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. [Read more…] about Escaping Brown Vienna: Persecuted Journalist László Frank’s Memoir Part I