Bill Braun and his brother, Edward, were reared in an Orthodox Jewish home in the early 1920’s, when Vienna was a prosperous cultural and cosmopolitan center. Their father, Max, was a salesman and bookkeeper who suffered from ill health. Their mother, Sara, was a milliner. Despite the rise of the fierce antisemitism that was to change his life, Bill still looks back with affection on the city where he was born. “I went to see all the great plays for 40 cents each,” he recalls. “I had to stand through them all, but it was wonderful. We were poor, but I really did not know I was so poor. It’s only when I measure what I had then against how I live now.”

As a very young child, Bill experienced little, if any, antisemitism. But as the antisemitic Christian Socialists became influential, attitudes began to shift dramatically. “You could get thousands of people into the streets for Nazi rallies, even though the party was still illegal and rallies were forbidden,” he recollects. “When the Nazi party established a base in Vienna, they took over a building not far from my grandmother’s house. I often walked on that street. The Nazis painted the house brown and called it ‘The Brown House,’ because brown was the official Nazi color. I remember seeing officers wearing brown shirts as well.”

By 1937, the Nazis had massive support and the Nazi terror was mounting. “They were seizing Jews in the street and beating them,” Bill says. “When Hitler’s army marched into Vienna on March 13, 1938, almost all Austrians greeted it with great joy. They thought the redeemer had come. I was 17 years old and had never seen anything like it. The Social Democrats, who had defended human rights, collapsed in one week, one day, one moment.

“Jews lost everything,” he continues. “They lost any access to law. If you got beaten up, there was nothing you could do about it. If you got robbed, there was nothing you could do about it. You had to feel lucky that they didn’t drag you along.”

"To Escape or to Endure?"

In response to the rise of restrictive rules targeting Jews, Jewish organizations in Vienna opened a central soup kitchen. There they would cook hot food (usually soup with potatoes and vegetables) and send it to Jews in various districts. They opened schools for Jewish children under the age of 14. (After that age, Jewish children could no longer attend school.) The Jewish community also set up adult-education workshops designed to teach Jews practical skills like carpentry, locksmithing, and radio repair work, so that if they succeeded in emigrating to a country where they didn’t know the language, they would be able to earn a living.

“We lost our apartment,” Bill says. “We had to move to a Jewish district. However, we were very, very fortunate. Someone knew a woman with a two-bedroom apart­ment who was ready to emigrate. She took us in as subtenants. My father had a small pension, and that was what we lived on. For some reason, pensions were paid.

“We lived on soup, bread, and potatoes. It’s amazing what you can live on if you have to. We were forced to mark Jewish stores and apartments with brown paint. I had to write ‘Jew’ on the doors.”

On November 9, 1938, Nazi hostility toward the Jews exploded into violence in Austria and Germany on the night of terror now known as Kristallnacht (“the night of broken glass”). Nazi troops swept through the streets, vandalizing businesses and burning synagogues.

“Thousands of men were rounded up and sent to concentration camps after Kristallnacht,” Bill recalls. “But they could return, if their families guaranteed that they would leave Austria within weeks. Most men would come back with hair shorn off their head. Some had their teeth beaten in. They were so afraid that they didn’t say a word. They were told, ‘If you say one word, it’s over.’”

After Kristallnacht, Austrian Jews were subject to the same restrictive laws as Jews in Germany: Austrian Jewish lawyers were barred from courts; doctors couldn’t retain non-Jewish patients; businessmen had to sell their companies to “Aryans” for ridiculously low prices. Jews were forbidden to go to theaters, concerts, or films, and they had to sit on park benches marked “For Jews only.”

“I don’t know of anyone who broke the rules,” Bill says. “Who would dare put himself in a situation where you could end up in a concentration camp?”

By early 1939, all Austrian Jews knew that to survive they had to leave their homeland. That is when Bill’s older brother, Edward, who was a member of a Zionist youth organization named Bachad, went to Sweden on a "Kindertransport" (a children’s transport) with forty other Jewish boys. While living in a children’s home in the countryside, he got a job working with a farmer for two years. Most of Bill’s aunts and uncles also left. Some went to Slovakia, where they wandered from village to village. But Bill’s parents refused to leave. His father was too ill to travel.

