Shards of Kristallnacht still cut deep
Seventy years on, the memories have not faded. Kitty Suschny was a terrified schoolgirl of 13 when the Nazis unleashed a night of violence against Vienna's Jews on November 9, 1938.
"I saw the brown shirts marching from our window but my mother pulled me inside. I heard them shouting 'Jews go to hell'. There was screaming, shouting, the synagogues were set on fire. Many people committed suicide," recalled Mrs Suschny, who was evacuated to Britain but returned to Vienna where she lives with her husband, Otto.
Thousands of Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps on Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, a harbinger of the destruction to come.
The dazzling era of Jewish Vienna, that brought the world the psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, the writer Arthur Schnitzler and the composer Gusztav Mahler, soon evaporated in the crematoria of the Nazi concentration camps. Of the city's 185,000 Jews, one third perished in the Holocaust and the remainder emigrated.
Pogroms erupted across the Third Reich that night but the onslaught against Vienna's Jews was especially ferocious. Annexed by Nazi Germany in March 1938, Hitler's homeland was his most devoted disciple. Vienna was a "laboratory for anti-Jewish violence", writes the historian Mark Mazower, in Hitler's Empire.
This weekend Austria and its neighbours commemorate the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht.
Read entire article at Times (UK)
"I saw the brown shirts marching from our window but my mother pulled me inside. I heard them shouting 'Jews go to hell'. There was screaming, shouting, the synagogues were set on fire. Many people committed suicide," recalled Mrs Suschny, who was evacuated to Britain but returned to Vienna where she lives with her husband, Otto.
Thousands of Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps on Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, a harbinger of the destruction to come.
The dazzling era of Jewish Vienna, that brought the world the psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, the writer Arthur Schnitzler and the composer Gusztav Mahler, soon evaporated in the crematoria of the Nazi concentration camps. Of the city's 185,000 Jews, one third perished in the Holocaust and the remainder emigrated.
Pogroms erupted across the Third Reich that night but the onslaught against Vienna's Jews was especially ferocious. Annexed by Nazi Germany in March 1938, Hitler's homeland was his most devoted disciple. Vienna was a "laboratory for anti-Jewish violence", writes the historian Mark Mazower, in Hitler's Empire.
This weekend Austria and its neighbours commemorate the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht.