All for the Best

By Walter J. Foster

Walter Fast was born in Vienna not long after the First World War and as a child he lived through the political turmoil of Central Europe, which culminated with Hitler's annexation of Austria. As was common at the time, his parents came from large families, so he had 25 aunts and uncles, with their children as cousins.

The families and his life were decimated by the Nazi occupation and he was first exiled alone to England at the age of fifteen, then deported to Australia, before being allowed to return and join the British Army, never again seeing his mother and more than half of his aunts, uncles and cousins.

His name changed to Walter Foster, he married and had children of his own, who grew up in England hearing anecdotal stories of different episodes of young Walter's life, of his family and the tumultuous political history of mid-century Europe.

When his children provided him with grandchildren, he was persuaded to re-tell these anecdotes for the benefit of the younger generation and he decided to assemble them into an autobiographical book, which gives a clear picture of survival through adversity of one of many hundreds of thousands of victims of the events following the rise of Hitler to power in Europe.

It was his hope that keeping such stories alive and re-telling them to successive generations would contribute to a better awareness in society of the fundamental need for decency, respect and peaceful co-existence, preventing the likelihood of any re-occurrence of events similar to the Holocaust of 1938 to 1945.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Feb 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781448209705

Walter J. Foster

Walter Fast was born in Vienna not long after the First World War and as a child he lived through the political turmoil of Central Europe, which culminated with Hitler's annexation of Austria. As was common at the time, his parents came from large families, so he had 25 aunts and uncles, with their children as cousins. The families and his life were decimated by the Nazi occupation and he was first exiled alone to England at the age of fifteen, then deported to Australia, before being allowed to return and join the British Army, never again seeing his mother and more than half of his aunts, uncles and cousins. His name changed to Walter Foster, he married and had children of his own, who grew up in England hearing anecdotal stories of different episodes of young Walter's life, of his family and the tumultuous political history of mid-century Europe. When his children provided him with grandchildren, he was persuaded to re-tell these anecdotes for the benefit of the younger generation and he decided to assemble them into an autobiographical book, which gives a clear picture of survival through adversity of one of many hundreds of thousands of victims of the events following the rise of Hitler to power in Europe. It was his hope that keeping such stories alive and re-telling them to successive generations would contribute to a better awareness in society of the fundamental need for decency, respect and peaceful co-existence, preventing the likelihood of any re-occurrence of events similar to the Holocaust of 1938 to 1945.

Book preview

ALL FOR THE BEST

Or the History of Young Walter

Walter J Foster

FOR MY CHILDREN AND MY GRANDCHILDREN

I was persuaded to write these notes when not long ago one of you asked, concerned and perplexed, why it was that I had come to England when my family had gone to Israel. Clearly I had not done enough to explain.

The Haggadah commands us to tell our story to our children and children’s children. And I really would like my grandchildren to know about their roots.

So here is the story of the Fasts and of the Schlamms and of my early years.

When I re-read what I had written it reminded me of Voltaire’s catalogue of the calamities of his century: the tale of Candide and the maiden Conégonde, and their friend, the wise Pangloss, who taught that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds – and that come what may we must cultivate our garden.

My wish for you is that you and your children and your grandchildren should always live in a decent society in a peaceful part of the world.

With Love

Dad & Grandpa

Bournemouth

February 1993

Contents

The Fasts

The Schlamms

The Saga of the Schlamm Clan

Grosspapa Heinrich

Josefine

The Kawafag

Wohnungen

Country Houses

Early Learning

Schools

Friends and Scouts

Poverty and Politics

Departure

Arrival

The Internment of Walter Fast, Born Vienna 25 June 1923

Behind the Wire

Soldier

Restitution

Student at Last

Rachel

The Wimmer Projekt

A Note on the Author

Plates

I was born soon after midnight on what was to be a fine Sunday morning in June of 1923 in the Auersperg clinic in Vienna, a sound middle-class establishment, with Professor Halban a leading obstetrician in attendance. I know all this because my mother told me so. She wanted the best of everything for me and tried to shield me from all harm. She intended me to grow up – in security and in her loving care – to be a true Viennese gentleman, kind to his mama and a credit to her.

It was not to be. My life from early childhood was ruled by politics and world events. I was born into a rootless society, at the height of the worst inflation in modern history, only a short while after a great and bloody war. My childhood toys included mementoes of that war – a service revolver, a bayonet, and a great stack of unlabelled tins, wonderful for rolling down the hall. They contained sticky condensed milk, sent by a thoughtful friend of my father’s from the Rumanian front when my brother was a baby and milk unobtainable in Vienna. When I was four I remember soldiers marching in what I later learnt was the first small civil war of the young Austrian republic, known to history as the Justizpalast Fire. When I was ten there was the much bigger civil war of Karl-Marx-Hof fame. I can hear to this day the rattle of the machine-guns. I had just turned eleven for the Nazi putsch that murdered Dollfuss. I was fifteen at the time of the Anschluss, the Nazi takeover of Austria. Nine months later I was on a Kindertransport to England. In another few months there followed the Second World War, internment in Australia, years of service in the Army, the horror of what much later became known as the Holocaust.

