Hiding Through the Holocaust: From Buttercup Fields to Killing Fields

By Eva Edmands-Acher

My book traces our familys odyssey from 1938 when we were forced to flee Austria to seek refuge in France. Part 2, A New Life in America, deals with my life in New York City as a young woman of eighteen trying to adjust to life in the United States.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Feb 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781490723334

Eva Edmands-Acher

Eva Edmands-Acher was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1929. Because her father was a noted journalist, at the annexation of Austria by Germany, she and her parents were forced to flee to Paris. In 1940, after the division of France, they were forced to seek refuge in southeastern France, then in the French Alps where they were sheltered by a Catholic priest until the end of WWII.

Book preview

© Copyright 2014 Eva Edmands-Acher.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

isbn: 978-1-4907-2332-7 (sc)

isbn: 978-1-4907-2334-1 (hc)

isbn: 978-1-4907-2333-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014900280

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Trafford rev. 02/06/2014

33164.png www.trafford.com

North America & international

toll-free: 1 888 232 4444 (USA & Canada)

fax: [phone]

CONTENTS

GLOSSARY

FACTS ABOUT THE WAR

PREFACE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PART I

VIENNA

PARIS

CALVISSON

SAINT-MARTIN

EPILOGUE

PART II

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

POSTSCRIPT

GLOSSARY

Anschluss—The annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938. Hitler had forced the resignation of the Austrian chancellor by demanding that he admit Nazis into his cabinet. The new chancellor, a pro-Nazi, invited German troops to enter the country on the pretext of restoring law and order.

Aryan—(In Nazi ideology) a person of Caucasian, race not of Jewish descent.

Boches—Offensive slang word used for German soldiers during WWI and WWII.

Cure’—Priest

fagots—A bundle of sticks or twigs bound together as fuel; a bundle of iron rods bound together for reheating, welding, and hammering into bars.

floseed—the silky down in corn and other plants.

gendarme—A member of the French National Police organization consulting a branch of the armed forces with responsibility for general law enforcement.

Gestapo—German secret police under Nazi rule. It ruthlessly suppressed opposition to the Nazis in Germany and occupied Europe and sent Jews and others to concentration camps. From 1936 it was headed by Heinrich Himmler.

Milice—militia, a paramilitary organization

swastika—an ancient symbol in the form of an equal-armed cross with each arm continued at a right angle, used (in clockwise form) as the emblem of the German Nazi Party.

trestles—A framework consisting of a horizontal beam supported by two pairs of sloping legs, used in pairs to support a flat surface such as a tabletop.

FACTS ABOUT THE WAR

An estimated

Over six million Jews died at the hands of the Nazis.

Over one million Jewish children were murdered.

Approximately two million Jewish women perished.

Approximately three million Jewish men were forced to serve as soldiers, labored in camps, and were killed.

Over forty thousand facilities in Germany and Germany-occupied territory were used to concentrate, hold, and kill Jews and other victims.

However, somehow, three million Jews survived the Holocaust. And, for this, this we should all be grateful. The prior we should all mourn.

PREFACE

No man is an island, entire and unto himself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me because I was involved in mankind, and therefore never to send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.

—John Donne, Meditation 17

T he Holocaust is one of the darkest pages in the recent history of mankind. It saw the unprecedented massacre of over six million men, women, and children whose only crime was that they had been born Jews or were guilty of hiding Jews. Played against the background of the Second World War, it would go down in history as the most infamous crime against humanity and history. As in all wars, there were also heroes, not the generals like De Gaulle or Patton. The real unsung heroes with thousands of little people in occupied territories throughout Europe who vowed to fight to the death to wrest their country from the invader. They were brave men and women of the resistance movement, who took up the fight when the leaders of their country then betrayed them. They laid down their arms, surrendered, and in many cases, collaborated with the enemy. These people were the members of the clergy, Catholic and Protestant alike, who risked deportation or their lives for the crime of hiding Jews or were helping them escape. One such heroic figure was Father Longeray, curate of Saint-Martin, a tiny parish in the French Alps. His name is significant because my parents and I owe our lives t o him.

Because of him, my parents died peaceful deaths in the United States, not in the concentration camps and Nazi Germany. My book is dedicated to the compassionate, kindhearted Father Longeray.

Seventy years have gone by since the Nazi defeat by the Allied forces. A new generation has grown up and matured. The average American teenager is at a total loss to identify former leaders like MacArthur or Marshall. For those of us who are middle age or older, these are names that were so very much a part of our lives.

