“It is not to think that real strangers, as you are, give us so much love”: An Austrian Pen Pal's Journey to a Safe Haven in the United States

Abstract

This article traces Marianne Winter's unique immigration journey as an eighteen-year-old Jewish Austrian refugee. Pivotal to the family's escape was the epistolary friendship that developed in early 1935 between Marianne and her American pen pal Jane Bomberger. When Jane's father Max learned of the Winter family's persecution, he generously provided the required affidavit to ensure their safe passage to the United States. Six of the remaining letters from Marianne to Jane, additional family documents, and interviews with Marianne contextualize her upbringing in Vienna and her family's immigration story within a larger sociocultural and historical framework. The article examines how Marianne's youth, participation in competitive swimming at the Viennese sports club Hakoah, education at Eugenie Schwarzwald's Frauenoberschule, and apprenticeship as a dressmaker shaped her identity and enabled her to face the many challenges of forced immigration from her homeland. The article additionally explores how other members of the Winter family, especially her brother Stefan, experienced the Holocaust, immigration, and their new lives in the United States.

From her apartment in Vienna's 9^th district in the Löblichgasse Nr. 6, fourteen-year-old Marianne or “Nanne” Winter began exchanging letters with an American pen pal in early 1935. “Matched by chance” through the Camp Fire Girls, sixteen-year-old Jane Bomberger of Reading, Pennsylvania, had chosen Marianne's name from a list at one of her local group meetings.¹ In a brief interview included in Yaron Zilberman's 2004 documentary Watermarks, Marianne explains that the exchange came about as an effort to improve the Austrian students' English.² However, the epistolary friendship that spanned three years led to a far more dramatic and profound act of humanity. Ultimately, it would enable the escape of Marianne's family from Nazi Germany and their immigration to the United States when Jane's father, Joseph Bomberger, sponsored the family at considerable financial risk.

Only six of Marianne's letters to Jane have survived, providing a window into the girls' friendship and Marianne's life in Vienna. The letters and additional materials from the Winter Family Papers housed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives, the Alexander and Marianne Selinger Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, as well as interviews with Marianne, help paint a fuller picture of her sheltered childhood in Vienna and her family's flight from their homeland to and settlement in the United States.³ Marianne's journey is a unique story that nonetheless intersects with the experiences of other children and young adults who were able to escape Nazi persecution. The youth's loving and supportive home, her pre-Anschluss life, her schooling, and her participation in competitive sports point to factors that were constitutive of her identity and they must have helped her deal with the challenges she faced after the Anschluss. At the same time, Marianne's story underscores the role that chance and financial means played for those who were able to find refuge from the National Socialists.

Born 1921 in Vienna, Marianne grew up in a middle-class, secular, educated Jewish Austrian household with her parents and younger brother Stefan, born 1926. Marianne's father, Max, had met his wife, Anna, during World War I while recovering from a war injury when, as a trained pianist, she entertained injured soldiers. After holding a job as a banker until the financial collapse of the 1930s, Max established a perfume company, Essenzen für Parfumerie, which was housed at the same address as the family's apartment. In an interview Marianne recalls that her family had “lived very nicely,” remarking that they employed a maid and cook and lived in an apartment with a courtyard and a terrace in the back. She describes the neighborhood as “mixed,” noting that she herself had “mixed friends.” While she did attend services on high holidays when she visited her grandmother and was confirmed in the Seitenstetten Temple, she stressed the fact that her family was not religious, “not at all.” Marianne and her family identified themselves foremost regionally as Viennese and nationally as Austrian and, after the Nazis came to power in March 1938, they were persecuted solely because of their Jewish heritage.⁴

In many ways Marianne led the life of a “typical” Austrian teenager up until the Anschluss. Her pre-Anschluss letters to Jane include the usual exchange between female pen pals from different countries, in which they offer cultural information and comparisons. They also provide an immediate window into Marianne's life and point to the family's social standing and comfortable financial means. In the first extant letter written to Jane dated September 28, 1935, Marianne begins with a recap of her summer vacation: “Today I came home from Fischamend where I spent my holydays and there I found your nice letter and lovely present.”⁵ The girls supplemented their letter exchanges with small fashion accessories, such as gifts of scarves, belts, and handkerchiefs. She goes on to tell Jane about her summer vacation in Vienna, her swim training at the Mondsee, and visiting family on a drive to “Pressbourgh” Czechoslovakia (Bratislava, capital of Slovakia). At the close of her letter, she returns to the gift Jane had sent: “I was very fond of your present, it was really lovely, and I could not get something of the sort here.” She answers in kind and sends a gift typical for Austria: “Now I'll send you a little pig and hope that it will bring you luck.”

While the September letter offers an overview of Marianne's summer activities, the letter from December 12, 1935, reports on extracurricular activities in winter, such as skiing and skating. She also enjoys taking dance lessons, inquiring of Jane, “Do you like dancing? I think it is very gay,” though finding the “step” dance “a little difficult.” In the letter from January 12, 1937, she touches on a topic of general interest to her age group and comments on her views of teenage romance. She writes that she was happy to hear about Jane's “nice Quentin” and send her regards. However, she is surprised by Jane's talk of marriage: “It seems a little queer to me, Jane, if you talk from marriage. I don't know may be only in my acquaintanships nobody thinks of such things. We love one day this one, the other day another one we talk about serious things and about sports, work and so on. But in the main this we meet for dancing.” She also comments on Jane's desire to visit Marianne in Europe: “You write about coming here to Europe, Jane if that would be possible I would be the happiest girl on earth.” Little did the young friends realize at the time that tragic circumstances beyond their control would bring them together a year or so later.

A topic Marianne returns to in multiple letters as well as her interviews is her pride in her swim team in the sports club Hakoah and her achievements there. In her letter from September 28, 1935, Marianne writes: “My holidays I passed first at Mondsee where I was number 1 (You remember there the Austrian youngster Masterships took place). Now I am Austrian Youngstermaster and I am very proud of that title.” Marianne translates “Jugendmeister” as “Youngstermaster,” or Junior Champion. Indeed, Marianne's letter underscores her emotional involvement in the sport and her club, as she remarks, “Tomorrow there is a large meeting Austria-Hungaria and I have to start. I have great fear.” Facing her fears when competing may have served her well later in dealing with the state-sanctioned anti-Semitism and migration.

The swim club also connected Marianne socially with Jewish Austrian contemporaries. In her letter from December 12, 1935, she writes how she enjoyed her swim club's traditional winter ball: “Our club made a dancing-ball and we all had dirndl-dresses and had a lot of fun. Now we have the traditional swimmer ball in evening clothes, it is always very full, I go this year the first time because I was to[o] young. I hope it will be fine.” The dirndls worn by the women athletes underscore the group's identification with and their pride in their Austrian heritage. A few years later Jews would be forbidden from wearing the traditional Austrian garb under the National Socialists.

Marianne's involvement in the local Jewish sports club “Hakoah” (“Koah” meaning “strength” or “power” in Hebrew) allowed her to cultivate a competitive spirit that she could tap into when faced with more serious challenges. The club, founded in 1909 by Austrian Zionists cabaret librettist Fritz Löhner and dentist Dr. Ignaz Herman Körner, provided a venue for Jewish Austrian athletes not accepted at the other local sports clubs. Not only was Marianne able to associate with other heralded swim champions, such as Hedy Bienenfeld, but she found a positive association with other young talented and athletic Jewish Austrian women. In 2004 Marianne joined other members of the swim team at a reunion in Vienna documented in Yaron Zilberman's film Watermarks, when the athletes reconvened to swim one more time at the Viennese Amalienbad pool. One of Marianne's former teammates, Anne Maria Pisker, a resident of London, says of her own forced migration, “you sink or you swim, and when you are young, you swim.”⁶ Like her teammate, Marianne also refused to “sink” and chose instead to persevere in the face of her fears.

In addition to her skills as an athlete, Marianne's varied educational background shaped her sense of self and allowed her to gain valuable life skills. When Marianne began corresponding with Jane, she was a pupil at the Frauenoberschule der Gesellschaft der Schwarzwaldschulen (women's high school of the society of Schwarzwald schools), one of the schools founded by the famed pedagogue and women's rights activist Eugenie Schwarzwald. In her first letter to Jane from September 28, 1935, Marianne provides a very general description of the school and a school day:

Based on report cards collected in the Winter Papers, we know she attended this remarkable school from the fall of 1932 to spring 1936.⁷ Schwarzwald sought to further girls' education by combining a high level of general education classes with life skills. Traditional borders between subjects were dissolved in the school's innovative curriculum. For example, German, philosophy, and history were combined in a block. At the same time, practical subjects such as cooking, sewing, and childcare were taught.⁸ According to the writer Hilde Spiel, who had been a student at the Frauenoberschule, it was the inclusion of the practical subjects that motivated her parents to send her there.⁹ Schwarzwald's teaching staff included luminaries such as Arnold Schönberg and Oskar Kokoschka.

For reasons unknown, Marianne would leave this private school and continue her education at the Fachliche Fortbildungsschule für Kleidermacherinnen (professional school of continuing education for women dressmakers).¹⁰ In a letter dated January 12, likely from 1937, Marianne writes that she is now in her first year of a three-year training program to become a tailor and that she one day hopes to send Jane the “wonderfullest things made in Austria (by me).” While the formal education Marianne received at the Schwarzwald Frauenoberschule would shape her intellectual growth along with some hands-on skills, her training at the Fortbildungsschule as a dressmaker provided her with practical skills essential for finding employment in the United States.

Like so many, Marianne's life would never be the same after March 11, 1938. Her recollections point to her parents' attempts to shield their children from the political events of the annexation of Austria and both her interview and two post-Anschluss letters to Jane point to her own determination and motivation to secure her family's safety. Marianne recalls how her parents chose to shelter their children from most news regarding the Anschluss and rising Nazi presence and violence in Vienna. Her parents refused to listen to Hitler on the radio and did not let her near the marching soldiers in the street or the crowds of “yowling” people on the Heldenplatz square when Hitler made his speech on March 15, 1938. Moreover, her parents never talked politics in front of their children. Nonetheless, she recalls that her mother was upset and “felt uncomfortable and didn't like it.”

Despite her parents' efforts to shield her from the unfolding events, Marianne was not spared. One experience that “was a big shock” to her occurred on a family walk in Vienna's fashionable 19^th district when Nazis stopped them. They let her father and brother go because her father had been an officer and her brother just a little boy. She and her mother, however, were forced to clean a villa that had been requisitioned by the Nazis, only to be let go after a brief time. She realizes that “it wasn't as bad as it could have been,” although they “went home shaken.”

According to Marianne, her father was still convinced that “nothing would happen to him” or his family since he had served in World War I. Nonetheless, Marianne's parents became increasingly anxious to leave Austria. Marianne says that because she was a teenager, the events and terror “ran off” her and that leaving Austria left her feeling “rather adventurous,” at least initially. When arrangements had been made, the parents first sent Marianne and her brother Stefan to Prague, where Marianne stayed with a cousin and her brother with other relatives. Their parents joined them a few months later. In the meantime, Marianne enjoyed sightseeing with her Czechoslovakian side of the family and even attended the opera once, all the time feeling that “the atmosphere was tense,” knowing that the Nazis would soon arrive in Prague where “things had deteriorated.”¹¹

In addition to the uncertainties of their journey, the Winters joined the ranks of Jewish families forced to surrender their assets and leave most of their belongings behind. Allowed to only keep 10 Reichsmarks each, worth about $45 today, they would face an uncertain future. Beginning in May 1938 Jewish Austrians were stripped of their property, required to register assets of more than 5,000 Reichmarks (RM), and forced to pay heavy taxes.¹² While Marianne's parents stayed behind in Vienna to “clean up,” Marianne notes that her father was “smart.” Somehow circumventing the government's mandate to seize and retain the majority of the family's assets, he had managed to ship off a container with the family's Biedermeier furniture, a piano, and household items for safekeeping, planning to have it transported to their final destination.

In the meantime, Marianne continued to write letters to her pen pal in the United States in a desperate attempt to secure her family's safety. In her letter from June 6, 1938, Marianne writes to Jane:

Marianne tells Zilberman in her interview that Jane's father had asked his daughter what it would take to help Marianne's family.¹⁴ Even though Jane's family was not related to the Winter family and her father Joseph earned only a modest income as a carpenter, he chose to sponsor the Austrian family.

In her letter from June 29, 1938, Marianne thanks Jane and her family for their generosity: “My dear, dearest Jane! You cannot imagine how we felt after having received your letter an hour ago. We could not believe that there are such people, who are really so kind to help us. It is not to think that real strangers, as you are, give us so much love.” In her letter Marianne assures Jane that her family will not be a financial burden on them after learning that they would sponsor them:

A carpenter by trade, Jane's father was building two houses at the time that were in his name and used those as proof that he could financially support the family of four, signing the affidavit on July 18, 1938.

On August 6, 1938, Marianne writes to tell Jane that they received the first affidavit and that she was busy packing suitcases with her mother so they could travel to Prague, where they planned to give the affidavit to the US consulate. They had learned “from many sides” that they would not be able to take a ship to the United States until January. She begins the letter stating her profound gratitude: “Today we received the affidavit and I want to tell you again and again in the name of my parents and of my name the greatest thanks.” She concludes, “Here there are no news. Here my mother and I have much work with packing our things.” She promises to write Jane from Prague, anticipating a new chapter in her life: “I hope that when I come to Prague I will find a letter from you, and then I will answer and a very long letter about my new life.” The demonstration of kindness by her pen pal's family and the promise of an escape for her family provides Marianne with hope for the future.