These were the formative experiences of my younger days, and if my life and my work since then had any sense beyond the purely private and personal, it was an attempt to make some small contribution towards a better and more reasonable order.

You my children and my grandchildren had the great good fortune of being born into and growing up in a comparatively settled, secure and decent society in a fairly peaceful world. So actually had my parents and grandparents, and I would like to pass on to you what little I know of their lives.

My parents were both born in the same year, 1889, in the same part of what then seemed the eternally secure and comparatively free and well-governed Habsburg monarchy – called Austria for short – in Eastern Galicia, today divided between Poland and the Ukraine. In the days of the Emperor Franz Joseph that Austrian province was very much part of the civilised world and home to about two million Jews, as many Ukrainians and to a rather smaller number of Poles. The Poles were the gentry and the officials, the Ukrainians the peasants and the Jews the shopkeepers and craftsmen. My parents did not have much of a Jewish religious education, they both went to the local grammar schools, the universal Austrian Gymnasium. In that part of the Empire the language of instruction was Polish, which was also my parents’ first language. They had only a smattering of Hebrew or of Yiddish – their second language was German. When they met and married in 1916, in the middle of the First World War, they were in their late twenties and had both lived in Vienna for some time.

The Fasts

The Fasts had apparently lived in Jaroslau (or Jaroslav, in the Slavonic version), a small town on the banks of the river San, for generations, though I have little information on them. Even the origin of the name is obscure – Jews always used to be called by their fathers’ names – Zvi ben Jonah, Jonah ben Zvi, David ben Gurion, etc. Only at the end of the eighteenth century did the Emperor decree that everyone must have a surname, a family name. Austrian name-giving commissions descended on Galicia to choose names for the Jews. They usually resorted to colours (Weiss, Schwarz, Blau, etc.), sometimes combined with objects (Gruenbaum, Blaustein), or places of origin (Danziger, Berliner). The commissions were reputed to be corrupt and solicited money for nicer names. It is said that my ancestor offered a decent bribe – but not quite enough: so they called him Fast – almost, not quite. Whatever the truth of the story, the name stuck, and I recall checking many years ago that there were equally as many Fasts, half a dozen or so, in the telephone books of Vienna, of London and of New York – though none of them Jews.

My grandfather Jonah Fast was born in 1840 and died aged 81 two years before my birth. He appears to have been one of only three brothers, one of whom emigrated to Australia, the other to Rosario da Santa Fé in Argentina, where there are still some cousins today. Jonah, who was probably the eldest, stayed in Jaroslau and married in 1865 Sara Ettel Sandek, one of ten children – most of whom had the good sense to emigrate – so there are numerous Sandek (sometimes spelled Sandig) cousins all over the world – mainly in America. Sara was a clever and tough business woman, she had a grocer’s shop which held the salt monopoly for the district and it seems that she and her business prospered.

Jonah was learned in Torah and Talmud and was a weaver by trade. He wove on his own looms very fine woollen cloth which had only two uses – underwear for nuns, which he sold to the local convents, and Tallisim, Jewish prayer shawls. The latter were clearly his pride and joy, but there was little demand – perhaps all the Jews of Galicia already had good prayer shawls. So Jonah developed a system: he wove for a year and a half, then packed all the tallisim into boxes and took the train for Hamburg and thence ship to New York. In America in his day a good tallis fetched a fair price and he stayed there until he had sold every one of them. This seemed to take as long as weaving them – about a year and a half. In the last four decades of the nineteenth century Jonah Fast made 14 such voyages across the Atlantic – each a laborious and even dangerous undertaking: when he made his first trip, the steamship was still a new-fangled contraption, and the first time a plane crossed the Atlantic was five years after Jonah’s death. I often wondered what made him do it, what was the attraction of America or in America, and why he did not stay there.

In the weaving intervals in Jaroslau he seemed to settle down happily enough with Sara and they produced seven children – spaced over 25 years, my father being the youngest. Except for him and for the second oldest brother Max (who witnessed the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and died some years later in America), they – as opposed to their Sandek cousins – seem to have concluded from their father’s wanderings that home is best. They and most of their children stayed in Jaroslau or nearby and were still there in 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, and are lost without trace – all except