Studs Terkel, in his introduction to the book The Good War, recalls a conversation he had in 1982 with a woman of thirty who lived in Washington, DC, she said, I can’t relate to World War II. It’s in the schoolbook texts, that’s all. Battles that were won, battles that were lost, or costume dramas on TV, it’s just a story about the past. It’s so distant, so abstract. I don’t get myself up in a bunch about it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

E va Rappart-Edmands-Acher was born in Vienna, Austria, of Jewish pa rents.

In 1938, when Germany invaded Austria, the family was forced to flee to Paris, France. At the outset of WWII, Eva and her parents were forced to flee from Nazi persecution. They wandered through France, homeless, until they were rescued by a Catholic priest, who hid them in his former boiler room high in the French Alps. Eva, who was twelve years old at the time, helped out being caretaker of the priest’s flock of sheep.

In 1945, the family returned to Paris. They then immigrated to the United States in 1948.

Eva has written a book in French about her wartime life, Claudius Longeray: Homme de Dieu, which was published in France in 1997.

Eva met and married Bill Edmands. The couple later settled in Lawrence, Kansas. After her husband’s death in 1993, Eva married Don Lane Acher in 2013. The couple lives in Lawrence.

Eva has given over four hundred lectures about her wartime experiences to churches, schools, and civic groups.

She can be contacted through : [e-mail]

*

A few years ago, I knelt by a humble grave in a small cemetery in the mountain town of Saint-Martin-Bellevue, France. As I read the simple inscription, Here lies Claudius Longeray, curate of Saint-Martin, 1888-1959, a passage from Genesis 5:22 came to mind: He walked with God. How fitting an epitaph that would’ve been. Yet it would have embarrassed Father Longeray. He was that kind of man.

I walked back the rocky mountain path leading to the village and stopped on the way at Saint-Martin church. It had been almost twenty years since I had last worshipped there. I was a grown woman now, but I felt the same awe and reverence I had experienced as a child whenever I looked at the beautiful altar under which the relics of St. Martin were and then at the statues of Mary and St. Therese. Over in the right-hand corner where the reflection of the stained-glass windows gave him an almost mystical glow, the archangel Michael was still fighting his battle with Satan, and farther back, the blessed St. Francis still talked to the little birds. The church was cool and dark and smelled of incense. As I closed my eyes, I could hear it, a thousand childhood hymns sung by little peasant boys and girls in black and red aprons and wooden shoes. Cher petit frère, oh, bon Jesus donnez-nous vos vetus. And then, in the hall of darkness of the church, it almost seemed to me as if Father Longeray were standing there in his frayed patched black robe (he was always too poor to afford a new one) his frail hands outstretched, leading us in song, trying to make the discordant sound of the children’s voices into a thing of beauty, fitting for his Lord. Slower, Jeanette. Not so loud, Jean-Louis, the little Jesus is not deaf.

After leaving the church, I passed by the rectory for a last look. The old gray stone building looked unchanged, outwardly at least. The last rays of the sun gave it a golden hue, softening for a moment its austere façade. In the distance, across the valley where the villages nestled at the foot of the mountains the Alps lay in deep purple shadows. Soon the evening Angelus would call the farmers in from their fields.

Standing in front of the old house that had played such an important part in my life, I knew that the memoirs I had written as a child could have only one dedication, to Father Longeray.

Aside from the personal side, why bring up the Holocaust again? Because, as John Donne wrote in Meditation 17, No man is an island. Also it has been said that as human beings, we bear a collective guilt for what happened. I am reminded of God’s saying to Cain, What hast thou done? The blood of your brother crieth out to me from the ground.

We, as Americans, have been lulled into a false belief that it cannot happen here or that it could never happen again. We can never again allow ourselves to become so complacent that we blind ourselves to events that should alarm us. Efforts by the increasingly vocal members of the Moral Majority have taken away some of our hard-won freedoms. Oliver North’s testimonies during the Iran-Contra hearings that he would suspend the constitution in the case of a national emergency are two cases I can cite. A revival of Nazism in Skokie, Illinois, and abroad, a refusal to grant Kurt Waldheim a visa, former Nazi leaders prominent in Germany: he’s still worshipped by some as a hero. Nazis thought of themselves as a super race, an idea evolved from Nietzsche’s notion of Übermensch.