Then, during the summer of 1939, Bill received a chance to go to England on a "Kindertransport". Despite the deteriorating conditions in Vienna, Bill still felt a powerful connection to his city. He was attached to his parents and felt responsible for them, since his father was ill. “The idea of leaving was difficult,” he says. “As bad as things were, I was attached to my home and my family.”

Finally, after hesitating for weeks, he took his place on a "Kindertransport". A 24-hour train ride got him to Brussels, Belgium, where he visited his uncle’s family, who had fled there from Vienna. That was only the first leg of his journey to a new life. “I can still remember how I felt when I saw that the locomotives were green,” he says. “In Germany they were all painted black. Those green engines—they were the surest sign of freedom.”

From Brussels he took a steamer to Dover, England, and then a train to London. “I remember that it was a very beautiful, sunny day.” he says. “The boat was full of tourists. Until that time I don’t know that I had ever spoken to or seen an Englishman. It was quite an experience.”

"An Arduous Freedom"

In London, Bill was met at the station by representatives from the Jewish agency’s temporary shelter. “They had a lot of experience with immigrants from Europe, but they didn’t have room for us to sleep,” he recalls. “So they fed us at the shelter and then took us to a place called Rowton House—a seaman’s hostel—a rough place, full of unsavory characters.”

By now it was obvious to the British that there was going to be a war. So they decided to send as many refugee children as possible out of London. “They found an old, abandoned castle way out in Abergele, Wales,” Bill continues. “A couple hundred of us lived there with just walls—no lights, no heat, no water, no toilets.”

In spite of the deprivations, the Jewish community provided children with kosher food and a rabbi, who led them in daily prayers and helped them continue their Jewish education.

“I was one of the older children and wanted to do something useful,” Bill remembers. “I knew a little about gardening, so I helped Mr. Reid, a gardener who raised flowers and vegetables. I also began to teach myself English. I tried to read the British papers as often as I could. Then I tried reading literature; I started with plays. To this day I have trouble with prepositions!”

Compounding these difficulties, Bill was not totally free in England. After the Nazis conquered the Low Countries and marched into France, fears rose among the British that they would be next. Indeed, that was Hitler’s plan. Rumors spread through England that the Germans were actively smuggling traitors and Fifth Columnists there in order to prepare for the oncoming invasion. As a protective measure, the British government began arresting people who held German passports, most of whom were Jews.

“Officers led them through the streets saying, ‘Look at what we’ve got. We’ve got the Fifth Column.’ Anyone over 16 was taken,” Bill recalls.

Bill was classified as a “B” alien, a person whose movements were restricted by British authorities. Bill and seven other German youths were moved to a place just outside Manchester. From there they were moved to the Isle of Man, where they stayed for a month on the coast in an abandoned hotel that had barbed wire all around it, to prevent anyone from escaping. Finally, the authorities decided to ship those without family in England to Canada.

“We were sent there for ‘safekeeping,’ Bill says cynically. In Canada, Bill was interned at three different camps for a period of two years, moving from one near Quebec to one in New Brunswick, and finally to an old fort on an island in the Richelieu River near Montreal. ”The camp school organized by the YMCA was very important,” he remembers. “We had lots of books, lectures by Jewish intellectuals who were also interned there, and even good food. Kosher meat was provided by the Canadian Jewish community.

“We were divided into two groups—one had all Jews, the other had non-Jews. I was with the Jews. There was barbed wire all around the camp. We had to wear uniforms which had red circles on the backs, and red stripes on the pant legs so we’d be good targets if we tried to escape. We tried to explain that we had no intention of escaping, that we were happy to be there.”

