What a contrast, as we celebrate Mandela’s life, we have the remaining stench from Eichmann.
My own family has an odd tie to Eichmann’s story. While most of what I have written refers either to our origins in Spain or the current fight about my father’s role in liberating Buchenwald, sometime after Franz Joseph invaded Northern Italy, the Negri family fled to the Austro Hungarian empire to a town then called Stanislaus. It was that “Negri” became “Schwartz” and we intermarried with the Adler family. I was able to access the birth and tax records from that town but found no names I could tie to us.
Eichmann joined the Nazi Party and the SS in Austria and was placed in charge of cleaning Eastern Europe of Jews. At first the policy was to encourage emigration, but as the Nazis began to lose the war Eichmann became responsible for Jewish deportations to extermination camps, where the victims were gassed. His own work is best seen at Auschwitz concentration camp, where 75 to 90 per cent were killed immediately on arrival. After the war, Eichmann fled to Austria, tha and still today a have for antisemites who would be unable to live in modern Germany. .
Lenin also had something to say about Austrian and about Galicia. In 1913, Lenin wrote: “Out of some 10½ million Jews in the world, a little more than half live in Galicia and Russia, backward and semi-barbarian countries which keep the Jews by force in the position of an outlawed caste. The other half live in the civilised world, where there is no caste segregation of the Jews. There the great and universally progressive features of Jewish culture have made themselves clearly felt; its internationalism, its responsiveness to the advanced movements of our times (the percentage of Jews in democratic and proletarian movements is everywhere higher than the percentage of Jews in the general population).”
The irony is that Jews from Galicia in my Dad’s time belonged to the American Austrian Society (at least that is what my Dad called it), a Jewish cultural group proud of its ties to Franz Joseph. As we came into a town on our boat (the last of which was named the Black Eagle) my Dad would scream out “S’ wohnen hier Jede Galizianer?” of “”S’ wohnen hier Jede Yidden?” If anybody responded he would ask if they were “Stanislaus Gebornen.”
Years later my parents made a tour of Ukraine, including a visit to the now Ukrainian city Ivano-Frankivsk, formerly called Stanisławów. There were no traces of the Jewish population. According to the 1931 Polish census there were 26,996 Jews in Stanisławów, including relatives from the Adler family we know died in the camps. There were 100 Jews left in Stanisławów on July 27, 1944 when the Soviet army arrived.