Holocaust Testimony: Martha Blend

When, in 1938, the Germans invaded Austria, my parents knew that as Jews, we were in for a hard time. They had read about Hitler’s harassment of the Jews of Germany in the newspaper, but had thought wrongly that he wouldn’t invade our country. As an eight-year-old child, I had already picked up vibes of fear when the grown-ups mentioned names like “Hitler”, “Gestapo” (the Nazi secret police), “SS” (Hitler’s stormtroopers) and “Dachau” (a notorious concentration camp). I also became aware of the vicious propaganda put out against the Jews in the newspapers and on the radio, as Hitler used us as scapegoats for all the problems of the world. My parents, realising our danger, tried to emigrate to another country, but all the countries that could have taken us in only allowed a trickle of refugees to enter, and it would have been years before our turn came.

I have described what life was like for me as a Jewish child in Austria, and what happened later, in a book called A Child Alone. Here is an extract from it:

Now in the street, wherever you went, there were uniformed men in brown or black shirts with swastika armbands stepping out aggressively in their jackboots. Every week we were importuned by people shaking their collection-boxes in our faces for this or that Nazi cause. Army lorries packed with fierce-looking blackshirts sent out threatening signals as they swept past. At other times, the snarl would turn into a smile: the lorries would be laden with gifts to the Austrian people from a beneficent Fuhrer. A burly SS-man would stand astride the tailboard, smirking ingratiatingly as he held out bananas for the taking. I knew instinctively that these goodies were not intended for me and kept my hands tightly clenched as I crept away from the happy throng.

On my way home, I wondered how it was that neighbours who had until recently been friendly, now kept their distance, and acquaintances who a short while ago had trumpeted their devotion to Austria now seemed comfortable with the new order. One day I could hardly believe my ears: from the flat below came the unmistakable sounds of ‘Heute haben wir Deutschland’today we have Germany, tomorrow the world the proud boast of the Nazi Party. My friend Karl was thumping out the tune on his piano with gusto…

About this time a measure was introduced which affected me personally: a decree that Jewish children were not fit to be educated with Aryan children and must be taught in separate classes. Up to now, my beloved teacher had regarded me as a prize pupil, always ready to throw herself into any activity with enthusiasm. How did this square with the official view? I knew I hadn’t changed, so this blanket condemnation was all the harder to bear. Suddenly I was cut off from the place which had been a safe haven, the teacher I loved and the children I had known, among them my friend Grete. I now had to enter the school building by a different door and found myself in a different classroom with a new teacher who was said to be Jewish. She was nice enough, but no substitute for my beloved Leopoldine Hanner. For the first time I was in a class with boys as well as girls. There was an air of impermanence about this arrangement everybody was trying to get somewhere else Switzerland, France, Sweden anywhere out of the clutches of the Nazis. Our teacher, Fraulein Steckler, went through the motions of teaching us, but I don’t remember learning much in that class, though I still have the exercise book I used. It contains little more than the words of the Lorelei song.

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