It is 86 years since several hundred Viennese Jews tried to escape Nazi persecution by applying to come to Northern Ireland through the New Industries (Development) Act, in most cases without success. Within four years, by the end of 1942, a third of Vienna’s Jewish community had been murdered, around 65,000 men, women, and children. Of the 730 or so people mentioned in the letters sent by roughly 300 applicants in the PRONI files, at least 125 were killed in the Holocaust.
Reading their letters is a moving and chastening experience. Usually, the writers give brief career synopses, with accompanying requests for a visa and work permit. They have lost their jobs, but they could create work for local people in Northern Ireland. They have lost their money, but they would not be a burden on the taxpayer. They would work tirelessly in whatever job they found themselves. They would bring honour and success to the country.
They rarely go into detail about the frightening realities of their lives under Nazi rule, but occasionally they make a personal, direct appeal for admission. They have a son or husband in a concentration camp, their ageing parents are not well, they are penniless and are banned from working. They hope for a “a good deed from humanity”, as one applicant described it, a gesture of solidarity with the persecuted and powerless.
We read their letters with the benefit of hindsight. We know the fate of the applicants, but they didn’t when they wrote the letters. We can survey the scene, while they were trapped in it. We can track their histories, however briefly, in archives or websites.
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These official records, and the letters of the Vienna applicants, help keep their memories alive. It is a valuable albeit sparse record – names, dates, final addresses, journeys, fates. It gives, however fleetingly, a precious sense of the rich and irreplaceable experience of the individuals named in them, the unique presence that every person contributes to the world, the formative moments of their lives, the births, deaths and marriages, the personal landmarks that make a life.
The civil servants tasked with appraising the applications for the Ministry of Commerce had to decide which met the criteria of the New Industries (Development) Act. They had to back those individuals they felt could create employment or could train others in companies chosen for aid under the scheme.
Today, with our knowledge of the Holocaust, it seems an unbearable decision to make, but at the time it must have seemed less so. We can only speculate about how easy or difficult individual civil servants found their task.
For us, the choice seems simple. These people were living in appalling circumstances and if any group of human beings ever deserved rescue, they did. The local media had covered the brutality and wickedness of Nazi rule in Austria, and no-one could be ignorant of the injustices and dangers that Jews there were experiencing. But the governments of all free nations, including the United Kingdom, Ireland and the United States, imposed extremely tight admission policies, which tied the hands of civil servants, even if they had wanted to adopt a more liberal attitude.
They were obliged to work within these guidelines. Occasionally, some civil servants expressed frustration and irritation at the persistence of Jewish émigrés who lobby on behalf of relatives in Vienna, and their bureaucratic conformism sounds callous. Of course, we are much more knowledgeable now about conditions in occupied Europe than they were, but reading their dogged determination to reject tiny numbers of people if they did not meet the strict criteria is disheartening and disquieting.
No-one can read the letters in PRONI now without feeling pity and rage at what was happening in Vienna, and in the corridors of power where different decisions could have been made. The voices of the innocent, their dignity and nobility in the face of terror, speak to us across time and space.
Reading their applications, it is impossible not to feel the grave injustice done to them by the states who shut their doors and the governments that closed their hearts to their terrible predicament. So much more needed to be done and, with goodwill, so much more could have been done.
No-one can read their letters without feeling pity and rage at what was happening in Vienna, and in the corridors of power where different decisions could have been made. The voices of the innocent, their dignity and nobility in the face of terror, speak to us across time and space
What is past is past, and unhistorical ideas of mass rescue are easy to dismiss as pointless. Yet the imagination refuses to be silenced. Would a mass appeal to the people of Northern Ireland, and Ireland, to the churches, to sporting and charity organisations, to political parties, not have found an echo?
Could the better angels of our nature not have found their voice, and opened their homes to these dispossessed and despised men and women? The realist says ‘no, not possible’, but the idealist cannot be silenced, and says ‘yes’.