In August 1942, Bill was able to leave camp, but as a condition of his release he had to work on a dairy farm cleaning stables. During the winter, it was bitterly cold. He no longer received any mail from his family, and he feared the worst. After that, he worked in a steel factory in Toronto, making trusses for airplane hangars. “I was scared the trusses would come down,” he recalls. “I got to know some Native Americans who were good with the trusses, because they could climb. After a year, I found myself a safe job in a uniform factory.”

When the war ended, in 1945, Bill entered the University of Toronto as an undergraduate. He began tracing what had happened to his family. In Israel, he found his brother, Edward, who had emigrated there in 1941 from Sweden. Edward still lives in Israel.

Bill’s parents were less fortunate. In the fall of 1940, his father, Max, died of complications from high blood pressure. Bill’s aunt and uncle tried to persuade his mother, Sara, to cross the border illegally into Slovakia and join them. But Sara didn’t have the courage. “She thought that because she was so good at her work, she might escape being deported,” Bill recalls sadly. “And she did, for a long time. But eventually she was sent to a work camp in Riga, Latvia, where she died.”

Bill’s Aunt Regina died in Belgium. After her death, her husband, Solomon, and their two sons fled to southern France. From there the men walked across the Alps to Savoy, a region in Northern Italy, where they hid out with Italian partisans in the mountains. Then Solomon sent one of his sons down into the valley to find food. The boy was caught by the Germans and shipped to Auschwitz, then to Czechoslovkia, and finally to Mauthausen, a death camp in Austria. Miraculously, he managed to survive and was transported back to Germany after the war.

“It was possible for some people who had a lot of resourcefulness, courage, and luck to survive,” says Bill admiringly.

After completing his undergraduate work in Toronto, Bill decided to study for a Ph.D. in German Literature. His Jewish friends thought he was crazy. “I did it for two reasons,” says Bill. “One was because of the influence of a professor who was a true humanist. He was Swiss, and he made a great impression on me. The other reason is that in those days, people thought there really were two Germanys. One was the Germany of art, literature, music, culture; the other was Nazi Germany, an aberration that suppressed the humanist Germany.

“It was a very pleasant idea,” he says, “but it was completely wrong. There was only one Germany. I thought I could save some of my inheritance by teaching it.”

In 1953, Braun received his doctorate and accepted a teaching job at Morehouse College, in Atlanta.

In 1956, the University of Rochester hired him as an assistant professor of German literature. He married Louise Zabel and they had two children. Zvi Martin, their son, is now a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer; Sarah Alisa, their daughter, is a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at the University of Michigan. Bill, now 78, is still trying to save his inheritance. He continues to teach—part time—in the university’s Department of Religion and Classics.

"A Warning"

It is imperative not to forget, to pass on the lessons of the war and the Holocaust, Bill believes. He is now convinced that the Holocaust was not an aberration but a natural expression of German nationalism. “In Germany in the 1930’s and 1940’s, everything that could have gone wrong, went wrong,” he points out. “Nazi power was made possible by the Germans’ excessive patriotism and their habit of submission and obedience.

“Most Austrians and Germans knew that Jews were being killed in concentration camps,” he maintains. “Surely, some of the soldiers who were Catholic must have confessed to their priests. But the priests never told. Even the railroad engineers must have known. They left with full trains and always came back empty.

“There are Holocaust deniers,” he continues. “To those of us who went through the ordeal, these deniers are criminal. It’s important that we pass on the story to the next generation, so that overwhelming testimony will show that it took place.

“The Nazis attracted leaders in every field—in art, in the army, the church, the universities. All these were professional people who could have stopped the Holocaust. But no one lifted a finger.

“From generation to generation, people must be taught. As a Jew I can never feel safe anywhere. Since it happened once, I do not think there is any way we can say it won’t happen again. Just look at Rwanda, the Balkans, the Kurds, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot. Just look at what we do in our prisons. All I can teach my children is, you’re not safe. Whether this will work, I cannot tell.”

Excerpt from "Perilous Journeys: Personal Stores of German and Austrian Jews Who Escaped the Nazis" written by Barbara Lovenheim and Barbara Appelbaum