How “Leopoldstadt” Made Me Confront My Household’s Tragic Historical past

Twenty-two years in the past, my father despatched a letter to me that I by no means had the braveness to open. I put it away in a drawer, the envelope nonetheless sealed, pondering I’d get round to it sometime. I knew what was in there; I couldn’t bear to look.

My household’s Holocaust story wasn’t one thing I’d ever a lot engaged with. I knew the fundamentals, dimly, but it surely all felt far-off and summary—anyone else’s nightmare. So when my father wrote up what he knew and despatched it to me and my two siblings, I made the better selection: to maintain residing in protecting ignorance.

Then, in early 2020, a play referred to as Leopoldstadt premiered in London. Written by Tom Stoppard, it was loosely impressed by the playwright’s personal Holocaust historical past, and the story appeared remarkably just like my household’s previous: an assimilated Austrian Jewish clan is ripped out of its comfy Viennese life by the arrival of the Nazis and, finally, destroyed. I learn every part I noticed about Leopoldstadt, particularly because it moved to Broadway in 2022 after which gained the Tony Award for Greatest Play. I used to be weirdly drawn to this story a few doomed household that wasn’t my very own. Maybe Leopoldstadt was a strategy to entry my historical past with out having to stare straight at it.

And but I didn’t see the play. My father, for whom this historical past is much extra private and instant, did attend a Broadway efficiency, and he discovered the expertise to be shifting and considerably uncanny. He tried to persuade me to go, however I by no means made it up there. I figured Leopoldstadt would ultimately arrive in Washington. Perhaps I’d see it then, I stated. I wasn’t certain that was actually true. As with the letter, it was simpler to push it away.

Earlier this 12 months, Shakespeare Theatre Firm introduced {that a} new manufacturing of Leopoldstadt could be opening right here on the finish of November. Directed by Carey Perloff and produced in affiliation with the Huntington Theater Firm in Boston, it’s the primary staging of the play after the Broadway manufacturing closed. I’m undecided why, however this time one thing felt totally different. I made a decision I wanted to cease hiding—from Leopoldstadt and from my household’s previous. I purchased a duplicate of the printed play and skim it. Then I pulled my dad’s letter out of the drawer.

My grandparents, Robert Brunner and Louise Koblitz, had been deeply assimilated Viennese Jews throughout that pre-WWII interval when town—although racked by financial and political crises—was a middle of cultural innovation, a lot of it pushed by Jewish genius. Greater than 200,000 Jews lived in Vienna earlier than 1938, and so they weren’t merely tolerated—they had been on the coronary heart of town’s mental life.

A pair not but married, my grandparents had been immersed in that thrilling swirl of tradition and concepts. My grandfather owned a bookselling enterprise, Robert Brunner Books. My grandmother had labored as an elementary-school instructor. Although they didn’t have some huge cash, they had been non-religious, middle-class Austrians who felt at residence in a classy place that accepted them as its personal. Vienna was their whole world.

The prolonged Merz household—the main target of Leopoldstadt—are equally drawn to the cultural warmth of that extraordinary second. Their textile enterprise has made them rich, however “we actually worship tradition,” says Hermann, the patriarch.

That’s all ultimately shattered, in fact. Leopoldstadt follows the Merzes from 1899 by way of 1955—the great years, the terrifying collapse, and the aftermath. A few of the characters escape; most don’t. The query of whether or not and when to depart haunts the play. “Issues will relax,” one character says. “No, issues will worsen,” one other replies. By the point most Jews realized they wanted to flee, it was too late.

For my grandparents, leaving didn’t really feel like a lot of a selection. My dad’s letter lays out a unprecedented story of luck and braveness, an escape saga that started when my grandfather had the great fortune—if that’s the fitting strategy to put it—to get hauled in by the Gestapo.

It was 1938, not lengthy after the Nazis annexed Austria, and my grandfather, who was concerned with Socialist politics, knew the leaders of a banned leftist political social gathering. The Gestapo believed, incorrectly, that he was one in every of them. He was interrogated after which briefly launched. In a panic, my grandparents confronted powerful choices: keep in Vienna and face the additional attentions of the Nazis or flee into the unknown, with slim prospects for escape. They’d no authorized path in a foreign country; the Gestapo would seemingly think about him a fugitive.

My grandparents heard a rumor a few explicit German authorities workplace on the French-German border which may let Jews cross in return for a bribe. It appeared like their best choice—their solely choice. They nearly made it there. If that they had, they most likely would have been arrested and despatched to a camp.

My father wrote about what occurred subsequent:

“Whereas they had been on the trolley en path to the federal government workplace, they had been approached by an extraordinary ‘business’ smuggler, who accurately deduced their state of affairs and plans. He warned them off of going to the Gestapo and supplied to get them to Paris in trade for some jewellery that my mom confirmed him. In a snap judgment, my dad and mom opted to belief him.”

