29. ‘ALL QUITE OPENLY, PUBLICLY AND LEGALLY’

Elisabeth took the little attaché case with the jumble of netsuke home. England was home now: there was no question that she would take the family to live in Vienna. Iggie, demobbed from the American army and searching for work, felt the same. Returning to Vienna was something that very few Jews would do. There were 185,000 Jews in Austria at the time of the Anschluss. Of these only 4,500 returned; 65,459 Austrian Jews had been killed.

Nobody was called to account. The new democratic Austrian Republic established after the war gave an amnesty to 90 per cent of members of the Nazi Party in 1948, and to the SS and Gestapo by 1957.

The return of émigrés was felt to be harassment of those who had stayed. My grandmother’s novel of return to Vienna helps me understand how she felt. There is one moment of confrontation in Elisabeth’s novel that is particularly revealing. The Jewish professor is challenged as to why he returned, what he was expecting out of Austria: ‘You did choose to leave a little early. I mean you resigned before you could be dismissed – and you left the country.’ This is the key, powerful question: What do you want by coming back? Have you come back to take something from us? Have you come back as an accuser? Have you come back to show us up? And, as a tremor beneath these other questions: Could your war have been worse than our war?

Restitution was difficult for those who survived. Elisabeth fictionalises this in one of the strangest moments in the novel, when a collector, Kanakis, notices ‘two dark, heavily-framed pictures hanging on the wall just opposite his chair, and a faint smile creased his eyelids’.

‘Do you really recognise those pictures?’ exclaims the new owner. ‘They did in fact belong to a gentleman who was surely an acquaintance of your family, Baron E. You might possibly have seen them at his house. Baron E unfortunately died abroad, in England, I believe. His heirs, after they had recovered what could be traced of his property, had it all sold at auction, having no use for this old-fashioned stuff in their modern homes, I suppose. I acquired them in the auction-rooms, as well as most of the things you see in this room. All quite openly, publicly and legally, you understand. There is no great demand for this period.’

‘There is no need to apologise, Herr Doktor,’ replies Kanakis, ‘I can only congratulate you on your bargains.’

‘All quite openly, publicly and legally’ were words that Elisabeth was to hear repeated back to her. She discovered that, on the list of priorities in a shattered society, the restitution of property to those from whom it had been sequestered came near the bottom. Many of those who had appropriated Jewish property were now respected citizens of the new Austrian Republic. This was also a government that rejected reparations, because in their view Austria had been an occupied country between 1938 and 1945: Austria had become the ‘first victim’, rather than an agent in the war.

As the ‘first victim’, Austria had to hold out against those who would damage it. Dr Karl Renner, a lawyer and post-war president of Austria, was clear about this. He wrote in April 1945:

Restitution of property stolen from Jews…[should be] not to the individual victims, but to a collective restitution fund. The establishment of such and the following foreseeable arrangements is necessary in order to prevent a massive, sudden flood of returning exiles…A circumstance, that for many reasons must be paid very close attention to…Basically the entire nation should be made not liable for damages to Jews.

When, on 15th May 1946, the Republic of Austria passed a law which declared that any transactions that had made use of discriminatory Nazi ideology were to be deemed null and void, it seemed that the path was open. But the law was strangely unenforceable. If your property had been sold under the policy of forced Aryanisation, then you might be asked to buy it back. If an artwork was returned to you that was considered significant to Austria’s cultural heritage, then its export was blocked. But if you donated works to the museum, then a permit for other lesser artworks might be forthcoming.

In deciding what to return and what not to return, the government agencies used the documents to hand that held the most authority. These were those put together by the Gestapo, who were noted for their thoroughness.

One file, on the appropriation of Viktor’s collection of books, noted that a library was handed over to the Gestapo, but ‘there is no record describing its full content. However, there can only have been a small number of works, given that the document confirming the takeover mentions the content of two large and two small boxes as well as of a rotating bookshelf.’

So, on 31st March 1948, 191 books are returned from the Austrian National Library to the heirs of Viktor Ephrussi; 191 books are a couple of shelves full, a few yards out of the hundreds that made up his room.

