My grandmother’s brothers and sisters go letters from her until they disappeared about 1940 or 41. My grandmother’s husband was from Vienna. Any of his relatives there had to have known what was going on because they were experiencing it. I don’t know if he had constant communications with them or not. We have nothing left from little estate.
However, the Pale was an intersection of commerce and communications, so some information had to have come out as to the conditions there.
My late friend was in Vienna when the Germans came in, and he endured a lot of beatings at the hands of the Gestapo. He knew he had to get out and eventually did but lost his sister to a tragic accident of fate. He gave her his boat ticket to America but the boat got trapped in Yugoslavia and the Jewish passengers were executed.
Bill got out thru the US Consulate in Marseilles just before the final wall came down.
Anti-Semitism in both Austria and Lemberg/Ukraine/Poland was well known but it hadn’t risen to the level of genocide until the Nazis came in.
The other tragedy is that the Soviet Union refused to take in Jewish refugees, esp. those from eastern Poland where my friend’s fellow citizens of Chelm were turned back at the Soviet border and many were later killed in German “Aztions”.
Read some of the comments of European Jewish leaders to their fellow Jews about not panicking and fleeing the rise of Hitler. That is what created a false face on what was descending.
“My grandmother’s brothers and sisters go letters from her until they disappeared about 1940 or 41. My grandmother’s husband was from Vienna. Any of his relatives there had to have known what was going on because they were experiencing it. I don’t know if he had constant communications with them or not. We have nothing left from little estate.
However, the Pale was an intersection of commerce and communications, so some information had to have come out as to the conditions there.
My late friend was in Vienna when the Germans came in, and he endured a lot of beatings at the hands of the Gestapo. He knew he had to get out and eventually did but lost his sister to a tragic accident of fate. He gave her his boat ticket to America but the boat got trapped in Yugoslavia and the Jewish passengers were executed.
Bill got out thru the US Consulate in Marseilles just before the final wall came down.
Anti-Semitism in both Austria and Lemberg/Ukraine/Poland was well known but it hadn’t risen to the level of genocide until the Nazis came in.
The other tragedy is that the Soviet Union refused to take in Jewish refugees, esp. those from eastern Poland where my friend’s fellow citizens of Chelm were turned back at the Soviet border and many were later killed in German “Aztions”.
Read some of the comments of European Jewish leaders to their fellow Jews about not panicking and fleeing the rise of Hitler. That is what created a false face on what was descending.”
To MadMax - All of what you say is true, but the part that is missing in your ex post facto condemnation of the Jewish and other leaders was that precious few could have had the awesome third eye it would have taken to foretell the kind and scope of horrors that could await them. The Nazi propaganda machine put up facades at every turn. Should Jewish and European history have better informed them. Yes, but still not to imagine an entire army of military recruits, officers, and an army of adventuresome and soon blood-thirsty women as the logistical arm of the mass slaughters over such a hugely wide area. Did Jews try to escape? YES! Did some succeed? YES. Did they hide in self-make pretend graves in the forests, a new one in a different place every night on a constant run for years? YES!
Once they realized from secret oral testimonies of escapees and rumors that were trickling back what likely awaited them and managed to escape the mass slaughters that descending overnight on their towns, a few escaped both the mass graves of their towns and concentration camps and a subset survived in hiding and/or on the run, sometimes with the help of neighbors and others who knew the difference between right and wrong and hid some for a day, a week, or intermittently.
Yes, by 1940 and 1941, it had become almost impossible for Germans to leave. Many in the Pale who knew that Nazis had taken over in Austria and Germany, believed that these Germans would not harm them and that they would be like the Germans they knew from WWI. Even if the Jews of the Pale concluded that systematic murder of Jews was the goal, where could they have gone other than hiding?
Our family likewise lost to Nazi evil just about everyone in all generations of a big family that lived not far from Lemberg and other places.