The smuggler hid them in a barn for a number of days, then introduced them to the sting of a subject and informed them France was on the opposite facet. A French taxi could be ready, he claimed. The story appeared extremely unlikely—they had been satisfied they had been headed to their deaths. However what may they do besides consider him?

My household won’t ever know who that smuggler was or what may need motivated him. He may have taken the jewellery and despatched them to die. However he saved his phrase: The taxi was there. It took them off to Paris, the place my grandparents would spend greater than a 12 months, looking for a rustic that might take them. Lastly, they obtained a cellphone name from the US Embassy: If they may get there by the tip of the day, they may have two treasured American refugee visas. The paperwork are dated August 31, 1939. The following day, Hitler invaded Poland and the struggle started. They had been later informed these had been the final two refugee visas issued by the US authorities in Paris till the tip of the struggle. My grandparents arrived in New York in early 1940, with $20 and no concept what lay forward. Neither of them ever went again to Austria.

With a handful of exceptions, the remainder of my grandparents’ household—my household—remained in Vienna. From their new residence in New York, my grandparents tried every part to get them out. (Their determined letters from this era are actually within the assortment of america Holocaust Memorial Museum.) However nothing labored. Their family had been ultimately despatched to Poland, the place, after who is aware of what horrors, they had been murdered.

The identical finish awaits many of the Merzes. On the finish of Leopoldstadt,characters converse the names and fates of assorted members of the family:

Ernst: Auschwitz.

Hanna: Auschwitz.

Kurt: Dachau.

Nineteen members of the Merz clan, most useless by the hands of the Nazis. The scene tends to depart audiences sobbing.

Leopoldstadt feels private to me, however for Carey Perloff, the director of this new manufacturing, it truly is: Stoppard was partly impressed by her circle of relatives’s escape from Vienna in 1938, after a prescient relative pressed them to depart whereas they nonetheless may. “They believed him and went,” Perloff says. “I at all times assume that was a miracle.”

Perloff, who grew up in DC, is a well-­regarded theater director now based mostly in San Francisco. She’s recognized Stoppard for greater than 30 years and has directed a dozen of his performs. Perloff’s mom, Marjorie—a distinguished poetry and tradition critic who died this previous March—was a toddler when her household fled Austria. Her sturdy recollections of that point grew to become a memoir, The Vienna Paradox. In 2018, when Stoppard was writing Leopoldstadt, he visited Marjorie in Los Angeles, the place they spent a day speaking about her life and her guide.

After all, Stoppard famously has his personal Holocaust historical past and story of escape. Raised in Czechoslovakia, he was a toddler when the Germans invaded in 1939. His household fled to Singapore, then India. Stoppard’s father was killed when the Japanese bombed a ship he was on. His mom then married an Englishman, and from the age of 9, Stoppard lived within the UK, by no means studying a lot about his previous as a refugee. It wasn’t till the early Nineties, when he had espresso with a relative he’d by no means earlier than met, that he discovered the total story. He hadn’t even actually recognized he was Jewish.

“Whereas my mom was alive, she discouraged trying again at household historical past,” Stoppard informed me in an e-mail. “However I believe the principle impetus for writing Leopoldstadt was extra to do with my behavior of referring to my very own ‘charmed life.’ I discovered myself remodeled into a bit English schoolboy, and I by no means seemed again. I suppose you may say that I started to really feel dangerous about not trying again, and in the long run the consequence was a play referred to as Leopoldstadt, which in fact was not my story in any respect, as a result of we weren’t Viennese Jews and my household was fortunate to . . . [get] out of hurt’s means.”

Leopoldstadt each is and isn’t Stoppard’s try to grapple with that previous. There are components of the play that talk to his personal story, but Stoppard says he was attempting to seize one thing broader. “As a result of my mom didn’t like trying again, and I had no particular urge to unpack her story till it was too late, I missed my probability to have the conversations which little doubt would have added some sides to the story I used to be attempting to inform,” he says. “Writing a play shouldn’t be like writing a memoir or anything. Drama has a particular dynamic which playwrights are attempting to use. Ultimately, I used to be helped by treating the household as a fiction.”

However for descendants like me, all of it feels very actual—the primary time I’ve seen the world that was taken from my forbears delivered to life. “It’s a very invented story that could be very near your loved ones historical past and my household historical past and lots of, many individuals’s household historical past,” Perloff informed me. “The ghosts of my household are in all places within the play. And I believe the ghosts of Stoppard’s household are additionally.”

The Nazis stole every part from my grandparents—their family, their mates, their whole world. In addition they took one thing much less tangible: their Austrian citizenship. Throughout the pandemic, I made a decision to get it again.

The Austrian authorities now presents citizenship to descendants of people that misplaced it as a consequence of Nazi persecution, and over the previous few years, hundreds have taken them up on it. My dad and I crammed out the paperwork collectively. It was straightforward to show our declare; amongst different issues, my father has loads of previous authorities paperwork with my grandparents’ names on them, some bearing actually chilling ink stamps with swastikas.

