Jonny Moser’s Wallenbergs Laufbursche (2006): An Austrian Historian’s Personal Eyewitness Account of Surviving the Holocaust in Exile in Hungary Joseph W� Moser West Chester University Jonny Moser’s (1925-2011) autobiography Wallenbergs Laufbursche (2006) was published fairly late, both in the author’s lifetime and after a significant number of Holocaust memoirs had already been published. This is remarkable, since Moser was actually one of the earliest Holocaust historians in Austria, and in fact his small book Die Judenverfolgung in Österreich 1938-1945, which appeared forty years before his autobiography, was the first book on the Holocaust in Austria, long before scholarship had devoted much interest in this Abstract : Jonny Moser’s (1925-2011) autobiography Wallenbergs Laufbursche (2006) deals with an almost forgotten chapter of Austrian-Jewish history: the expulsion of Burgenland’s Jews within the first months following the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938. The Mosers lived as illegal immigrants in Hungary until they were discovered by the authorities at the end of 1941, when the family was transferred to a labor camp for foreign Jews in Eastern Hungary. After they were released from the labor camp in spring 1944 and following the German invasion, they just barely escaped being deported to Auschwitz. They finally met Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who issued them Swedish Schutzpässe, which helped them survive the final war months in Budapest. As a nineteen-year-old errand boy for Wallenberg, Jonny Moser got to know Wallenberg better and Moser remained for the rest of his life one of the most important witnesses of Wallenberg’s work� Moser returned with his parents and sister to Vienna in the summer of 1945, where he remained for the rest of his life� Keywords : Burgenland Jews, Holocaust in Austria, Raoul Wallenberg, Holocaust in Budapest, Holocaust Memoir 84 Joseph W� Moser topic� As a founding member of the Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes, Moser was a pioneer of Holocaust research in Austria. He also maintained his own personal collection of documents relating to deportations of Jews from Vienna that were being discarded by Vienna’s Israelitische Kultusgemeinde in the 1960s, because there simply was no interest in remembering the process of deporting Jews from Vienna. In the 1960s, he corresponded with Benjamin Murmelstein in Rome about the deportations of Jews from Vienna and about the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Murmelstein had been the deputy chairman of the Jewish Council of Elders after the Anschluss, and was essentially Eichmann’s Jewish henchman in Vienna� 1 In that sense, Moser was at the cutting edge of Holocaust research at the time, since Claude Lanzmann interviewed Murmelstein in 1975 as one of the first eyewitnesses for his documentary Shoah, even though the footage was not included in Shoah and was not released until 2013 in the film Le dernier des injustes / The Last of the Unjust, because the topic of Murmelstein working for the Nazis to deport Jews was too complex a topic until recently� Moser also visited and corresponded with H�G� Adler in London in 1968, who had published Theresienstadt 1941-1945: Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft (1960). Many early Holocaust researchers, including Claude Lanzmann and Raul Hilberg, visited Moser in Vienna, as well as many others� He was considered an expert on the demographics of the Holocaust in Austria, because of his collection of documents and personal research, and he was also considered to be a significant eyewitness in remembering Raoul Wallenberg’s work in Budapest, since he and his family were saved by Wallenberg and he worked for Wallenberg as an errand boy. As his son, I remember many visits from researchers who still in the early 1980s would visit my father simply to ask if he thought that Wallenberg could still be alive in Soviet captivity� My father disliked this question, as it was completely speculative and did not relate to his work as an historian� The publication of Jonny Moser’s autobiography was not possible until after his retirement from running a Tabak-Trafik (tobacco store) in Vienna in 1997. Although he was considered a pioneer in Holocaust research, he lacked an institutional affiliation that would have afforded him the resources to live from his research. When he set about to write his autobiography, he worked like an historian would and he focused on facts that could be proven, trying not to be labeled as just another oral history of the Holocaust. Consequently, his autobiography does not incorporate personal emotions, but rather it tries to chronicle what happened� He explains the history of the expulsion of the Jews from Burgenland and what life was like in Vienna 1938-1940, as well as his survival in exile in Hungary� Moser kept a diary that he started in July 1944 and he was able to save it� Earlier writings did not survive as everything had been taken from his Jonny Moser’s Wallenbergs Laufbursche (2006): Surviving the Holocaust in Hungary 85 family when they were about to be deported from Budapest to Auschwitz� His autobiography follows his detailed notes from 1944 and is supported by research on the Holocaust in Hungary, in which he describes how constantly changing domestic Hungarian politics vis-à-vis the Germans and the Jews influenced his