... And the Policeman Smiled Read Online Free PDF

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    Children were bewildered and frightened though many, like Richard Grunberger, then just turned fourteen, had seen the warning signs:
    In 1937, the third year, we had a history master by the name of Prochasker. He was a monarchist and yearned for the days of the Austo-Hungarian empire. He was very embittered by what the allies had done to Austria and Germany after the First World War which put him in agreement with the illegal Hitler Youth leader in my class. I could tell by the way in which the Hitler Youth character was asking certain questions and making certain points, which the history teacher was not really courageous enough to refute, that something was really going on under the surface. For example, I remember one lesson about the setting-up of the United States, where the history teacher merely told us how the Declaration of Independence was drawn up and so on, and this Hitler Youth character said: ‘Isn’t it a fact that among the founding fathers of the United States there was only a majority of one who voted in favour of making English the language of the new country rather than German?’ and I was rather amazed at this but the history teacher said: ‘Yes, this is so.’
    For Jews, Vienna became a city of fear and destitution. The risks of offending what was ludicrously described as the law were endless. ‘No Jews Here’ signs were everywhere. Cafes and cinemas carried warnings: ‘Gypsies and Jews Keep Out’; children were told to stay away from public parks; a little girl who was brave enough to attend school found ‘Cursed be the Jew’ scrawled across her desk. Magda Chadwick recalls her mother having to stand in front of her shop with a placard: ‘Jews must not buy or come in here’.
    One obvious target was Judenstrasse – Jews’ Street – where Rosina Domingo lived. On the night they wrecked her local synagogue:
    It had two galleries. At the top one was a huge tablet of the ten commandments with the sun rays coming from it. The Nazis threw everything down, but probably because the tablet was too heavy they couldn’t move it and it was left. It was so symbolic when you went in there. Everything was destroyed but the tablet still stood.
    The demands on youngsters was not easily understood. For Angela Carpos, who is half-Jewish, the pain of not knowing who she was or how she was supposed to behave started with the order for her to attend Jewish school in the morning and state school in the afternoon. It was not long before she encountered Nazi rule head on.
    When I was still living with my mother the Nazis were burning books and they came and snatched out of my hand my one and only lovely teddy bear and burnt it in front of me. They didn’t hit us – but what really terrified me were the scrubbings that went on. I saw neighbours and friends being humiliated, scrubbing windows and scrubbing streets. Absolute fear ran through everybody. You cannot understand it unless you have experienced it. The fear of walking the streets, the fear of every door. You are not aware of it. When I was in one of my foster homes in Scotland I lived in a bungalow with some very nice people. They had a gravel driveway with a little gate. Apparently, they told me years later, every time someone came along the gravel, I took a kitchen knife and sat under the table. I don’t remember – which is interesting. What must have gone into us children is beyond belief.
    And over all there was the feeling of utter loneliness, of having no one to turn to. In the tenement block where Richard Grunberger lived:
    â€¦ everybody was asked to put out swastika flags. Across the landing from us was a veteran social democrat. In the weeks preceding the
Anschluss
, when the political climate had got ever more intense, he had come over and spent a few evenings chatting to my mother and proclaiming his social democrat convictions and reminiscing about the old