she spoke to friends. I knew from her looks that she was referring to me. The German word Malleurchen is derived from the French word malheur, which means a disaster, mishap, or blunder; the German ending -chen is a diminutive, so the German word means a small disaster or small blunder. Some sophisticated German and Austrian ladies from the middle class delighted in using the word to refer to a child born from an unwanted pregnancy.

The differences in age, religion, nationality, and social background between my parents had a strong effect on my mother’s feeling about her pregnancy. My mother, Maria Kasuhn, was only twenty-one years old when I was born on June 3, 1925, while my father, Eugen Vantoch, was forty-five. They were not married at the time, which added to her distress. She was angry with my father, and when they discussed the selection of a name for me, she said, Call him Joe or anything. Finally, my mother suggested Paul, and I was baptized with that name at the Alservorstadt church in Vienna’s IX District. The religion of my father was quoted as Mosaisch (Jewish) and my mother’s as Roman Catholic. The birth certificate did not list the marital status of my mother as single. It took five more years before my parents got married and I became legitimate. This birth certificate turned out to be of great importance in the Nazi era.

When I was several months old, my mother parked my baby carriage on the driveway in front of my father’s store. Not long afterward, the brakes of a parked car came loose, and it barreled down the slope toward the carriage. My life was saved by my father’s German shepherd dog, Nora, who had followed my mother and was whining to direct her attention to the baby carriage. My mother moved the carriage to another location, and moments later the car ran over the very spot where the carriage had been standing.

This story must have been true, because in later years it was told and retold many times by both my father and my mother. The dog saved my life. But it did not save me from the conflict into which I had been born due to my mixed racial heritage, which affected me throughout my life.

My father met my mother in the stamp shop he owned, where she worked for him as a salesgirl. After he sold his apartment and the stamp shop, my mother became disenchanted and decided that she had had enough of his aimless lifestyle. It held no future for her, and she could not handle her blunder any longer. When I was about one year old, she handed me over to her brother Willy and his wife, Carla, who were childless. My mother took a beautician course in Vienna, and when she could not find work, went to Switzerland as a hairdresser, where she worked in Interlaken for some time. Later she worked as a nanny in Holland.

During the years of her absence she visited often and always came loaded with generous gifts of coffee, chocolate, and other goodies for Carla and Willy. Later my mother told me that whenever she came to visit me at Uncle Willy’s, I did not recognize her at all and screamed my head off when she tried to hold me. Her motivation to leave me in the care of Carla and Willy for four years puzzled me. I thought it may have been manifold: She was not ready to settle down at the age of twenty-one, she had no apartment, no reliable income, and she was eager to visit foreign countries after having been confined to Vienna, where she lived in virtual poverty. Also, her unique, compulsive personality drove her to do the unconventional, things out of the ordinary. Then she liked to impress audiences with her heroic achievements. She did similar stunts later in life, which sometimes had catastrophic consequences.

My father also came to visit me at Carla’s. On one occasion he criticized Carla severely for feeding me hot dogs from a nearby hot dog stand—he considered hot dogs an unhealthy proletarian food.

My Uncle Willy was an active Crypto Nazi (ein Illegaler) until Hitler occupied Austria in 1938, when Willy came out of the closet and became just a Nazi, without the crypto, while my father was the political opposite, being of Czech-Jewish extraction. However, they always were on friendly terms, maintained a good family relationship, and mostly did not discuss politics. Willy admired my father for his cleverness to keep his business afloat during the economically depressed times. My father admired Willy for his technical skills and keeping our radios repaired.

My parents’ backgrounds were very diverse and colorful. My father was slim, short in stature, had an aquiline nose, blue eyes, and dark hair. He was the scion of a Czech-Jewish family in Nymburk, Czechoslovakia. My grandfather Ludwig, before World War I, founded the substantial Griotte liqueur factory (Ludwig Vantoch AG, Nymburk) and supplied Austrian markets as well as exporting internationally, even to the United States.

My father talked rarely about his life, but he did tell me that he participated in bicycle races. The bicycles had wooden wheels and glued-on tires to reduce weight. He also served in the military, in the equestrian division, called the Husars. At one point he was wounded and got a bullet under his skin, but the bullet was never removed. Sometimes he let me touch it, which gave me an eerie feeling because I could move the bullet around by pushing it with my finger. Other than that, he never told me what he did during the war.