story of survival� Unlike Ruth Klüger’s autobiography weiter leben (1992) / Still Alive (2001), which in addition to her detailed account of surviving Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, also describes her complex relationship with her mother and father, Moser’s autobiography almost purposefully avoids such personal stories� He felt uncomfortable writing about personal issues, which he may have seen as petty, although some readers would have appreciated a more personal approach to his narrative. Instead, he wrote like an historian. Unlike many Holocaust survivors, who did not want to be confronted with the details of their suffering after the war, Jonny Moser coped with the trauma by studying the Holocaust as an academic discipline long before it had received broad attention from historians, and he was very concerned with historical accuracy. Writing Wallenbergs Laufbursche was the culmination of a lifetime’s work of trying to understand what had happened. It was not his final publication, as he finished a manuscript on the first deportations of Jews from Vienna to Nisko in fall 1939, based on his collection of primary sources� Jonny Moser passed away in 2011 and his sons published the manuscript in 2012� 2 Wallenbergs Laufbursche deals with an almost forgotten part of Austrian-Jewish history: the expulsion of Burgenland’s Jews in the first months following the Nazis’ takeover of Austria in March 1938. The surprisingly quick looting of his parents’ general store in Parndorf by local Nazis as well as the attempted deportation of Parndorf Jews across the open border with Hungary during Passover (of all times! ) were formative events for the twelve-year-old boy� Jonny Moser’s father, who had converted to Judaism in 1921, was issued a so-called Ariernachweis identifying his religion as being Jewish, a curiosity of the time, but it allowed him to sue the mayor of Parndorf as well as the Eisenstadt Gestapo chief Otto Koch for looting into their own pockets. In order to remove his father as a potential witness in the upcoming trial, the Gestapo sent his father to Hungary, and Jonny Moser along with his mother and sister were also illegally smuggled by the Gestapo into Hungary in October 1940. In Budapest, they lived as illegal immigrants until they had to come out of hiding in late 1941 hoping for a Hungarian exit permit to use their visa to the U.S., which then became impossible just days later with the bombing of Pearl Harbor after which Hungary declared war on the U.S. The family was sent to a Hungarian labor camp for foreign Jews in Ricse, in Eastern Hungary. After being released from the labor camp in spring 1944 and the German invasion of Hungary, the family just barely managed to 86 Joseph W� Moser remove themselves in Békásmegyer (a suburb of Budapest) from being deported to Auschwitz. Meeting the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who issued them Swedish Schutzpässe in early August 1944, helped them survive the final year of the war in Budapest� As an eighteen-year-old Jonny Moser got to know Wallenberg, and he was thus one of the most important witnesses of Wallenberg’s rescue efforts in Budapest. Together with his parents and his sister, Moser returned from their exile in Hungary to Vienna already in June 1945, though one must understand this as a new beginning, because the Mosers never returned to live in their former hometown in Burgenland� As a Germanist, I am particularly interested in the genesis of my father’s autobiography, which to some extent I was allowed to observe when I was a child, and which can be substantiated through my father’s notes from the years 1944 and 1945. In contrast to many Holocaust survivors, Jonny Moser spent his whole life dealing with the history of the Holocaust, which in his notes from 1944/ 45 he already termed as the “Judenverfolgung” (persecution of the Jews) in an essay with the title “Die Budapester Judenverfolgung�” In this multipage text he deals with the time from 15 October 1944 to 15 January 1945, during which the Nyilas (Arrow Cross Guards - Hungarian Nazis) murdered Jews in the streets of Budapest� Jonny Moser’s Wallenbergs Laufbursche (2006): Surviving the Holocaust in Hungary 87 This notebook gave Moser an opportunity to deal with the reality in Budapest, which he recorded with great detail. The red notebook (on the left in the picture) deals with events from 1944 to 1945. The black one on the right was purchased in Vienna in June 1945 for RM 1�50 (the receipt is still in the book) and it describes the three return trips from Budapest to Vienna, until they could take up permanent residence there again� Jonny Moser wanted to remember and not repress anything; it was a coping mechanism for him� In the red notebook there is also a chronology of the years 1945 to 1938 going backwards, and there are corrections for the years 1942 to 1938, where he updated events to their correct dates. It appears that he must have spoken with his parents and sister about these events, and thus made corrections� He had a memory like a calendar and he collected calendars his whole life long. This chronology helped him decades later to write his autobiography with an eye to precise dates. Even though about fifty years passed between his notes from 1945 and his work on his autobiography in the years 1997-2006, the events from the time of the Holocaust were always at the center of his life. Therefore, when I was in elementary school in Vienna in the early 1980s, I knew more about the Holocaust than most adults, regardless of whether they were Jewish or not. The ignorance of many Austrians about their country’s history before the election of Kurt Waldheim as the country’s president in 1986 was always a big topic of conversation at home� Before my father passed away in 2011, I was only allowed to touch his notebook once, after the publication of his autobiography. I had asked him for it for a few hours, so I could read it and ask him questions. He really just gave it to me for a few hours before he asked to have it back. His notes are written in a legible script and besides the chronology there are also literary writings and short essays about the present in Budapest. Detailed drawings of the places, at which he stayed or was detained during the Holocaust are particularly interesting� 88 Joseph W� Moser For example, there is a drawing of the brick factory in Békásmegyer, on the regional rail line to Szentendre, from where Budapest Jews were deported to Auschwitz from 2 to 8 July 1944� Moser’s family just barely escaped being sent on the last train to Auschwitz, because while the Nazis were loading the train my father told Franz Novak, who was in charge of the SS-Sondereinsatz-kommando Eichmann in Budapest, that they were not Jewish. Novak liked Moser’s Burgenland German dialect and so he and his family could return to Budapest to check their identity at the police jail at Mosonyi utca 9� When they returned to Békásmegyer, the brick factory was deserted, and they had escaped the last transports from Hungary to Auschwitz� My father had no notes from the time before summer 1944, because the Nazis took everything away from them just before they were moved to the brick factory in Békásmegyer. From 15 May to 1 July 1944, the Hungarian authorities had locked them up in the Tsuk factory on the Danube island Csepel just south of Budapest (a map of which can be seen on the left of the picture above). This was the time of the first heavy Allied air raids and some Hungarians believed that buildings that were inhabited by Jews would not be bombed� During these Jonny Moser’s Wallenbergs Laufbursche (2006): Surviving the Holocaust in Hungary 89 weeks, they were locked up in this industrial area above ground with a large group of Jews. They would not have survived a direct hit. They were lucky that the Tsuk factory was hit in the night of 1 to 2 July, when they were already aboard a Danube ship upstream through the eerie blacked out city of Budapest on the way to Békásmegyer� Jonny Moser wrote that some Hungarian anti-Semites saw themselves confirmed that the Allies only bombed buildings that had no Jews in them. Following the incarceration in the Tsuk factory, my father was afraid all his life of being locked up� Our apartment in Vienna was never locked at night, as the fear of break-ins was less significant than the fear of not being able to evacuate quickly in the case of an emergency� Although he had lost all papers from before summer 1944, he made drawings of the places in which he had spent time before. For example, he made a drawing of the Hungarian concentration camp for foreign Jews in Ricse, Eastern Hungary, as well as the Zsidókorház ( Jewish hospital) in Budapest’s Szábolcs utca 39, in which he had spent time recovering from pleuritis� A key turning point in Jonny Moser’s life was meeting Raoul Wallenberg at the residence of the Molnárs at Budapest’s Minerva utca 1a, which was right next door to the Swedish embassy. On 12 August 1944, my father and his sister Herma visited the Molnárs, a well-to-do family that was Jewish according to Nazi racial law, and who did charity work and had helped them before. Mici Molnár was a member of the Zwack family and housed all her relatives in her basement at the time. The Zwacks are well known for the herbal liqueur Unicum. The Molnárs were happy to see him and my aunt, because following the deportations to Auschwitz, they were quite surprised to see these two impoverished foreign Jews. They asked them to stay for the day and wait for Wallenberg to return who had moved in upstairs, as it was conveniently located to the Swedish embassy and provided the Molnárs with some security� When Wallenberg arrived around 10 p. m., he asked them if they had any personal connections to Sweden. My father did not see any, but Herma was quite alert and made up the story that they had once received toys made in Sweden. That was good enough a reason for Wallenberg to issue Schutzpässe to them and their parents� 90 Joseph W� Moser Jonny Moser’s Wallenbergs Laufbursche (2006): Surviving the Holocaust in Hungary 91 My father’s pass is number 151, my grandparents’ passes were not preserved. It was one of the first passes that Wallenberg issued five days after meeting my aunt and father on August 17. Wallenberg signed the pass on the left bottom corner� What is remarkable about their Schutzpässe is that they were some of the few that received a German transit visa stamped on the back on 21 November 1944, as well as the Hungarian exit permit. They decided not to travel to Sweden, however, due to the chaos of the final months of the war in Nazi Germany, but they belonged to a small group of Schutzpass holders who were issued these official travel permits by the Nazis. The Swastika stamps on the German transit visa impressed the Hungarian Nazis who usually did not respect the Swedish Schutzpässe� The Mosers experienced the liberation by the Red Army on the Pest side of the city, which was liberated two months before Buda, as the Red Army advanced from the East and was stalled for a few weeks at the Danube in Budapest, while the German troops hunkered down on the Buda side� 92 Joseph W� Moser Here you see a drawing of the cellars that had been connected during the war to provide escape routes during air raids. This is where Moser and his family were liberated by the Red Army. In the front you can see the Kalvin tér, which my father erroneously spelled with a C. The Üllöi utca is a broad arterial road that leads from downtown Pest out of the city towards the southeast. They were exposed to significant fighting in this strategically important area, and needed to seek shelter, as the Soviets advanced block by block. My father described in detail in his notes as well as in his autobiography how the front advanced through these cellars. The front part of the block was completely destroyed in the war and not rebuilt until the late 1990s� Interestingly, the notebook also contains a small note from Frau von Ráso, on which she is asking the then eighteen-year-old to be at a certain address in the morning� He was supposed to help to get beds for the children’s home that Wallenberg organized. Margit von Rásó, née Zwack, and Mici Molnár’s sister, was also staying in the Molnár’s villa at the time. The note is a reminder today of how my father took care of errands for Wallenberg and his other aides� The title word Laufbursche expresses a certain modesty in my father’s autobiography, because at the time he did a lot more than would have been expected from a regular errand boy. As a penniless refugee from Austria, he was always ready and willing to serve and he even dared to go into the lion’s den, when, following the Arrow Cross coup on 15 October 1944, he would still deliver diplomatic notes to the Hungarian foreign ministry, which was actually quite dangerous for a Jew. He asked for a car with a driver, who would pull up in front of the ministry and wait for him. This seemed to impress the Arrow Cross Guards, and he would raise his right hand to greet them entering the building. They consequently did not suspect him for being a Jew. He also accompanied Wallenberg, Per Anger and Vilmos Langfelder on 23 November 1944 to the Austrian border at Hegyeshalom to save Jews, who had walked on a death march led by the Nazis from Budapest to the then German border. In Hegyeshalom, he helped Wallenberg distribute blank Schutzpässe to people and then load them onto waiting trucks that would take them back to Budapest. This scene was also featured in the 1984 TV-movie Raoul Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story, in which Wallenberg was played by Richard Chamberlain. The Austrian edition of the German TV guide Hörzu interviewed my father when the movie was shown on Austrian TV and published the scene in Hegyeshalom and a picture of my father with the heading “Mitarbeiter (co-worker) of Wallenberg�” 3 Co-worker may be saying too much, but he really witnessed too much of Wallenberg’s work to just be described as a regular errand boy� Jonny Moser’s autobiography differs from other Holocaust autobiographies, because as a historian he took great care in writing a chronology of the historic Jonny Moser’s Wallenbergs Laufbursche (2006): Surviving the Holocaust in Hungary 93 events, which contributed to his survival and that of his family. He supported his testimony not only with his personal notes, but also with archival research, which he pursued for decades alongside his day job as a tobacco store owner in Vienna’s second district and his passionate work as a SPÖ Bezirksrat for Vienna’s first district for over thirty-two years. Additionally, he read all the secondary literature on Wallenberg and Hungary’s political history in 1940-1945, and thus provided his readers with a detailed account of the complex changes that occurred in Hungary� He felt that it was important for his readers to understand that the pro-German, primarily anti-Semitic prime ministers under Admiral Miklós Horthy’s regency, had quite differencing political stances on the impending genocide of the country’s Jews. The interchange between complete collaboration with the German Nazis and hesitant reluctance on the part of Hungarian politicians stalled genocidal actions, which contributed to saving many Jews in Budapest. Horthy, however, did not stop the deportations to Auschwitz until over 400,000 rural Hungarian Jews had been sent to their deaths, but without Horthy’s decision to ultimately stop the deportations, even fewer of Budapest’s Jews would have survived. The murderous Arrow Cross gangs only started killing people in the streets of Budapest after Horthy had been deposed on 15 October 1944, just under three months before Pest was liberated by the Red Army. Many policemen and officials who were loyal to Horthy had been weary of the war since July 1944, and they were no longer interested in supporting the agendas of the German Nazi occupiers and their Hungarian henchmen. This also contributed to my family’s survival, as Horthy loyalist police and military officers freed Jews from Arrow Cross gangs. My father and his family experienced this in December 1944, after they had been captured by a group of Arrow Cross men. The