Last Waltz in Vienna

"It’s funny and sad. He was an only child born in 1920. His grandfather had been a Jewish army surgeon, something of a rarity, who rose quite high in the ranks. His father was a banker so they were quite well-off. He describes his childhood with humour, his relationship to his moody father who has explosions of anger, and his adoring mother. It was a typical Viennese Jewish middle-class family, and he draws a wonderfully affectionate portrait of his parents. He also shows how German culture was central to his parents’ pleasure in life, Goethe, Schiller and all the rest of them. He wrote the book as a way of plucking a rather typical family out of the anonymity of mass slaughter. They all got out of Austria and ended up in Ireland, but then his parents went to France, from where they were deported and killed in the camps. He had the guilt all survivors seem to have. He always remembered a phone conversation with his father who said, ‘Maybe I should come back to Ireland, though I prefer being in France’ and Clare had said ‘stay in France’ because he himself was enjoying a rather free and happy life in Ireland. It’s a beautifully written book and very moving. He wrote another called Berlin Days . After the war, he went to Berlin and was involved in the denazification process. But he realized, after the war and in later years, how fundamental that Viennese childhood was to his identity and to who he was. He also makes the point that he uses the term mass murder or mass murderers, never the term ‘war criminals,’ because, he says, the Jews were not at war. To call the Nazis war criminals is wrong. It’s more just the idea of the happy days in Vienna when he was this much-loved boy. He became a journalist afterwards and had a career in journalism, working for Axel Springer, which explains why he writes so well. I also want to mention Ruth Kluger because she wrote a book called Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered that is very unlike Clare’s book. She is roughly the same age but she stayed in Vienna very late with her mother. Both were deported to the concentration camps but survived. Kluger is an uncompromisingly truthful woman. It gives you a jolt, like the Hungarian Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertész’s Fateless about his own deportation, aged 14. There isn’t a drop of self-indulgence in Kluger’s writing. She describes her relationship to her mother with unsparing honesty. Her mother had always been neurotic, but became a tower of strength in the camps. I’ve heard before that some people who seemed fragile psychologically were stronger in the camps than others who appeared less frail. It’s also interesting to read her account of being in Vienna when most Jews had left, or had committed suicide. She sneaks out to the cinema, and describes a man secretly handing her an orange in the train when it’s going into a dark tunnel. He presses the orange in her hand. It’s a little gesture…but there is no sentimentality in her book. It’s also a rare book by a woman remembering her experiences in Vienna. Yes, absolutely. My father said that he lost four cousins in the camps who were more or less his age, but he didn’t particularly like them. They’d meet, but not regularly, and usually fought and hit each other. He didn’t miss them, but he grieved deeply for two people, a woman cousin who jumped from a window in Trieste and his aunt who died in Sobibor. It meant a lot to me because my sister and I don’t have much family. We have two half-sisters and three cousins in America and that’s it. It’s also about not having an identity—feeling neither Irish nor Belgian. I owned these seven memoirs written by family members that served as the basis for the book, and lots of photos, so I felt I had a duty to put this story together. But writing it also made me feel much more connected to my transgenerational inheritance, to the fact that I am the great-granddaughter of a schnapps bar owner in Vienna. Now I am going to write about the other side of my family, which is Irish. The two books will be a diptych. Maybe I’ll feel incredibly Irish after I’m done with that, but I don’t think it’ll be quite the same. For me, being Jewish is also about this feeling of not belonging anywhere, or of belonging in many places."