Escaping Brown Vienna: Persecuted Journalist László Frank’s Memoir Part I

This is part one of a series that aims to introduce the memoir of Hungarian-born Viennese emigrant-journalist László Frank who spent almost a decade in Shanghai as a Jewish refugee, after successfully fleeing Nazi persecution. In this post, I’ll briefly write about some of Frank’s experiences until the Nazi takeover of one of his hometowns. Most of what follows is based on chapter one of his 1960-published recollections. (For an earlier post on Frank’s anecdote in cholera-infected Shanghai, click here.)

It was a gray October day in 1938 when László Frank’s train pulled out of the former Austrian capital’s railway station. The ancient imperial center of the Habsburgs and of the collapsed First Republic was now degraded to a German town in Ostmark, an administrative subdivision of the Third Reich. The conductor’s whistle still echoing in his ears, the fugitive journalist slowly started to feel a sense of relief. His sister, Klára, a neurologist at the Wiener Poliklinik has already left Vienna for London, via Budapest and Athens. Her friend, psychoanalyst Anna Freud convinced her earlier to follow them to the United Kingdom where she already arrived safely. Antifascist intellectuals around Frank had already fled too. Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, leader of the Paneuropean Movement and an inspiration for the famous fictional resistance hero Victor Lazlo in the movie Casablanca was already in Czechoslovakia. The tables of the Rebhuhn Cafe where Stefan Zweig and Thomas Mann used to be occasional guests were vacant now. For someone like Frank, who earned so many enemies with his adamant investigative and anti-corruption journalism it was the eleventh hour if he wanted to survive.

He knew exactly what to expect from the new regime. After weeks of hiding following the Anschluss, he was arrested on March 23, 1938 while visiting a friend in the outskirts. Almost certainly being denounced by the family’s maid, Frank found himself in the cellars of the infamous “Graues Haus” (“Gray House”). By the summer he had already spent three months in various prisons, each time being one of the lucky ones who weren’t transported to the Dachau camp. On a bright June day, the Reich Commissioner (Reichskommissar) of Ostmark released those arrested in March who didn’t commit “grave crimes”, on the ultimatum that they all leave the Reich by September 14. It was while Frank was planning his escape to Paris, when the Gestapo took him in and made sure he understands the urgency of his emigration.

Frank wasn’t the only person trying to get out of Nazi-occupied Vienna, but he was one of those few Austrian residents who didn’t have passports. A “sworn enemy” (esküdt ellenség) of the Horthy regime that ruled Hungary after the fall of the evanescent Hungarian Soviet Republic (Tanácsköztársaság), he couldn’t rely on the country of his citizenship either. It was a Nansen Passport that appeared to be the solution when his cousin in Lisbon offered him a glimpse of hope by mailing him a boat ticket. Portugal, although itself a right-wing dictatorship at the time, was in fact a temporary asylum for many Jewish refugees through the years of the tightening Nazi grip on Europe. (More in: Marion Kaplan’s Hitler’s Jewish Refugees, 2020.) However, László Frank never got to see the land of Lusitania as he was soon to learn at the Hamburg railway station.

On October 17, he walked confidently into the Portuguese Consulate in the North German port city. His initial optimism quickly faded, when he was told that regulations had changed, those immigrants possessing documents from the Ministry of Interior cannot be accepted anymore, only those who receive them from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs will be allowed to enter. His Nansen passport issued by the Viennese authorities also proved to be useless for obtaining a visa to Portugal. Well over the Gestapo’s deadline, Frank had no choice but to return to Vienna hoping for a miracle that he won’t end up again in jail, or worse.

It was days before the second and final deadline of November 30, when a fellow-fugitive proposed an outlandish idea in Frank’s crammed apartment on the Universitätsrasse 11’s 5^th floor. Adolf Storfer, the future founder of the famous Shanghai Jewish emigrant newspaper Gelbe Post suggested Frank to venture into the unknown and try China. It might have sounded crazy what other Jewish Hungarian communist journalist presented, but those weren’t exactly sane times either. On November 27 Frank, Storfer and another companion finally left Vienna and a couple of days later boarded the Norddeutscher Lloyd’s steamer in Bremen. As they set foot on the “Potsdam”, none of them considered either the captain’s take on the infamous Nuremberg Laws, or the presence of Nazi spies among their co-travelers.

[To be continued]