He took me ice skating at the Engelman Ice Rink in Vienna, swimming in the Danube River, and, according to my mother, he was a passionate coffeehouse card player. Despite his physical prowess, he suffered for many years from serious tuberculosis and was treated in sanatoria in Davos, Switzerland, and in Afflenz, Austria.

He had fine gourmet taste buds, which helped him to improve his father’s liqueur formulas. Starting with the liqueur’s sour cherry base, he added tiny amounts of vanillin, cumarin, bitter almond, French Hennessy brandy, citric acid, acetic acetate (Essigsaure), and other ingredients, which gave the product a sublime aroma. The recipes still remain a secret. When the liqueur was sipped and rolled on the tongue, different combinations of flavors appeared every time, to the enchantment of connoisseurs. Later in life, when I lived in Virginia, I tasted a thirty-year-old bottle my mother had safeguarded for decades. The aged product was incredibly flavorful—much better than Cherry Heering, the leading competitive brand.

Though my father’s engaging personality made him very popular with the ladies, he had no affairs in the 20 years of his marriage to my mother, with the exception of one or two occasions when he had to deal with life-or-death situations during the Nazi period.

Everyone admired my father’s beautiful penmanship. He could form perfectly shaped letters, either super small or normal size. It was impossible to fake his signature, as I found out after attempting to sign a note from my teacher about my unruly behavior in class.

He also had talent for drawing. Once he sketched a horse’s head while I was sitting on his lap, and I was flabbergasted at how, with a few strokes, he could produce such a likeness.

As far as I can remember, my parents’ life together was always overshadowed by the fear of losses and declining business income. My father had many irons in the fire: He owned a shop that dealt in rare stamps, the liqueur manufacturing outfit, and a large apartment in the same building. His finances were never clear to me. He received an inheritance from his father, Ludwig, and also a share of the proceeds after his stepmother, Kamila, sold the substantial Griotte factory in Nymburk. After he squandered some money by speculating against the French currency, he sold the stamp store and the apartment to raise funds. Years later, after the liqueur business became viable, he usually had problems with paying taxes. My father had a special tattered coat he used especially for visiting the tax office. We always knew when it was tax time because he wore his tax coat (Steuerrock) again.

One of my father’s major shortcomings included penny-pinching with his employees. One time, when we lived in Prague, I begged him for a small raise for our chauffeur, which would have hardly made a dent in our profits, but he would not relent. Among my father’s best qualities were his boundless energy and his undaunted courage during the Nazi reign of terror.

My mother was from the other side of the tracks. Her father was a basket weaver who barely could make ends meet. My mother and her brothers Fritz, George, and Willy were all exceptionally good-looking and talented. My mother was a beauty of almost Hollywood caliber. Basket weaving was not lucrative, and landlords were very greedy, so the family had to move their poor household goods with a hand-drawn cart every couple of months for nonpayment of rent. I discovered this later from the Viennese police records.

Both of my mother’s parents died in Vienna during the flu epidemic in 1919, and the authorities sent Fritz and George to an orphanage, while my mother was apprenticed to a business producing feather costumes for stage productions. She got only food—no pay—and had to work all day preparing feather costumes and delivering them to theaters. This was in addition to doing household chores for the owner lady. Apprenticeship in those days was like slavery. My mother’s miserable existence ended after she met my father, who was a wheeler-dealer and always had some money.

The different backgrounds of my parents make it obvious that a lot of gene mixing had to occur to bring forth an individual with my peculiar personality traits.

My upbringing was left entirely to my mother, while my father was the breadwinner who took care of finances. Occasionally he took me ice skating or swimming, but he did not get much involved in my life unless in case of an emergency, when he was always ready to help. He was pleased with my Catholic upbringing and once commented when I brought home a report card from my religion teacher, Dr. Studeny, that Czechs are successful in all professions.

I was raised in a non-Jewish milieu. I disliked and often abhorred my Jewish heritage, but I had a fanatical fear for my father’s well-being. When he died in a Prague hospital, I was in a trance for several days. With Jewish friends and acquaintances I had most harmonious relations, but I did not want to be labeled as being Jewish, half-Jewish or any other fraction thereof. With non-Jewish friends, I rarely revealed or discussed my racial origins. I also did not disclose my heritage to either one of my two wives, my two daughters, or any of my girlfriends, with the exception of Olga, who was Jewish.