And so it goes. Where are the records Herr Ephrussi kept? He is still held culpable, even after death. Viktor’s life of books is lost because of a document with its initials illegible.

Another file is on the appropriation of the art collection. It contains a letter between the directors of two museums. They have an inventory made by the Gestapo, and they have to sort out what happened to the pictures ‘of the banker Ephrussi, Wien I., Lueggerring 14. The inventory does not form a particularly valuable arts collection but the wall decoration from the apartment of a wealthy man. From the style it seems clearly to have been put together according to the taste of the 1870s.’

There are no receipts, but the ‘only paintings, which were not sold, were the absolutely not sellable ones’. The implication is that there is not much one can really do.

Reading these letters, I feel idiotically angry. It is not that it matters that these art historians don’t like the taste of ‘the banker Ephrussi’ and his wall decoration, though the phrase is far too close to the Gestapo’s ‘Jew Ephrussi’ for comfort. It is the way in which the archives are used to close down the past: there is no receipt for this, we cannot read that signature. It was only nine years ago, I think, and these transactions were by your colleagues. Vienna is a small city. How many calls would it take to sort this out?

My father’s childhood was punctuated by Elisabeth writing letter after letter against the backdrop of failing expectations that the family would get their fortune returned. She wrote partly from anger at the way in which pseudo-legalistic measures were put up to dissuade claimants. She was a lawyer, after all. But mostly because all four siblings were in real financial need and she was the only one in Europe.

Whenever a picture was retrieved, it was sold and the money split. The Gobelin tapestries were recovered in 1949 and sold for school fees. Five years after the war the Palais Ephrussi was returned to Elisabeth. It was not a good time to sell a war-damaged Palais in a city still under control of four armies, and it raised just $30,000. After that Elisabeth gave up.

Herr Steinhausser, Viktor’s former business partner who had become President of the Association of Austrian Banks and Bankers, was asked in 1952 if he knew anything of the history of the Ephrussi Bank that he had Aryanised. It was believed that the following year, 1953, would be the centenary of its foundation in Vienna. ‘Know nothing of it,’ he writes back. ‘Won’t be celebrated.’

The Ephrussi legatees received 50,000 schillings on agreeing to a renunciation of any further claim. It was the equivalent of about $5,000 at the time.

I find all this stuff about restitution exhausting. I can see how you could spend your life tracking something down, your energy sapping away with all these rules and letters and legalities. You know that on someone else’s mantelpiece is chiming the clock from the salon, with the mermaids twined liquidly around its base. You open a sales catalogue and see two ships in a gale, and suddenly you are standing by the door to the stairs with nanny wrapping a muffler around your neck ready for your walk along the Ring. For one held breath you can piece together a life, a broken setting for a diasporic family.

It was a family that could not put itself back together. Elisabeth provided a kind of centre in Tunbridge Wells, writing and relating news, sending on photographs of nieces and nephews. After the war Henk started a good job in London working for the UN relief association and they were more comfortably off. Gisela was in Mexico. She had lean times and worked as a cleaner to support the family. Rudolf was demobbed and living in Virginia. And fashion had ‘given up’ on Iggie – as he put it. He could not face working on gowns again: the thread from Vienna to Paris to New York had been broken by his battle experiences in 1944 in France.

He was now working for Bunge, an international grain exporter, an unintentional return to the patriarch’s roots in Odessa. His first assignment had been a long year in Léopoldville in the Belgian Congo, hated for both its heat and its brutality.

In October 1947 Iggie visited England between postings. He had been offered placements back in the Congo or in Japan, neither of which appealed. He travelled to Tunbridge Wells to see Elisabeth and Henk and his nephews, and to visit his father’s grave for the first time. Then he planned to make a decision about his future.

It was after supper. The boys had done their homework and were in bed. Elisabeth opened the attaché case and showed him the netsuke.

A melee of rats. The fox with inlaid eyes. The monkey wrapped around the gourd. His brindled wolf. They take a few out and put them on the kitchen table of the suburban house.

We didn’t say anything, Iggie told me. We had last looked at them together in our mother’s dressing-room, thirty years before, sitting on the yellow carpet.

It’s Japan, he said. I’ll take them back.