complexity of the history of the Holocaust in Budapest and Hungary should not be underestimated� My father’s manuscript was edited down for publication, and most of what was cut from the text was his extensive historical context. As a historian, he believed that one could not understand his personal survival without this context, and he was right in the sense that only few people understand Hungarian domestic policy in 1940-1945; however, today one can even look up the basics of this history on Wikipedia in German or English� At times his book is more of a monograph than an autobiography, but then the one does not mutually exclude the other� It is important to recognize that the historical context for surviving the Holocaust in Hungary is different from that in Germany, Austria, or Poland, since the deportations to Auschwitz did not start until May 1944, less than a year before the liberation. The Hungarian authorities as supposedly sovereign members of the Axis, while supportive of anti-Semitic legislation, were ambivalently complicit in the deportations to Auschwitz� It is this ambiv- 94 Joseph W� Moser alence that contributed to more Jews surviving than in Poland. The situation in Hungary runs parallel to the one in Romania, where Romanian authorities were of mixed minds� Mirjam Korber’s diary Deportiert: Jüdische Überlebensschicksale aus Rumänien 1941-1944: Ein Tagebuch (1992) chronicles here family’s survival after being deported from Southern Bucovina by the Romanian authorities to Transnistria. Korber’s diary, unlike Moser’s diary, beside giving detailed account of the suffering in Transnistria, also incorporates the daily struggles of being a teenager� Her diary was published alongside with essays that explained the Romanian context. Every survivor had different ideas of what to write in a journal at the time and what to share later in life� Memoirs are deeply personal accounts and one has to recognize that every survivor had a different way of expressing the struggles in those difficult days. Jonny Moser’s narrative focuses on his teenage years 1938-1945, but he was not able to discuss what it was like being a teenager then� It seemed too trivial to him, but it is as simple as a difference in personality, as to how much a Holocaust survivor wanted to discuss personal matters not relating to the persecution. His memoir focuses on his father Josef Moser as well, while his mother Katharina and sister Herma are somewhat marginalized. Of course, in the camps, men were separated from women, which may have contributed to him being less aware of what his mother and sister were doing� But then he also does not mention that after his father had died, he took care of his mother in her final months in 1953 when she was suffering from a long terminal illness. While he had differences of opinion with his sister Herma, he still entertained a dialogue with her and her husband Wilhelm Krell, who was the managing director of the Jewish community in Vienna until 1971. The three regularly discussed the topic of the Holocaust, when only few wanted to talk about it in the first decades after the war. His autobiography ends on 28 July 1945, when the family had permanently relocated to Vienna. “Wir waren wieder zurück in Österreich, konnten neu beginnen“ (360), reads the last sentence of his book. Only the epilogue by Eleonore Lappin and Albert Lichtblau give any indication of Jonny Moser’s postwar life, which was actually quite interesting as well, but for him it stood in the shadows of his difficult survival in the days of the Holocaust. Notes 1 Doron Rabinovici examined the ambiguous relationship of Vienna’s Jewish community leadership during the Nazi period in his book Instanzen der Ohnmacht, first published in 1998. He writes extensively about Benjamin Murmelstein (157—71)� Jonny Moser’s Wallenbergs Laufbursche (2006): Surviving the Holocaust in Hungary 95 2 Jonny Moser� Nisko: Die ersten Judendeportationen� Ed� Joseph W� Moser and James Moser. Vienna: Edition Steinbauer, 2012. 3 See the title page of the Austrian Hörzu magazine, 10-16 November 1984. Works Cited Adler, H.G. Theresienstadt 1941-1945: Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft. Geschichte Soziologie Psychologie. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1960. Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story. Dir. Lamont Johnson. Paramount Television, 1985. Television� Klüger, Ruth. Still Alive. New York: The Feminist Press, 2001. ---� weiter leben. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1992. Korber, Mirjam. Deportiert: Jüdische Überlebensschicksale aus Rumänien 1941-1944: Ein Tagebuch. Trans. Andrei Hoisie. Konstanz: Hartung-Gorre Verlag, 1993. Moser, Jonny. Demographie der jüdischen Bevölkerung Österreichs 1938-1945� Vienna: Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes, 1999. ---� Die Judenverfolgung in Österreich 1938-1945. Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1966. ---� Nisko: Die ersten Judendeportationen� Ed� Joseph W� Moser and James Moser� Vienna: Edition Steinbauer, 2012. ---� Wallenbergs Laufbursche: Jugenderinnerungen 1938-1945. Vienna: Picus Verlag, 2006� Rabinovici, Doron. Instanzen der Ohnmacht: Wien 1938-1945. Der Weg zum Judenrat� Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 2000. Shoah. Dir. Claude Lanzmann. BBC / Historia / Les Films Aleph / Ministère de Culture de la Republique Française, 1985. Television.