My Mother
Honoring my Mother who Loved Selling and Modeling my Music Purses
Written by Maria Brody on 6/4/2012
An escapee from Hitler in Austria, she once said to me, "I can't understand how a culture that produced Mozart, Strauss... could be so violent".
Below is my Mother's own summary of a short time period in her life written for a talk for my son's high school class the year she moved in with me. It was typed by her old neighbor from California. Below that is my own short memorial of her life.
You can hover on any of the photos for title and description.
6/4/2012
I was born in 1925 in Vienna, Austria. When I was 12 years old and my brother was 15, there was a lot of unrest in Vienna (even before that) because of the extremely bad economy –actually it was bad in most countries. It was sad to see so many people sitting on the sidewalk begging. My mother was always giving me money to give to them.
When Hitler made himself known in Germany (and soon in Austria) he promised every family a car, a Volkswagen which means a “car for the people”. And he promised jobs for everyone. Yes, they did get jobs but jobs making armaments, tanks, planes, etc. for a war. They did not get a VW.
It was on a Sunday morning, in March 1938, and a beautiful sunny day, I opened my window, and – what was this? I heard marching steps on the main street leading to mid-town. Something that looked like a parade. This was actually the invasion of Austria by the German Nazis. Right there, I was looking at them. There was no fighting, just like that invaded, by brown-shirted soldiers, carrying swastika banners.
We had a lock on the upstairs door where my parents had a sitting room. I quickly locked their door where they were, so that the Nazis couldn’t get them, I thought. Nobody yet knew to what extreme cruelty the Nazis would introduce later. No Jew was safe, even behind a locked door!
From then on it was downhill for most Jewish families, like mine. At that time I went to high school.
I remember, first thing my non-Jewish friends told me that they cannot be friends with me anymore, because this was too dangerous. The Nazis wouldn’t allow it. One girl, I remember, walking backwards –facing me- told me that this was the end of our friendship. I was sad and hung down my head. At school we had sports, and often we had two lines and we called out who we wanted in our line. Somehow we ended up with one non-Jewish line, and one all Jewish line. That felt unpleasant. But there it was.
I had 5 Jewish friends. Two of them were my 2 cousins. I played with them a lot so they became my and my brother’s close friends. They moved to England and later to Argentina. One immigrated to the U.S. with her parents. Another one to Buenos Aires, Argentina, with her parents. Another 2 friends were claimed by the Nazis and possibly shot or gassed or murdered in some other way. And then my brother and I left Austria for England.
One of my 2 grandmothers, ended up in the Holocaust, murdered, and my little 7 years old cousin Liserl was murdered. Another uncle and aunt went to Israel. This was called Palestine then. Some of my uncles and aunts managed to find their way into New York, U.S.A.
In Austria there were already many Austrian Nazis who welcomed Hitler. Also, Hitler had planted many Nazis around Vienna and the rest of Austria a few years before all this. Hitler began his war against Jews, Gypsies, disabled people and people who were openly his enemies.
In Vienna, the Jews had a community center with their names, addresses and occupations of all the Jewish people. The Nazis could and did invade every Jewish household. They got the Jews from all over Austria, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, Belgium, Holland. They also got Norway, Spain, Hungary, Greece, Italy, Denmark (in Denmark the non-Jewish people helped the Jewish people and rowed them by boat to Sweden. I think the Nazis didn’t bother with Sweden.)
I was told that I have to leave my high school, and take a train ride into town to some Jewish high school. I went once, but I don’t remember what I did then. Also I went 5 times a week to the State Opera House to take ballet dancing lessons with a whole lot of girls and few boys. Again I had a friend there who was not Jewish and she too could not be my friend any more. I get a letter from the Opera, saying that I cannot belong to the Opera any more.
Then Jews were not allowed to go swimming and not allow to go skiing. Oh, yes, I almost forgot, my best Jewish friend Dorrit was still around (before she and her parents got to New York, U.S.A.). We were told that the Jews were allowed to go swimming in a certain pool, out-of-town. We went there by train. We put on our bathing suits. Before we got into the water, we heard from the other side some loud noises and loud screaming. We ran as fast as we could to get our clothes on and luckily there arrived a train going back to Vienna. On the next day we heard that the Nazis came to that pool to grab all the Jews from that pool. I had no idea what the Nazis did with the Jews they got from that pool.
After about 3 weeks of the invasion of Austria, Vienna, about 5 brown-shirted soldiers came to our house, to haul my father off to a concentration camp. One soldier recognized my father a lawyer, and had helped the soldier with a problem way back. So the man said to the others “let’s go, we won’t take him”. By 1940, they hauled off women and children too. My brother and I were helped by the British Quakers to get out of there before things got worse. We left in February 1939 thanks to one my Uncles. Uncle Otto, was already in England and somehow he approached the British Quakers and persuaded them to help me and my brother get out of Austria. We got two tickets to go. When my mother got the tickets she was so happy, she jumped up and down, up and down like a little kid. My brother then was 16 and I was 13.
The British Quakers had amazingly organized everything to get the children out of Austria and Germany. They got for this, trains, ships, buses; they got in touch with the parents, and to find out where they are going to live. They couldn’t just drop off the children once they got to England. All this was called the Kindertransport (Kinder means children). There were children from 2 years old to 18. One poor mother had a 2 year old and 5 year old. I happened to stand next to her when she said “good bye” to her children and she said to me “please watch out for them”. Who knows, she might never see them again. (Quite a few parents, I was told, ended up killed in a concentration camp). I was so lucky and my brother too –but my brother George had a bad time in London. I had a great life all of the time! The last night, I and George sat in our room, and I said “let’s hide”. But that just was wishful thinking. The train was waiting for us at midnight- so as not to be observed too much. I said good bye to our parents, and I was proud that I didn’t cry, but I did almost. We boarded a train loaded of children without parents. The children knew that this was a serious, very serious trip. They were quiet and well behaved. I don’t remember anything about the luggage, but I had enough clothes for winter and summer. Our train traveled to the coast of France, and our ship was waiting for us. We all had comfortable bunks to sleep. The trouble was, my parents had given me a large sea-sickness pill. I didn’t know that I didn’t need it. I took it and it almost got me sick. They had put the 2 little children of the woman in my cabin. They were fine. Again, the children were wonderful. It was a smooth ride. The ship landed in Southampton, England. What a relief. No more Nazis! Just kind Quaker women, handing us brown-bag breakfasts of crackers and hard boiled egg – my favorite kind of egg. Only just my egg fell through a wet hole in the paper bag. I didn’t pick it up; it just rolled away. There were buses waiting for us to go to London. My brother, George, was in the back of my bus. I called out to him “don’t leave me”, and again that was wishful thinking. The women on the buses knew where each of us were supposed to be dropped off. And even our luggage was dropped off at the right place. George was left by a big house with some other teenagers. I was driven off into the country side to a big, nice looking Quaker boarding school (a high school). In England it was the custom to send your children to a boarding school. Those who could afford it.
I remember the next thing: I was sitting in a classroom speaking English, working on geometry problems. It was cold and windy outside. The glass doors to the outside rattled and I shuddered. And something new: I was not thinking in German any more, I was thinking in English.
About my parents
The Nazis stole our car. The Nazis could steal anything from the Jews. What if we didn’t want to give things to them; they probably would have shot us. They could have us do anything they wanted. What kind of world was this? I don’t know!
My parents sold their house for just a little money. One night they hired a taxi to drive them over the Austrian border to Hungary; in the middle of the night again. My father had cousin in Budapest. They stayed there for a little while. My father learned how to bake bread so he could earn a little money at a bakery. My mother was a doctor and a dentist*. As I mentioned before, my father was a lawyer. But soon the Nazis came to Hungary, and my parents had to flee to Greece. The Nazis already had Greece. My parents had to go through Italy, then Spain, and to Portugal. In Lisbon there was a British ship going to New York. They got on it one night, when people were sleeping, and some were busy on their jobs. My parents were permitted to enter New York. They had two visas, given to them by a friend a while back.
My parents had a bank account in England, (not too big). They moved that to New York. So they rented a one-room apartment. They got little jobs here and there. Meanwhile, they both went to Columbus University. My father graduated and became a CPA – a certified public accountant, mostly in tax matters. He did very well. My mother became a bacteriologist to work in a hospital. She was hired right away to work in a hospital laboratory. She changed jobs just once, and worked until she died at the age of 72. She had a slight temperature for quite a while. My uncle Max thought she should be checked out at a hospital. She didn’t want to go. But somebody made her go, and she was so upset she died of a stroke. My father died of a heart attack at the age of 56, while my brother and I were still in England.
About my brother George.
Since George was already 16 years old, he was sent to a fur company to work in London. I don’t know why he wasn’t sent to finish high school. I was sent to school wherever I stayed. Pretty soon the German Blitz began. Blitz means lightning. It happened over London. The German bombing of London went on night after night; it seems for a long time. Hundreds of bomber planes. George was not affected at night. He slept at a place outside London and came to work to London. Still, it must have been pretty terrible for him. He hated his job and he must have been pretty sad and depressed. He sometimes came by train to visit me up North in Yorkshire. Of course in those days the German bombers could never reach up North. It was beautifully peaceful up there. I would make George a huge English breakfast every morning.
The government got worried about all these people from Austria and Germany; some of them could be spies. So they filled up a boat load of the people like George and older, to ship them to Australia. This ship was torpedoed by the Germans; George was called to go to a second ship. But since it was too dangerous for them to go, the government instead sent them to an island right by England: the Isle of Man. This was a tourist island, and they lived in rather old hotels, and they were treated very well. There were a lot of teachers amongst the older people, and they arranged classes in all possible subjects. That was great for my brother. He became extremely interested in the sciences so that he became a scientist for the rest of his life. The war was still on, but the Germans turned away from England and got themselves interested in invading Russia and North Africa. (Crazy). So the refugees at the Isle of Man were let out. And to follow whatever they wanted to do. So George went to the Oxford University in England. He met his wife Paddy at Oxford where she studied languages. George and Paddy and I were expected to live in the U.S. because my mother lived in New York. We never saw my father again because he died just before we got to New York in 1946.
George became a professor of Nutritional Biochemistry first in Urban and later at MIT. Paddy taught French at the University. He’s now 90 years old and lives in Berkeley, California with his wife.
And now about me.
For me, everything went well, (except for losing a hard boiled egg). My Quaker school advertised that they want me to have a home. Two sisters advertised that they were looking for a young girl to live with them and raise her. Pretty soon after this, I took a train to go north to Yorkshire, to live with the two sisters. It was love at first sight for the three of us. They knew exactly what to do with teenagers. One woman was a teacher in a one-room school in a small village. The other woman worked in a cotton mill in our small village. This was all in the country side. No bombers, no sign of a war. It was so peaceful, and we got along as if there were no war.
I lived in this tiny village of Langcliff in Yorkshire near the big village of Settle. Our address was like that “……near Settle.” This was the country side of the famous writers –the Bronte sisters- the land of the moors and the heather growing wild everywhere about which Hollywood made a movie of one of the Bronte’s sisters’ novels “Wuthering Heights”
I would call my new family Auntie Madge (teacher) and Auntie Edna (mill worker). Their last name was Newhouse. We lived in a small house made of rocks; again. One of the Aunties gave me her bedroom, and she moved to the attic. What nice people! They even bought me new furniture. They said that they had to put in new furniture to confuse the ghost which was in the house. Then they had a ghost in their basement. Then there were ghosts behind some walls outside; behind the walls along the road leading to the bigger village of Settle. We used to go to Settle to the movies on this road about once a week to see all the marvelous movies from Hollywood. When we came out we lined up for fish and chips to take home. (What a marvelous life for me, while some people were tortured in Europe.) So we went home in the dark, of course “with the ghosts behind the walls”. I was never worried about their talk of ghosts. The Aunties taught me everything cooking, cleaning, knitting. We had very good meals. We had no heaters except the fireplace in our front room. England was not that cold. When we went to bed we had hot water containers to put inside the bed. We dried freshly washed clothes on a “clothes horse” in front of the fireplace. If I ever was cold, I would sit right by the wet clothes. In summer time I would do my homework sitting by the open front door. It never got too hot. There was a river at the bottom of the hill. I would bring my homework to the river and waded into the middle, and sit on a rock doing homework.
There was a cotton mill at the bottom of our hill. The house where I was living was owned by the cotton mill and we didn’t pay any rent. One summer vacation they let me work in the mill. That was exciting, and I got paid. They had some machinery to turn cotton into threads. It was quite easy to do; most of the workers were from our village.
In my village of Langcliff, each year we celebrated Christmas for a whole week. Parties, dances, church services, presents. We got together with my Aunties’ brother and other sisters and their grown-up children and their husbands and wives. They all lived nearby. We shared a pig with the brother, to be eaten at Christmas. We made our own sausages and hams and bacon.
We had an “aristocratic” family living there by the edge of the village. They were Lord and Lady Dawson. And they had 2 beautiful daughters whom we thought of as princesses. Their house was as big as a castle built of rocks. There were plenty of rocks in the area. Those houses were called “Halls”. We all in our little houses worshipped them like royalty. Lord Dawson was the editor of the main newspaper, the Times, and he had to be in London a lot. Lady Dawson stayed home with their two daughters. She would sometimes come and help decorate the church for Sunday services. That was the only thing they did for the village.
