Читать книгу Three Tearless Histories - Erich Hackl - Страница 16

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WITH HER LETTERS Maria keeps the Klagsbrunns up to date about things that have happened among their acquaintances and in the firm. At one point, because of customers who are behind with their payments, she wishes her former employer were there. “This is a time when you’re urgently needed.” Several times she even regrets having agreed to the purchase. The large number of regular customers aren’t a lot of use to her, she says, because most of them are Jews, and the storage space she had at the freight depot was canceled straight away. She even once accuses Leo of having cheated her since—intentionally or because he forgot—he omitted to delete the obligation to pay the installments, which he’d had entered in the Land Registry, which meant she’d had the authorities on her back for years and was burdened with extra charges. “I can’t understand why you took me for a ride like that when I’ve always been so correct in my dealings with you.”

Apart from that the relationship between her and the family continues to be as warm as ever. Now and then she complains that the Klagsbrunns don’t write often enough and when they do it’s too little. Right at the beginning she’s worried about whether the crates with their effects have arrived because she had the impression that Hofbauer, the forwarding agent charged with dispatching them, seemed lax and money-grubbing. She asks whether a Bauer family has already written to them. “Max regularly asks after you. I think the man misses you a bit.” To Fritzi she sends fashion magazines and a cookery book. She mentions that her boyfriend, Arthur Egger, whom she marries at the end of 1940 or the beginning of 1941, has pains because of his duodenal ulcer. That Egger joined the NSDAP—either to help his chances of promotion with the Deutsche Reichsbahn or because it’s of advantage for her and the firm—we will only learn later from Grete Gabmeier.

From the above-mentioned list drawn up by Maria Pfeiffer of her payments to and for Leopold Klagsbrunn (various tax and health insurance arrears, missed installment payments, dues, lawyers’ fees, back-payment of wages, dispatch charges, travel expenses for the Klagsbrunn family…) it is clear that the purchase price was also used to pay the expenses Leo’s sister Sida and her daughter Franja incurred in connection with their plans to emigrate. Thanks to Grete Gabmeier we know that Franja was an actress in Vienna (and in the studio theater ‘Literatur am Naschmarkt’ that put on plays and reviews by dissident authors) and later on worked as a dental assistant in a small town near London. A postcard to Fritzi in Lisbon has survived, dated October 27, 1938, in which Franja mentions a school in England where she’s applied for a job. “The disadvantage is that there’s no other kind of work I’ll be able to accept. But at the moment I just need to know where I belong.” Between the lines she hints at how unbearable both her own situation and life in general has become in Vienna. “I try keep my spirits up but it is sometimes difficult. On top of everything it’s very cold & gray & windy outside and & that gets me down.”

It remains unknown whether Sida was eventually also allowed to emigrate to Great Britain. And what about Johann Frey, Franja’s father? Had he already died, did he not want to leave, did he live apart from his wife and daughter? Unlike Leo’s friend Max, we didn’t find him in the database of Shoah victims compiled by the Documentary Archive of Austrian Resistance. According to that Maz Bauer was deported to Theresienstadt together with his wife Hermine on July 10, 1942, where she died on February 16, 1943. The date of his death is unknown.