Diversity of Perspectives in Holocaust Memoir: Bruno Schwebel’s As Luck Would Have It 73 Diversity of Perspectives in Holocaust Memoir: Bruno Schwebel’s As Luck Would Have It Laura A� Detre Independent Historian In the early 2000s, the Mexican broadcaster and artist Bruno Schwebel began to recount his life story. Schwebel, who had migrated to Mexico via France with his family in the 1940s, was looking back at a remarkable life and felt compelled, as many Holocaust survivors before him, to explain how he came to be the person he was and he did so in the form of an autobiography� Schwebel’s memoir is part of a relatively new movement to broaden the scope of Holocaust narrative. In the early years of scholarship on the Shoah, most of the stories historians relied on were those of Jewish adults, largely male, who were persecuted and eventually sent to camps because of their religion. In recent years, historians have widened their focus to include the accounts of individuals, such Abstract : Toward the end of his life, the Mexican broadcaster Bruno Schwebel recounted his life story in the form of an autobiography� Schwebel’s memoir is part of a relatively new movement to broaden the scope of Holocaust narratives� Historians have widened their focus to include the accounts of individuals, such as women and children, who were not considered central to our understanding of Nazi persecution initially. Ruth Klüger’s ground-breaking autobiography, Still Alive, represents this shift toward a more inclusive understanding the Holocaust and Schwebel’s book is in that same vein� He recounts his early life in the working-class Viennese neighborhood of Brigittenau and his father’s involvement in the Social Democratic party. It was both this political affiliation and his father’s Jewish origins that imperiled Schwebel and his family, and they are a dual focus in his autobiography� Keywords : Bruno Schwebel, Refugee, Social Democrats, Child Holocaust Survivor, Mexico, Holocaust Memoir 74 Laura A� Detre as women and children, who were not considered central to our understanding of Nazi persecution initially. Ruth Klüger’s groundbreaking autobiography Still Alive represents an important work in this shift toward a more inclusive way of understanding the Holocaust and Schwebel’s book is in that same vein� He recounts his early life in the working-class Viennese neighborhood of Brigittenau, growing up in a Gemeindebau and deeply immersed in politics through his father’s involvement in the Social Democratic Party� It was both this political affiliation and his father’s Jewish origins that imperiled Schwebel and his family and they are a dual focus in his autobiography. The book is also interesting because, although Schwebel was nearing the end of his life when he wrote the text, the events he relays occurred in his childhood and teenaged years. This perspective is vital to historians and it paints a fuller picture of life for victims of the Nazi regime, showing us how the fears of various groups differed and how characteristics such as age, religion, and political allegiance shaped the opportunities individuals and families had for survival� First-person narratives have long been the genre most commonly associated with Holocaust literature. In fact, many authors and scholars of the Shoah have inveighed against the fictionalization of Nazi persecution of Jews and other minority groups, arguing that it trivialized the factual accounts of this period to use them to create imaginary worlds. Consequently, much of our understanding of this history comes from autobiographical writing and those texts reflect the specific personal experiences of the authors. Because of the nature of genocide, some people were more likely to survive Nazi persecution and be able to tell their own stories than were others. Consequently, many of the earliest Holocaust memoirs published were written by young people, old enough to avoid immediate death in camps but young and healthy enough to survive the brutal life within. Though not strictly speaking a memoir, Elie Wiesel’s Night is a good example of this kind of writing and has shaped generations of school children’s ideas of the Shoah� Wiesel’s story has come to represent the classic Holocaust narrative - deportation by train, ghettoization, life in Auschwitz, and eventually liberation after a period of extreme deprivation and abject terror. Today though, we recognize that the history of the Holocaust is far more complicated than this and that victimhood had many forms� In the immediate post-Shoah, individuals were really only considered survivors if they had spent time in a small number of death camps. This marginalized many people, whose experiences were harrowing, but took place outside of that particular network of horrors� Schwebel’s life story would not have put him in that narrow category of Holocaust survivors a few decades earlier, as his family successfully found exile, first in France and then in Mexico, and never experienced an internment camp. Fortunately, today we take a broader view of what the Shoah was and we Diversity of Perspectives in Holocaust Memoir: Bruno Schwebel’s As Luck Would Have It 75 have come to understand the multiplicity of ways in which the discriminatory policies of the Nazi regime affected people’s lives. There has also been a shift in the tone of Holocaust memoirs in the decades since they were first written. As Ştefan Ionescu noted in his essay on Holocaust writing in Romania, memoirs produced in the mid-twentieth century generally focused more closely on the mechanics of the Holocaust and factual details of the author’s experiences attempting to survive the Shoah. By the end of the 1980s there was a transition to memoir writing that placed a greater emphasis on daily life and the individuals who attempted to help the authors to survive this terror (Ionescu 369). This was true even in places where there was less government control over publication and, to some extent, it is a natural consequence of readers’ ignorance of the mechanics of the Shoah. Readers first needed to understand that death camps existed before they could come to terms with the many individual experiences of this terror� Bruno Schwebel’s writing fits this pattern. He wrote little about the abject horror of the Holocaust. There are mentions of relatives who did not survive, but these are mostly wistful longings for lost grandparents, rather than gruesome descriptions of the mechanics of death. Even when he acknowledges the peril his immediate family faced, he plays down the threat, choosing not to focus on the potential for death. For example, he writes about his family being separated in September of 1939 when his father was sent to the Vélodrome d’Hiver and then to the internment camp at Meslay du Maine. Meanwhile, the Schwebel children were sent to a children’s home run by the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE) and their mother worked as a cook nearby� It was not until 24 July 1940 that the family would be reunited in Montauban, in southern France (Schwebel, Luck 74). The fact that the Schwebel family was able to reunite and eventually travel to Mexico together is remarkable, and Bruno Schwebel recognized that but did not write about this period in a lurid way� His intention is not to terrify but to inform� He also admits that his memory of this period is less than perfect� As a preface to his chapter on life at the OSE school he notes that he relied on Ernst Papaneck’s 1975 book Out of the Fire for details about the operation of the school, and later he admits that he does not know how his mother managed to follow her sons and that he has no recollection as to whether she travelled with them to Montmorency or if she came from Paris later (Schwebel, Luck 60)� Are these gaps due to the passage of time, the inevitable failings of an aging memory, or the fact that Schwebel was eleven years old when these events transpired? It is difficult to know but his admission that he does not recall details humanizes him. These stories also reinforce that, from Schwebel’s point of view, this book is first and foremost the story of a loving family that overcame persecution and built a new life in a place they came to love� It is not a horror story� In part he can accomplish this because 76 Laura A� Detre the Schwebel’s were fortunate and their support network successfully helped them avoid a death camp and the systematic demise of their family, but it is also a stylistic choice not to emphasize grotesque and violent imagery� The question of Schwebel’s age at the time of these events is central to understanding this text� An important change in the nature of Holocaust memoirs that deserves attention reflects the passage of time and the rise of what Susan Rubin Suleiman called “The 1.5 Generation.” Suleiman identified children who experienced the events of the Holocaust as having distinctly different experiences from their parents and other adult relatives. In her essay, she raised important issues for future scholars working with such texts, such as how do we define who was a child in the Holocaust and is there anything beyond the broad persecution of all European Jews that binds these individuals together as a generation? She notes that there are multiple ways to define generations and that when we talk about children and the Holocaust, we could be talking about people born in the wide range between the final year of World War I and then end of the Second World War in 1945 (Suleiman 283)� Suleiman went on to observe that the mode of survival is important for understanding a child survivor’s relationship to the Holocaust� A teenager who experienced a death camp may have described their feelings about survival in fundamentally different terms from those of someone who was a young child hiding in an attic (Suleiman 286). For this project, her most important observation is that the 1.5 generation’s understanding of their own experiences are deeply informed by many factors, including but not limited to age, social class, and the experiences of family members (Suleiman 289). In the case of Bruno Schwebel, he was old enough to have meaningful recollections of persecution� He was also deeply aware of his family’s status within both Austrian and Mexican society and wrote in detail about his working-class origins. Finally, the survival of his immediate family, both parents and his brother, is central to his story as well. Suleiman ended her essay by noting that every individual’s experience was different and valuable and making an argument for the central role that literary narratives should play in our understanding of the events of the Shoah (Suleiman 291)� Bruno Schwebel’s memoir should fundamentally be viewed as a work of literature. He attempts to recall historical events with as much accuracy as can be expected decades later, but all memoir writing is a literary exercise in the sense that the author controls the narrative� Schwebel did not write in a vacuum and was conscious of his audience as he crafted this work. In fact, there are multiple versions of this text, produced at different times with different goals� Schwebel was aware of his cross-cultural existence and he published his autobiography in the languages that most affected him. He wrote in Spanish for a Mexican readership and that text, entitled De Viena a México - La otra suerte, Diversity of Perspectives in Holocaust Memoir: Bruno Schwebel’s As Luck Would Have It 77 was published by his alma mater, the Instituto Politénico Nacional, in 2006. The German-language version of his life story was published by the Theodor Kramer Gesellschaft in 2004 and was titled Das andere Glück. Erinnerungen und Erzählungen. The American translator of the version cited in this work noted that Schwebel was closely involved in the process of creating the English-language version of his book and they used elements from the Spanish text to create an authentic voice (Schwebel, Luck 222). The idea that a memoir would have a unique character in one language versus another is not new. The writer and scholar Ruth Klüger produced memoirs that are virtually separate works in English and in German. These linguistic and cultural differences illustrate that memoirs do more than just document fact. The production of a memoir is a literary pursuit, and the choices a memoirist makes, from what topics to write about to word choice, influence the final product. Readers and scholars who use memoirs to understand the past need to be cognizant of this� Schwebel’s age may be fairly typical for Holocaust memoirists today, and our broader definition of survivorship has generated great interest in stories of exilees, but in a few respects his story is unlike most previous texts. The book focuses heavily on his father’s connection to the Social Democratic Party of Austria rather than religion� While his family’s Jewishness (his father was Jewish by birth and his mother by conversion) would have been enough to imperil them, they were more actively persecuted by both the Austrofascists and later the Nazis because of Theodor Schwebel’s position within the party. When Bruno was born in 1928, the Schwebels lived in the Janecek-Hof Gemeindebau in Vienna’s 20 th district. Theodor Schwebel had joined the Social Democrats in the aftermath of World War I, seeing the party as the only genuine option for Jews to participate in the political sphere� Interwar Austrian politics presented a complex landscape for Jews to negotiate, as new political parties were founded and their attitudes toward minorities were becoming clearer. In many respects, the period of Red Vienna was a hopeful time when anything seemed possible, but it was also when the horrors to come were planted and nurtured� As Rob McFarland and his coauthors point out in their essay on Jewish life in these years, there were a multiplicity of socialist parties in 1919, some of which were explicitly Jewish institutions. The Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP), the predecessor to today’s SPÖ, generally believed that Jews needed to acculturate to German-speaking, Catholic culture in Vienna, and that meant they should be less overtly religious. Over time, many of the Jewish socialist institutions came under the umbrella of the larger, more politically powerful party and made demands in exchange for their loyalty� At the same time that this consolidation occurred, conservative bourgeois parties complained that the SDAP was overrun with Jews, many of whom did not personally identify as Jewish but who 78 Laura A� Detre came from Jewish origins (McFarland et al� 191)� For families like the Schwebels there was no perfect political organization with which they could affiliate but the SDAP was the best available option� This political affiliation was the reason Schwebel’s father lost his job after the 1934 Civil War. Schwebel reports the events of February 12 in his memoir, noting that he and his brother returned to the family apartment after hearing explosions nearby. They were sequestered to their room that evening while a group of socialists met in the family’s living room. After their loss in February, leading to the creation of the Corporate State in May of 1934, the Social Democrats were outlawed and members like Theodor Schwebel, who worked for the League of Farm and Forestry Workers, lost their jobs. Schwebel’s uncle Oskar, who lived in Neulengbach, between Vienna and St. Pölten, was also active in the Social Democratic Party and was charged with high treason by the Austrofascist government for his role in the Civil War� It is clear from Schwebel’s retelling of this family history that this political affiliation was not a secondary consideration. As he states, “my father’s contribution in support of the organized working class, its long road from exploitation to active resistance and the consolidation of rights during the 1920s, may have been insignificant. But I am proud of his work even though it is little known” (Schwebel, Luck 29). After the Anschluss, when it was no longer safe for a Jewish family, especially one with outlawed politics, to remain in Austria, it would be the socialists who arranged for the Schwebel family to leave, first finding temporary refuge in France and then eventually permanent relocation in Mexico� Schwebel is very clear in his text that, even as a child, he was aware of the important role that various Social Democrats played in their exile� He writes lovingly about Marianne Pollak and the Rote Falken group that she organized for the children of Social Democrats residing in Paris in 1938 (Schwebel, Luck 56). Pollak, who was in her forties during this time, was also a committed socialist who had dedicated her career to the movement and found herself