It snowed once in all the six years I lived there. I used to love skiing in Austria. Somebody must have told these people that I used to love skiing. So I was welcomed to their “Hall” and they lent me some skies. I walked up a hill and put on my skies. Well, I didn’t realize my legs were completely out of practice, and I fell down continuously the minute I stood up with the skies on. Pretty soon I went home again and returned the skies. But the worst thing was people got hold of field glasses to watch me “ski” and I felt terribly embarrassed. At that time I was 15 and a half years old.
One of my favorite past time was watching the sheep or rather their lambs playing with each other just like kids. They actually played a game. They got together at the bottom of a little hill. Then suddenly they would run up a hill. Then one would get there first. Then they all would turn around and go to the bottom of the little hill. (If I were ten years younger now I would fly to London and take the train there and watch them do the same thing. That would be amazing after all these years -75 years.) We called that game “King of the Castle”. Typical English!
I went to high school in Settle. It was an all girls’ school. The all boys’ school was somewhere else. I don’t even know where. Often I would walk to Settle with my school friends from my village. The teachers were marvelous. They had a different way of teaching than in Vienna, Austria.
I became an excellent student. I was in terrible shape in Vienna. The same happened to my brother. The war was still going on when I attended the University, the London School of Economics. We were evacuated to Cambridge, and in my last year I was in London, when the war came to an end.
I was in college while the war was still going on. I decided to go to a farm to pick peas during part of my summer vacation. After 2 weeks I took the train to go home to Langcliff. I had to change trains in London at Victoria Station. I was sitting in the train waiting to go when there was a zooming noise which came from way above in the sky. Everyone in the compartment ducked down under the wooden seats, except me. I didn’t know what was going on. A man sitting next to me quickly pulled me under my seat. We were all very quiet hoping it would continue to fly over us. It did. Some poor Londoners were going to be killed. This was a missile, a new invention by the Germans; I was living in the country side and had not heard of this. The Londoners named it the “Doodle Bug”. This was invented by the famous, talented missile builder Werner von Braun. The minute the war was over, the U.S. grabbed him in order to work for us, the U.S. This always amused me!
Maria
Knoxville, Tennessee
* A friend asked me what she means by this (her mother being a dentist and a doctor). Somehow my Grandmother got an MD, but couldn't practice because she was a woman. Instead, she did social work visiting schools checking children's teeth.
The following life summary Of Maria Brody is by her younger daughter, Becky Chaffee
Maria is survived by her four children Tom Brody, Delanna Protas, Paul Brody and Rebecca Chaffee (myself), their spouses and 8 Grandchildren.
Many folks, said what a lot she's been thru and what an interesting life after reading the above, but this is only a small portion of her life. She then had to live thru my Dad who was brilliant like her parents and brother, but a difficult force to live and cope with. (She stuck it out for her kids she thought, I guess. This was close to 50 years until he died at age 72).
Maria Martina (Wolf) Brody died on March 4, 2018 at age 92. She was born in Vienna, Austria on October 3, 1925. She was a serious ballet student and danced in the Vienna Opera House. At 13, she had to escape in the middle of the night on the Kindertransport to England. When she arrived, her only lunch, a hard boiled egg fell out of a hole in the bag and rolled across the floor. Although she had witnessed horrible things, the disappointment of losing that egg stood out in her memory. After being taken in to live with two Quaker sisters in the English countryside, she graduated from the London School of Economics. She took the RMS Aquitania ship to to reunite with her Mother in New York. Visiting her brother at MIT at age 24, she met her husband of 46 years with whom she had 4 children. When her children were young, she taught all the neighbors ballet in the back yard in Seattle. She sewed, making our costumes and some of our clothes, and was a great cook. She especially loved making desserts with whipped cream. After all of her children were in school in Northern California, she became a nurse, bookkeeper and secretary at her husband’s (my Father's) family practice office. She went to night school to take most of the nursing classes needed for a degree. She really loved this job and loved getting to know all the patients personally. She was always wanting to go camping in the mountains, and took her kids and their friends many times. She encouraged all her children with their music as they were growing up. For her last 6 years, she lived with her daughter (me) in Knoxville. She read for long hours every day, everything from science texts to Danielle Steel novels. She never missed an evening of opera or ballet on TV and was always an arts supporter. Up until her last few days she tended to the flowers, swept the porch, folded laundry, cooked us snacks, set the table and cleaned dishes. She loved and overfed her cat. She took Belly Dancing, then Art Classes at the O’Connor Center and loved attending the Music Study Club meetings and other concerts with me. She also loved helping me showcase and sell music purses and art.
