Two Witnesses’ Testimony: Lost Manuscripts from 1938, Vienna-Dachau-Buchenwald by Maximilian Reich and Emilie Reich (review)

The title of this compelling memoir reflects the history of its eventual publication. Henriette Mandl, the editor of the volume, found her parents’ separate autobiographical writings by chance decades after they were written. Her father had written his memoir shortly after immigrating to England in November 1938. He then submitted it to British publishers, who rejected it as “atrocity propaganda” (7). They thought he was exaggerating the mental and physical hardship he had encountered in Dachau and Buchenwald during an incarceration of over six months. Reich’s daughter happened upon her father’s manuscript together with his detailed notes by chance in 1962, ten years after her father’s death, and edited them together as a single narrative. In 1988, the manuscript was again rejected, this time because it was considered tame in comparison with accounts by those who had survived the Polish extermination camps. It was finally published in its original German in Vienna in 2007; happily, it has now been rendered into excellent English by Francis Michael Sharp. This translation of these first written accounts by Austrian victims of National Socialism thus gives their story a wider audience of interested readers. The new edition wisely adheres to the structure of the German-language edition: Max Reich’s nearly two-hundred-page memoir is followed by the four sections: his wife’s complementary fifteen-page appendix, Mandl’s informative editor’s notes, a set of photographs of the Reich family, and a detailed twenty-page historical essay by Wolfgang Neugebauer contextualizing the Reichs’ writings. As excellent as this volume is, an index would have been helpful considering the welter of names and events the memoir contains.

The three locations in the title reflect the different roles each of these places played in Max Reich’s life seven months before emigration. The first twenty pages of the memoir elaborate on the overnight surge of overwhelming anti-Semitism in Vienna around the time of the Anschluss, leading up to the almost immediate arrest of Reich, a prominent Jewish journalist, in Vienna on March 17, 1938. Reich goes on to describe his debilitating two-week incarceration in a Viennese jail and then the harrowing April 1 deportation to Dachau with the so-called Prominententransport of 151 Viennese celebrities consisting of government officials, Jewish journalists and imaginative writers of renown, and Socialists, Communists and other “non-desirables.” The bulk of the Dachau portion of the memoir, making up one hundred pages and covering his six months in that camp, reveals the prisoner’s daily life of persecution and physical hardship. The next fifty pages traces his one month of incarceration in the even “tougher” Buchenwald concentration camp and his release at the end of October 1938. That Reich wrote his memoir only months after his release from Buchenwald, shortly after arriving in England at the beginning of November 1938, allowed him to portray his incarceration in animated and vivid detail.

What makes this early survivor’s account so vital is that his own modes of survival run parallel to the ways that survivors of the actual annihilation camps, after World War II began, found to avoid death. Reich employs three strategies of survival: to employ his own perspicacity self-protectively day-to-day; to bond with other prisoners for mutual support; and to accept good luck as a beneficent force. In all modesty, Reich gives voice to his own ingenuity of surviving. He continually avoids a notoriously sadistic guard and takes part in a conspiracy to bribe a capo to post letters to his gentile wife and two daughters in Vienna without being censored. In addition, he lets “the tower owls scream” (100) and consistently ignores the commands of the tower guards, who he passes by with heavy loads to avoid a series of bodybuilding exercises. Reich shares his mental games to survive, including his contact...