exiled after the Civil War, first to Brussels, then Paris, and eventually London. She and her husband, also a party official, returned to Vienna in September 1945 and she served in the Nationalrat from 1945 to 1959� Schwebel used this story about the Rote Falken and Pollak’s involvement with the children of this displaced community to illustrate how central their political affiliation was to their experience. Even at the OSE children’s home in Montmorency, where the Schwebel children were separated from their father and not in the direct care of their mother, politics were important. The children in the home were divided into three groups, Orthodox Jews for whom religious practice played a central role in their daily lives, “Cubans,” who were the children of the St. Louis, that ill-fated ship destined for Cuba, and Robinsonians, the group to which the Schwebels belonged. These were children of Diversity of Perspectives in Holocaust Memoir: Bruno Schwebel’s As Luck Would Have It 79 socialist refugees, not all of whom were Jewish (Schwebel, Luck 63)� Schwebel had lived in a family where politics were more central to their identity than was religion and that continued for him in exile� Ultimately, the Schwebels were able to get the proper papers to travel to Mexico because of Gilberto Bosques, the Mexican Consul General in Marseilles. Bosques had been instructed by the Cardenas government to assist refugees in France, and his staff issued approximately 40,000 visas, mostly to Spanish citizens fleeing the Franco regime and to Jews escaping Nazi-controlled Europe� In 1997 Bruno Schwebel wrote a testimonial on Bosques for the Raoul Wallenberg Foundation in which he states unequivocally that “if it hadn’t been for the anti-fascist position of the Mexican government, as well as the personal initiative of Mr� Bosques to save the largest number of people possible whose lives were threatened by fascism, my family and I probably would not have survived” (Schwebel, “Bruno Schwebel” n. pag.). Schwebel also notes that, upon their arrival in Mexico, they were greeted by Bundists who took care of them for the first few weeks after their arrival in the country (Schwebel, Luck 107)� Both the Austrian Civil War of 1934 and the following Corporate State under Austrofascist rule are topics to which historians have not given enough attention. The suppression of the Social Democrats after the failure of 12 February 1934 not only removes their voices from the country’s politics, but disproportionately affects Jews, many of whom shared Theodor Schwebel’s view that the Social Democrats were their only viable political option� Despite the threats that they faced under both Austrofascism and Nazism, some very dedicated Social Democrats literally kept their movement alive by helping the vulnerable to find refuge. Much like that of the future Chancellor of Austria, Bruno Kreisky, the Schwebel family’s survival was possible in large part because of this devoted group of men and women, both in Europe and Mexico. Like other refugees fleeing Nazi-dominated Europe, the Schwebel’s debated the merits of returning to the country of their birth. They did not reject their Austrianness and were clearly refugees upon arrival in North America, not immigrants who had sought out this new life. Nonetheless, by the end of the war and the stabilization of Europe in the 1950s, Mexico was their home. Schwebel’s parents tried their hands at various business opportunities, including chocolate maker and seamstress, but eventually ran various delicatessens, selling Central European specialties, such as gefilte fish and deli sandwiches� Schwebel observed that his father was never really suited to this work, having been a musician and an office worker in Europe. After his father’s death in 1975, Schwebel’s mother did return to Vienna on occasion, but she ultimately chose to live in Mexico to be close to her sons and their children� Schwebel himself was presented with the option of return to Austria at least twice as a young 80 Laura A� Detre man, immediately after the end of the war in 1945 and again in 1953 when he received his qualifications. When discussing this question of remigration, Schwebel was clearly of two minds. “Just as I had at the end of the war, I thought again about returning to Austria. That homesickness I had felt eight years ago was undiminished, and I had begun to analyze the anger with which I looked at my fellow countrymen though I was far from having overcome it. But no, I had put down roots by now, I felt good, and a splendid future lay ahead of me” (Schwebel, Luck 191)� Bruno Schwebel did go on to have a long and illustrious career in Mexico� He worked for the Mexican broadcaster Televisa from early in its history until his retirement in 1998� While at Televisa he had jobs that varied from camera operator, to producer to actor (he had a recurring role as a priest in the telenovela Gente bien, which also featured a brief appearance by a not yet famous Salma Hayek)� Schwebel was also a chess champion and an accomplished painter� He was an active participant in Mexican culture and not content to remain on the sidelines of society, waiting to return to a mythical homeland, and he wrote frankly about the fact that the things he accomplished in Mexico would probably not have been possible for him in Austria. This discussion of his post-Shoah life is, perhaps, the biggest difference between Schwebel’s book and many of those that came earlier. Unlike the earliest Holocaust memoirs, he did not limit himself to discussing anti-Semitism in Europe or his family’s flight