I did not inherit the good looks from my mother or the drive and courage of my father, but after overcoming mountains of obstacles, I did achieve a modicum of success.

After I was stashed away at Aunt Carla’s, my parents stayed in touch, but each did their own thing.

After working in Switzerland and Holland, my mother traveled to Memel in North Germany to search for her mother’s ancestry. In Hamburg she looked for work. My father commented in a letter to her that he was glad she got over her folly of searching for her mother’s ancestry and that there are many rich merchants in Hamburg. He did not say if they would be suitable to work for or to get married to. In the same letter, my father sent greetings from Fritz, my mother’s youngest brother, who stayed with my father. This gave Fritz a break from the orphanage.

In the letter my father reminisced about the nice vacation times he and my mother spent together in Kritzendorf, a small village on the Danube River. My father also mentioned that Nora the dog was sick and had to be taken to Dr. Neuman, a veterinarian. His greetings were from Nora, the canary, and of course also from Fritz. This letter showed my father’s generosity in taking care of Fritz, the dog, and the canary while my mother was frolicking in Hamburg.

My parents’ relationship resembled a pre-marriage tryout after the kid was born. Recognizing that I was well taken care of by Carla, my father offered my mother the freedom to do what she wanted to do, to look for a job or get married to a rich merchant in Hamburg. However, according to my mother’s account, my father condoned her peregrinations only because he himself had freedom to look for a rich Jewish lady to get married to. It was a complicated courtship with ups and downs. Actually, my parents married twice and also divorced twice, as I will explain later in my narrative. But their 20-year marriage turned out to be good.

***

My first memories go back to when I stayed with Uncle Willy and Aunt Carla, who took excellent care of me and were like my own parents. Willy’s apartment was located on the Urban-Loritz Platz in Vienna, close to the Gurtel, a broad thoroughfare encircling the outer Vienna districts. Aunt Carla’s mother, Marianne Ulbricht, of Czech origin, worked as a janitor. Her duties included washing the staircase every week and opening the building if somebody came after ten o’clock at night. She lived rent-free and got tips for opening the door after hours. Janitors were considered uneducated and lower-class individuals. Uncle Willy was not pleased to be the son-in-law of a janitor and made every effort to move from this apartment. After some years he found in the Clementinen Gasse a new apartment, where all rooms faced a firewall only fifteen feet away. That wasn’t good enough either, and in 1934 he bought a large apartment in the upscale neighborhood of Hietzing, where he lived until his death in 1983.

My contact with Willy during my formative years affected me to some extent and also gave me an insight into Nazi psychology. Willy’s fear of being unemployed, his anti-communism, and his love for authority made him a perfect candidate for the Nazi Party, which he joined when it was still illegal in Austria. In contrast, Fritz, my mother’s youngest brother, was religious, pro-democratic, altruistic, and generous. Both brothers were energetic and intellectually highly gifted.

In 1935, Uncle Willy registered several patents for push-button radios and other inventions; he built radios and was very good at math, even though he finished only four grades of high school. He amazed me when he solved the Rubik’s Cube in the nick of time.

***

After my parents settled down in Vienna and I lived with them, I stayed in very close touch with Willy and Carla, visiting with them every Sunday and spending vacations with them. Vacationing in the Alps was always a great event that I looked forward to for many months. Our favorite vacation spot was in the Ramsau near the Dachstein, the highest mountain in Styria. This landscape gave Willy an opportunity to show his great talent for mountain photography. He liked to be seen carrying climbing ropes, an ice pick, and proper climbing gear, though he never did any real rock climbing. He enjoyed posing as an audacious climber and liked to scare Carla with descriptions of his planned ascents to mountaintops along dangerous routes. On such occasions he shaved carefully, teasing Carla that he wanted to look good when they brought his dead body back to the mountain lodge.

Willy was a member of the Austrian Alpenverein, a club with strong pro-Germanic orientation and had many covert and not-so-covert Nazis as members. In the evenings, there were sing-alongs of patriotic melodies in our hotel restaurant, and everybody exhibited strong pro-German sentiments.

