Emergency Arrest in the Classroom: a School Revisits its Nazi History

Der Standard, March 28, 2024
German original: https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000211342/not-arrest-im-klassenzimmer-eine-schule-arbeitet-ihre-ns-geschichte-neu-auf

Gudrun Springer

A school in Vienna's Karajangasse became a prison in 1938. The brutality there was long underexposed. Now the school wants to modernize its memorial.

It was a beautiful early summer afternoon. The doorbell rang at an apartment in Karl-Marx-Hof. 13-year-old George Czuczka opened the door. A policeman stood in front of him and asked for his father, who came in. The inspector told him he was under arrest. "Should I take my coat with me?" asked Fritz Czuczka. The officer said yes and advised him to take his "toothbrush" with him, George recalls. "The next time we heard from my father was when he was in the collection camp in Vienna, in the 20th district in Karajangasse."

George Czuczka's account dates back to 2008, when he was interviewed for the Austrian Heritage Archive, a collection of interviews with people who emigrated during the Nazi era. The "collection camp" mentioned by Fritz Czuczka was a temporary prison set up by the National Socialists when the conventional prisons were bursting at the seams.

A memorial site since the 1980s

The so-called Not-Arrest in Karajangasse was located in a disused elementary school, the premises of which now belong to the Gymnasium am Augarten. The grammar school set up a memorial early on with general information about the Nazi era and events at the former elementary school. Now the school wants to revise the exhibition.

The Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) found out about the request by chance. The historian Philipp Rohrbach works there and has been researching emergency remains in Vienna for years. He is now helping the school to modernize the exhibition. Rohrbach finds the project remarkable in that it is a "bottom-up project", i.e. it was created through the commitment of individuals and not realized according to plans "from above".

Several emergency shelters in Vienna

There were also emergency detention centers in Vienna, for example in the Sofiensäle, in Pramergasse and in the former Kenyongasse convent school - Rohrbach and historian Regina Fritz were already intensively involved in this in 2011. The topic still occupies both of them today. There were also shootings in Kenyongasse. The emergency detention center in Karajangasse is known to have been the scene of severe abuse and threats of executions.

A particularly large number of people were imprisoned after the Anschluss in the spring of 1938, when a large wave of arrests of political opponents and Jews took place. A further wave of arrests, then of Jewish people in particular, took place at the time of the November pogrom.

Little noticed for a long time

To this day, relatively little attention has been paid to the provisional prisons of that time. "There is no place dedicated to the emergency detention centers," says Rohrbach. "The radical nature of the National Socialist policy of persecution and extermination in the years that followed has probably pushed research into the brutality that took place in these buildings into the background."

There has been a memorial in the basement of the current Gymnasium am Augarten, where the elementary school used to be, since 1988. The fact that it is down there is somewhat misleading for visitors, as no one was imprisoned down there. Rooms on the upper floors, including classrooms, were used as prisons, as can be seen in the memoirs of Erich Katz, a Jewish student who was sent to the emergency detention center in Karajangasse as a result of the November pogrom. At this time, "the brutality there had reached its peak", says Rohrbach.

Detainees were desperate

Hundreds of them were crammed into a classroom without desks, Katz describes. There was "no place to sleep, no mattress, nothing". "As it was a former school building, there were no bars on the windows. In desperation, some prisoners threw themselves from the windows of the upper floor into the courtyard to commit suicide," Katz describes. The next morning, a policeman ordered every tenth prisoner to step forward. "Then came his threatening voice: 'If one more of you Jews jumps from the windows to commit suicide, every tenth person will be shot. And anyone who comes near a window will get a bullet."

Katz was transferred from Karajangasse to the Elisabethpromenade police prison ("die Liesl"), where Gestapo officers took personal details, took the prisoners' belongings and where he was repeatedly beaten and kicked in the boots. They were then transported to the Westbahnhof and from there to Dachau. Katz wrote about this: "The suffering we were subjected to can hardly be described in words."

In 1999, the memorial was officially opened in the school in Karajangasse. It has been open to the public ever since, currently on Thursdays (school days only) from 4 to 8 pm. The posters, which are dedicated to the Nazi era and knowledge about the emergency detention within the walls of the building, were designed as a school project by teacher Michael Zahradnik and pupils back in 1988. The posters were later made more durable, but their content corresponds to the originals. For example, they show who was among the prisoners in Karajangasse - one of them was called Bruno Kreisky.

Later, a committed teacher started a letter project with former pupils who had been expelled from the grammar school during the Nazi era. Copies of the letters are available in the exhibition as a thick book. Additions to the exhibition were repeatedly realized as school projects, for example researching how many pupils were murdered by the Nazi regime.

Archive at school?

However, the exhibition is no longer up to date. "The memorial is no longer up to date - both in terms of content and in terms of how knowledge is conveyed today," says Sarah Leitgeb, director of the memorial and teacher at the Augarten grammar school. For example, no sources are cited, and much of the content could be read by pupils today on the internet instead of in damp, cold cellar rooms, where electronic devices would also quickly break. "The collection of information could grow and be continuously added to on site," says Rohrbach. For example, an archive could be set up in the school, is one of the ideas. It would also meet the wishes of relatives who would like to know more about what happened to their ancestors at the site.

George Czuczka's father, the subject of this article, only wrote a short letter from the emergency detention center. The son later estimated that his family did not hear from him for two or three weeks. The next letter came from Dachau concentration camp. But the father was lucky: he was released again. The family fled to the USA in 1939. Son George still lives there. (Gudrun Springer, 28.3.2024)