Roamer: Austrian Jew saved from certain death by Nazi school mate

In a world described as “scarred by prejudice and systematic, targeted persecution” HMD also commemorates more recent genocides like Bosnia, three decades ago.

January 27 is the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz-Birkenau’s liberation, the largest of over 40,000 Nazi concentration camps, death camps, labour camps and transit camps across 22 different countries.

So there’ll be numerous 80th anniversaries of camp liberations this year, many less-often mentioned, like Gross-Rosen, Poland, on 13 February; Ohrdruf, Germany, on 4 April and Dora-Mittelbau, also in Germany, liberated on 11 April.

In November 1938, at least 90 Jewish men and women were murdered in Austria and Germany, and 30,000 sent to concentration camps, in the Nazi Kristallnacht pogrom.

Jews were attacked in their homes and on the streets, and all but one of Vienna’s forty-nine synagogues were destroyed.

By the end of WWII 65,000 Austrian Jews had died in the Holocaust. A few escaped to Northern Ireland, recounted in a new book by Noel Russell.

This is just one man’s miraculous story.

Shirt-factory worker Otto Goldberger lived in Vienna with his parents, 62-year-old Hermann and 56-year-old Malwine.

Shortly after Kristallnacht two Gestapo-men arrested Otto and took him to a police station.

He was pushed into a large room full of Jewish men.

As darkness fell, the SS herded them into an open courtyard for deportation to a concentration camp.

In a memoir written towards the end of his life, Otto recounted: “As the guards passed us, I with a quick glimpse recognised an old school-friend, Franz Pokorny. Not knowing what I was doing, I stepped out of line and only said: ‘Franz, do you remember me?’ He had just passed me when he suddenly stopped and jerked his head, staring at me: ‘Goldberger, out of the line immediately to the wall and stay there.’ I went to the wall and remained silent. I was convinced this was the end of me, a few bullets in my back and it is all over.

“Then there was suddenly stillness, when I heard footsteps coming toward me and it was my friend, Franz Pokorny. He ordered the guard to open the gate and as he pushed me out into the street, he just said in his Viennese dialect: ‘Scram home as fast as you can and let no one see you for a few days.’”

Otto never saw Pokorny again, who later faced prosecution for his Nazi activities.

Very luckily, Otto managed to get a British visa and tried to convince his parents to do likewise but they were determined to stay.

He was extremely worried that he’d have to leave them “at the mercy of those beasts, the masters of the new Germany”, but Otto’s father reassured him he’d try to get passports if that was their only option.

Otto wrote in his memoir: “I look back in sadness at his unswerving optimism amid dire calamity, always believing in the goodness of man.”

One day in mid-December 1938, they accompanied him to say farewell at the Westbahnhof station where Otto was almost overcome with grief.

“I must have felt in my innermost being I shall never see my parents again,” his memoir continued, “just before leaving I consoled them by saying we shall see you very soon, against my better judgement, and after a last look the train moved slowly out of the station.”

Near the Dutch border, SS troops and German police took Otto and a Jewish girl in his compartment off the train and searched meticulously through their documents and luggage.

They were finally allowed to continue their journey.

Otto joined his sister Fritzi in Londonderry and later set up a shirt factory in Belfast.

But his parents were not so lucky. Hermann and Malvine were deported from Vienna to Izbica in Poland on 12 May 1942 and did not survive the Holocaust.

l Noel Russell’s book ‘The Saved and the Spurned: Northern Ireland, Vienna and the Holocaust’ is published by New Island Books. Noel will talk about his book in Belfast’s Linen Hall Library on Monday, January 27 at 1 p.m. Admission is free.