Willy’s anti-Semitic philosophy was partly driven by jealousy. He compared his own inhibited business style and extreme risk aversion with the success of some dynamic but sometimes less-ethical Jewish entrepreneurs. According to him, a distant relative had a patent for rubber shoe heels that was unlawfully appropriated by a Mr. Perutz, a Jewish manufacturer who became wealthy and a household name in Vienna. Telling me this story, Willy became very agitated and red in the face. His conclusion: The Jews take advantage of other people and sell at lower prices, which in Vienna was considered dirty competition.

There was even a legal term, Unlauterer Wettberb, meaning illegitimate competition, a term which I heard many times from my parents from both sides of the issue. Either they worried that the competition was selling too cheaply or that we were accused of selling too cheaply. Viennese merchants liked to have fixed prices. Lowering prices was considered unethical.

I remember a Jewish merchant in our district whose display window proclaimed Alles Billiger (Everything Cheaper). He was well liked by his customers but hated by the competition. In 1938 his merchandise got even cheaper when the looters took it for free.

In spite of Willy’s ingrained anti-Semitism, he highly respected my father as a fair and generous businessman. Willy understood that in addition to know-how, it took a lot of courage to run a business under adverse conditions, such as overproduction and lingering stagnation. Only the fittest could survive under these conditions. To make a cold sales call on a business owner could meet with the rudest rejection.

In 1938, Willy managed the Vienna branch of a small Hungarian chemical company. He was on best terms with the Jewish owner and salvaged many of his assets after the Nazis’ annexation of Austria. This was certified by Anthony Lindner, the owner of the company, who after the war wrote from New York a very positive recommendation for Willy.

Later, during one of his many visits in Virginia, Willy had an accident when helping with some home repair. I took him for treatment to my friend Dr. Katzen, a Jewish physician, who took care of the injury. Willy could not heap enough praise on him. Willy liked and respected all Jews he knew personally, but the Conspiracy of World Jewry (Protocols of the Elders of Zion) still spooked him many years after the war.

***

I am now digressing to a big-caliber Nazi to illustrate that Nazis hated the Jews as an ethnic group but showed understanding and sometimes were even helpful to individuals whom they knew personally. This attitude was demonstrated by Hermann Gőring, who liked to make exceptions for some Jews and in one of his jovial moments said, I am the one who decides who is a Jew. On another occasion, however, he complained that every good German has a pet Jew who is above any reproach. If this was so, there would be no bad Jews at all. Where would this nonsense get us? That there are no bad Jews? So "every German had a pet Jew, but Der Jude, an aggregate term coined by orthodox Jew haters, struck fear into the heart of Germans as an evil force out to destroy them.

Göring’s greed for property and lust for titles are unparalleled in history, but he was not all bad. He was a swashbuckling World War I flying ace, an early joiner of the Nazi Party, became head of the Luftwaffe, and was named Hitler’s successor. But in 1942, after the Luftwaffe failed to supply Stalingrad and protect German cities from Allied attacks, he was shunted to the sidelines and focused on his art collections and other hedonistic pursuits. At the end of the war he tried to set up a government without Hitler. Göring’s next-in-command was Erhard Milch, who was reputed to be a Mischling. From all this it appears that Göring was an opportunist, not an inveterate anti-Semite, unlike Goebbels, Himmler, and others who were obsessed with the destruction of the race.

Thanks to Göring’s initiative, the concept of mixed-privileged and non-privileged marriages was formulated and sent in a letter to the Minister of the Interior and to the staff of Hitler’s deputy on December 28,1938, as an expression of the clear Willensmeinung des Führers (Opinion of the Fuhrer’s Will). The directives were ordered to be transmitted to all government offices, even at the lowest level. These privileges granted to highly assimilated German Jews were considered a tactical concession to prevent declarations of solidarity from non-Jewish relatives.

Following are the main points of the directives:

• Mixed marriages with a father of German blood and children rated as Mischlinge 1 are considered privileged. They do not have to move to Jewhouses, and the assets of the Jewish mother can be transferred to the family.

• Mixed marriages with a Jewish father are temporarily privileged and do not have to move to Jewhouses, since the children will have to serve later in the Arbeitsdienst (Labor Service)