In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Bird Has No Wings: Letters of Peter Schwiefert In 1938, Peter Schwiefert, a half-Jew, fled Nazi Germany to live as a self-declared Jewish refugee-first in Portugal, where he was imprisoned, then in Athens, where he was penniless. Peter's father, a playwright, and his stepfather, a member of an influential Prussian family, were gentiles. Peter's Jewish mother passed for German . All were furious at him for leaving. Under their protection, they said, he could have weathered the bad times in Germany. His declaration of being a Jew was to them an act of willfulness. "I've never seen such a handsome men," one of Peter Schwiefert 's friends had said of him. "Everybody loves you," was engraved on a gold chain given to him by a girl at the age of 19. But at 21 he was a refugee and began his outpouring of letters. These letters* should be added to the dark treasure of Holocaust documents . They are the testament of one who began as the Jew Hitler made and who ended as one who chose to be a Jew. We fill in for ourselves the replies that are not there. A Holocaust world rises from fragments about people and events. The father, for example, goes on writing plays under Hitler, the stepfather divorces Peter's mother and takes an Aryan wife, the Jewish grandfather dies alone, the Jewish grandmother is taken to a camp and gassed. Most of the letters were written to the mother Peter Schwiefert adored. He played down the hardships he suffered. He asked for news of her safety and the safety of his half-sisters, who did not even know they were Jewish, and of his Jewish grandparents. But mainly he begged his mother to be brave, to join him in exile, to save his grandmother-not to abandon her or let her be taken *5t. Martin's Press, 1976. 29 30 A HOLOCAUST MENTALITY away. Above all, he wanted her to acknowledge in her heart that she was a Jew. His mother responded (we fill in) by promising to come to him but never coming, by inviting him to visit her in her faked Aryan existence in Bulgaria and then withdrawing the invitation, by declaring to him her dislike ofJews, by converting to Christianity in a sudden effusion of religious feeling at the very time Peter was writing her of his exaltation at declaring himself a Jew. Part of a family that lived on self-delusion and lies, Peter alone equated truth with sanity. He longed to make an authentic self even in the madhouse. He wanted also to be a writer, but there was no time-"the bird has no wings." Is there anything in these letters to show the writer he might have become? Two things: he used writing as a tool for thinking, and he uttered the true cry of the writer who is faced with something to be done: "I have forgotten how to write!" Meaning that in writing there is no memory of how the thing was done before; each thing is new, and must be invented. Who but a writer would think to utter such a lament? If we compare the voice of these letters to that of another young and cut-off Jewish writer, Anne Frank, we must also look at the circumstances of each. Anne Frank wrote her diary within the security of her family. The hiding place is still a recognizable world in miniature. The diary is so full of charm and wit that it has become one of the Holocaust documents that postwar Germany has been able to take to its heart. The deepest horrors of her ordeal did not begin until after the diary ended, when she was taken to a concentration camp. Then there was no more family, and no diary. Peter Schwiefert's letters are written from a world in which the heart has already been torn out. He is alone and terrified for everyone he loves. He is without support, except for the wavering help of Jewish agencies, which often themselves were sinking under the load of victims they sought to help, and who hardly knew what to make of this volunteer refugee and half-Jew. Anne Frank ended her diary: "I still believe that people are really good at heart." Peter Schwiefert's last letter to his mother, written in 1944, says this: "And you see, Mother, what they've done to our...

Share