to safety. Approximately half of the text is devoted to his life in Mexico, a place he clearly grew to love� He is also frank about the fact that this migration to Mexico was particularly hard on his parents, who had fewer opportunities in their new home than he did� In that respect his writing is reminiscent of Ruth Klüger’s. Both were children in Vienna when the Nazis turned their world upside down. They both tell their stories of survival and of family relationships, although Schwebel only reports positive feelings toward his parents� And we know that both Schwebel and Klüger build enviable careers in North America. Their personalities and the details of their stories are widely disparate, but their ages are close and consequently there are significant comparisons to be made between both of their narratives� Another figure whose life experience and writing are similar to Schwebel’s is the novelist Aharon Appelfeld� Both men experienced this period as children, Schwebel being almost four years older than Appelfeld. They also wrote explicitly about how the Holocaust and its associated displacement and death impacted their view of family� Another factor that joins these two writers is their post-Holocaust life as immigrants, bound to a natal culture in which they could or would no longer participate. Of course, the fundamental difference between these two men’s life stories was the fate of their families� Appelfeld’s mother was murdered and he was separated from his father for many years, to Diversity of Perspectives in Holocaust Memoir: Bruno Schwebel’s As Luck Would Have It 81 be reunited after the two had independently migrated to Israel. Schwebel’s immediate family survived as a unit and was able to rebuild their lives in Mexico� Perhaps the most important thing to remember when contemplating the writings of child Holocaust survivors is that they should, as with all human beings, be treated as individuals whose experiences and personalities form their work. Klüger, Appelfeld, and Schwebel all recorded family histories surrounding the same period and events put into motion by the rise of anti-Semitism in the mid-twentieth century, but they were fundamentally different people. As scholars we can look at their works as a collective resource for understanding this tumultuous history, but none of these texts can replace the other. Some, like Appelfeld’s works, are highly dependent on what Dana Mihăilescu called “the predominance of somatic embodied memories” (Mihăilescu 6). This contrast with memoirists such as Jonny Moser, whose autobiography Wallenbergs Laufbursche is filled with detailed historical facts about both the persecution of Jews in Hungary as well as the more comprehensive sociopolitical state of the country in the late 1930s and the first half of the 1940s. Schewebel’s writing falls firmly between these two in terms of recounting facts versus feelings and perhaps this is because he was also between them chronologically� Having been born in 1928, making him older than Appelfeld but younger than Moser, Schwebel was old enough to recall details of life outside of his family home in the years leading to their escape to Mexico. Also, as the Schwebels were involved with politics to a greater extent than the average family, it is reasonable to guess that stories about the SDAP were discussed at home and perhaps recounted years after the events. In both his introduction and conclusion, Schwebel discussed his feelings about visiting Austria in the twenty-first century. He pointed out the contrasts between the prosperous, modern country, full of hope and comfort foods. For him, visiting the places of his childhood was simultaneously enjoyable and discomfiting. Much like the eponymous character in Robert Schindel’s 1992 novel Gebürtig, Schwebel wrote fondly about visiting the sites of his childhood and seeing positive change from when he lived in Vienna, but also said “I cannot ignore the fact that anti-Semitism, which is said to have deep roots in the Austrian soil, is still in evidence even though there are indications that those roots are losing some of their strength” (Schwebel, Luck 198). Schwebel died in 2011, before Austria’s recent shift toward right-wing politics and the general increase in extremism throughout Europe, so one can legitimately ask if he would feel positive about the country’s future today� But it is clear from his writing that he was proud of the life that he built in his adopted home and hoped that his memoir could help young people to learn from the experiences of the past� 82 Laura A� Detre Works Cited Ionescu, Ştefan. “The Boom of Testimonies after Communism: The Voices of the Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Romania 1989-2005�” Studia Hebraica 5 (2005): 357—80� McFarland, Rob, George Spitaler, and Ingo Zechner, eds. The Red Vienna Sourcebook. Rochester: Camden House, 2020. Mihăilescu, Dana. “Holocaust Child Survivors’ Memoirs as Reflected in Appelfeld’s The Story of a Life” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 17�3 (2015): n� pag� Moser, Jonny. Wallenbergs Laufbursche: Jugenderinnerungen 1938-1945� Vienna: Picus Verlag, 2006. Schwebel, Bruno. As Luck Would Have It: My Exile in France and Mexico. Recollections and Stories. Riverside: Ariadne Press, 2008. ---� “Bruno Schwebel and his family�” raoulwallenberg.net. The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, 1 May 1997. Web. 20 Dec. 2020. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. “The 1.5 Generation: Thinking About Child Survivors and the Holocaust�” American Imago 59�3 (2002): 277—95