The approval course of went fairly shortly, and in November 2021, I obtained a certificates declaring my new nationality. I’m formally Austrian now, a twin citizen. The burgundy EU passport sits on my dresser, each a minor level of pleasure and a possible exit technique throughout an period of concern and uncertainty within the nation the place I reside.

But by accepting the federal government’s effort to make amends with my household, I’m undecided what I’m actually signing up for. I’m actually solely Austrian on paper; I don’t converse German, and I’ve been to Vienna simply as soon as, a few years in the past. As a foreigner and a Jew, I’m sure I might be seen by many as an outsider. And I wrestle with an unsettling query: By tying myself to a rustic that was complicit within the homicide of my household, am I signaling a forgiveness that I’m undecided I’m able to confer? Or am I merely getting again one thing that was, in an actual sense, taken from me?

Not way back, I went with my dad to an occasion right here in DC, on the Austrian ambassador’s residence, for individuals who had not too long ago grow to be residents below this system. The hosts had been heat and welcoming; they stated the fitting issues about accountability and the continuing must struggle antisemitism. However I knew I didn’t actually belong. Standing there amid all these precise Austrians chattering away of their native language, my twin citizenship felt fragile, even false.

There’s a second in Leopoldstadt that haunts me, a harrowing scene wherein a Nazi exhibits up on the Merz residence and informs them, in essentially the most dehumanizing and contemptuous phrases, that he’s taking their residence. “Did you assume you had been Austrians, you previous parasite bitch?” he spits at one member of the household. Within the play, the Merzes actually did assume that. My household believed it, too. However citizenship—Austrianness—didn’t save them. Ultimately, it didn’t imply a factor.

Close to the tip of my father’s letter, he mentions my grandmother’s three younger cousins, Erika, Heinz, and Felix. The siblings had been simply eight, six, and three years previous when, in 1942, they and their dad and mom—my grandmother’s older brother, Rudolf, and his spouse, Sima—had been despatched to Wlodawa, Poland. Quickly after, they had been all killed. It’s not clear whether or not they had been taken to the close by Sobibor extermination camp or just introduced out to a subject and shot.

Their deaths hit my grandmother significantly exhausting, I knew, however the specifics of this historical past weren’t mentioned in my household—actually not by my deeply scarred grandmother, who lived in Bethesda for many of my childhood and was a frequent however ghostly presence in my life. (My grandfather, whom I’m named after, died earlier than I used to be born.) Most of her household and mates had been murdered. She was stricken by survivors’ guilt. She didn’t wish to burden me and my siblings with issues that had been too terrible to face. She informed my father it was all too “boring” to speak about.

However I additionally by no means requested. It appeared too massive, too horrible. None of it felt prefer it belonged to me. That was a delusion that I held onto for too lengthy. “I do understand my three kids as carrying on in some sense for his or her three cousins who had been roughly 35 years older,” my dad writes within the letter. I didn’t have any concept he thought of it that means—I’d by no means bothered to study a lot about them or think about the parallels to my very own life. However had the cousins survived, they might have been my household, my son’s household. They’d have come over for Thanksgiving dinner; I may need been mates with their kids. Their loss isn’t some abstraction, I’ve lastly come to comprehend. It’s my loss, too.

In Leopoldstadt, Stoppard wrestles together with his personal alienation from his Holocaust story. He was eight when his household fled, the identical age as my cousin Erika when she was deported and killed, only a 12 months older than Marjorie Perloff when she escaped. Towards the tip of the play, some characters who survived meet up in Vienna, the place one confronts Leo, an apparent stand-in for Stoppard, about how he avoids his previous. “Nobody is born eight years previous,” he tells Leo. “However you reside as if with out historical past, as when you throw no shadow behind you.”

I, too, have at all times prevented my historical past. However I don’t really feel capable of look away anymore. Will probably be on my thoughts after I go see Leopoldstadt on the Shakespeare in December. On the finish, as they learn off the names and fates of all of the characters, I anticipate to be in tears together with everybody else. However in my head, I’ll be listening to the names of my very own useless family:

Agathe Koblitz

Rudolf Koblitz

Hermine Brunner

The total record would go on and on, a procession of Brunners and Koblitzes who—just like the fictional Merzes—had been despatched to their deaths solely as a result of they had been Austrians who occurred to be Jewish. Their names are actually inscribed on Vienna’s Shoah Wall of Names Memorial. They’re my grandparents’ siblings and oldsters, their uncles and aunts, their nieces and nephews and cousins. These individuals I by no means met aren’t truly strangers, I now perceive. They belong to me. They’re my household. My id. My shadow.

This text seems within the December 2024 challenge of Washingtonian.

Politics and Tradition Editor

Rob Brunner grew up in DC and moved again in 2017 to hitch Washingtonian. Beforehand, he was an editor and author at Quick Firm and different publications. He lives together with his household in Chevy Chase DC.