Only two decades ago, American soldiers cold-bloodedly slaughtered helpless women and children at My Lai. They were just gooks. We have General Westmoreland’s public statement that Asiatics don’t have the same view of death as we do. I read that as their lives are cheaper than ours. There are so many of them. They are expendable, and they aren’t Christians. The same rationale was used by Adolf Hitler to explain exterminating the Jews.

The main objective then in telling my story is lest we forget. No less importantly, I regard my effort as testament to the indomitable will of the human spirit to survive against all odds. When I went back to France ten years after the end of the war, I visited my former grade school teacher, Monsieur Carme, who said, Your father’s unshakable conviction that Germany would be defeated sooner or later is what kept up the morale of all of us, when all seemed lost.

PART I

VIENNA

V ienna appears to me only indistinctly through the mist of the past. Buried in it are the remembrances of my early childhood, but certain events stay with me, never to be forg otten.

I never think of my hometown without tender emotion mixed with pride. I was too young when I left it to clearly remember its looks. Yet I can see the Mariahilferstrasse, the Kartnerstrasse with its elegant stores, St. Stephen’s Cathedral with its tall spires, and the Graben with its monument erected in memory of the Great Plague. The monument’s statues with their tortured faces often haunt my dreams.

I remember our apartment in the Neubaugasse. There, my recollections become more precise. I can still see the spacious rooms, the big salon with its bay windows, which overlooked five streets. I see my father’s huge desk, his impressive library, my own room with its cheerful furnishing, my closets crammed with all the toys a little girl my age could desire, the vast kitchen where our maid Mitzi resided, the glass-encased porch where I would tirelessly drive back and forth on my tricycle, and finally, my aunt’s room that looked like a tropical garden with all the cacti and other exotic plants.

I recall some events like my first day of school. I felt like crying when my mother left me at the door of the classroom where I was to be a prisoner with the other children, all strangers to me, and a teacher who terrified me.

Happy memories: birthdays, Christmas, Sundays that we spent visiting my doting grandparents, winter vacations in the Austrian Alps. Summers in Italy or Hungary, weekends on the Danube.

Seemingly unimportant occurrences: the day I lost my first tooth, my first grave illness, the little mouse that terrified mother.

Until the age of eight, I was a happy and cherished child. I have not gone back to Vienna, but I know that she was heavily damaged by air raids. The gay capital of the walz with her historic monuments and memories of her past splendors during the reign of the emperors is no longer the same. Austria was my country, my home, and my happiness.

All this ended with one stroke with the annexation of Austria by the Germans. On March 13, 1938, they entered Vienna, and soon afterward, we were left with nothing. Gone were our country, our home, and all our possessions.

Soon after my eighth birthday, I felt a change in my surroundings. Strange rumors were circulating around the city. A feeling of nervousness, nearly imperceptible in the beginning, grew day by day.

In spite of my young age, I had some understanding of what the Anschluss meant. The streets were full of men in uniform, wearing armbands bearing the SA or SS. Many people were starting to wear the swastika on their coat lapels. These were the Aryans. Non-Aryans, I learned, were subjected to all kinds of indignities, like scrubbing the sidewalks with a toothbrush, cleaning bathrooms, and the like.

Elegantly dressed women seemed to be singled out for these jobs. If we saw a gathering of people, we quickly crossed the street or turned into a side street. We wore our oldest clothes, and my mother stopped wearing makeup. We wanted to be as inconspicuous as possible.

One day, when Dad did not come home at the usual time, I was told that he had gone to Budapest on business and that I was to stay with my aunt Goldigstich for a few days. Nevertheless, I was overcome by a feeling of uneasiness, and I knew right away that something serious must have happened. Mother’s eyes were red, but it wasn’t until much later that I learned that the Nazis had taken my father away to prison.

Soon after the Anschluss, a law was passed that forbade all Jewish children to attend public school. Jewish children had to go to a segregated Jewish school. Prior to that, my Aryan classmates who sometimes spat in front of me when I passed them had already regarded me as a black sheep, so I was relieved to leave public school. I did not have time to enroll in another school, for things were happening too fast.

One day, when Dad was still in prison, two tall brutish-looking men, an SA and an SS, came to our apartment. They started arguing with my mother. I heard the words money, militia, and compensation. I could not make sense out of it, but I had a premonition that something bad was going to happen.

Suddenly, the argument became more heated. The men’s faces grew red. My mother was trembling in anger and had to be restrained by the friend who was with her. They left at last, but my mother was in such a state that she yelled after them, Dogs! Realizing what she had done, she blanched. If they had heard her, she would have been arrested. This was