However, their troubles were not yet over. When the US Consul in Prague first rejected Joseph Bomberger's affidavit, Max Winter wrote a pleading letter to Joseph on September 11, 1938, asking for further assistance. Max typed another letter to Joseph on October 25, 1938, from Czechoslovakia in which he describes his relief at receiving additional documentation in support of their quest for a visa:

He attempts to articulate his deep gratitude to the family of Marianne's pen pal: After Joseph submitted additional income statements to prove that he would be able to support a family of four, the Winters were invited for an interview at the US consulate and subsequently issued visas in January 1939. Max informs Joseph of this news: Such difficulties would include safe passage from Czechoslovakia and reaching the port of Genoa before their ship sailed for the United States. They left Prague a week before Hitler's troops marched in, the situation already being “very iffy.”¹⁷ Too dangerous to take a train through Austria, the Winters decided to fly to Genoa with tickets purchased with the last of their funds.¹⁸

Marianne's family was worried; it was “not an adventure anymore.” The family did not know what they would do in America: “It was not a good feeling anymore.”¹⁹ The Winter family traveled with very little, ready to flee when able. Marianne “didn't have anything sentimental” with her other than some jewelry pinned to her bra, a blouse and sweater. She did, however, bring two significantly sentimental items along from Vienna: her “first grade papers from school” and her Hakoah swimming emblem, which was “very dear” to her.

While her parents never talked about money—“it was bad taste”—she knew her parents were low on funds by the time they were ready to leave Europe. Despite these hindrances, her mother wished to enjoy one last high tea in the next town on her last day in Europe, a treat before boarding the ship, the Italian Convoy de Savoia.²⁰ Although she recalls their business class accommodations to have been “quite elegant,” paid for either with the family's remaining funds or financial support of family members, Marianne states that the crossing was difficult, most likely emotionally as well as physically. Because she was aware of the financial loss the family had suffered due to their forced migration, Marianne recalled generous individuals her family met on board, “nice Jewish people, American from the South,” who gave her father $50 (equivalent to roughly $1,000).²¹

Despite her mixed feelings about the journey, Marianne later recalled that “it was an adventure” to go to America, especially knowing that she would meet a friend with whom she had corresponded for three years. On February 2, 1939, Joseph and Jane Bomberger met the Winters at the dock in New York City and drove them to the family home in Reading, Pennsylvania. Marianne recalls the trip in a Cadillac and the relief she felt, stating that it “was fantastic because we really had nowhere to go.”²² A few days later, on February 4, an article in the Reading Eagle, “Fugitives Enjoy First Taste of Liberty Here,” describes the family's flight to the United States and their first encounter with American life:

The article posits the family's newly experienced freedom and patriotism in the United States as a counternarrative to Nazi oppression.

A photograph of the pen pals, Marianne and Jane, in the Reading Eagle on February 5 and the caption underscore both the young women's friendship and the continued vigilance of the Winters. In this photograph, both young women sporting smiles of relief and joy, Marianne has her left arm wrapped around her friend Jane's shoulder and gazes at her adoringly. The headline “‘Hands Across Sea’ Are Joined” is explained by a brief caption describing the family's escape from Vienna with the Bombergers' support. It is of note that the family's last name was withheld from the caption for safety reasons: “Fearing retaliation on relatives in Germany, the family of four declined to permit their names to be used.”²⁴

Marianne and her family's life, resembling that of many refugees, changed in rapid succession. After a week at the home of the Bombergers, the Jewish Aid Society made arrangements for a Jewish family to host them for a week, after which they moved into a rented brownstone in the center of Reading. At this time the family's financial plight was dire. Marianne recalls, “We had $300 we brought. That's all we had. We couldn't bring in any money out.” The need to find employment must have been a top priority. Thanks to Marianne's practical skills acquired in Vienna, she found a job as dressmaker. In her new position, she recalled her colleagues were “all old ladies. I was the only young person.”²⁵ While she must have been pleased to be employed, here she must have felt her social isolation and missed, among others, her friends and fellow athletes from the Hakoah swim team. At the time of the 1940 US Federal Census, her name was anglicized to “Maryanne” on the form and she was listed as a seamstress working forty hours a week in a clothing store.²⁶ Max Winter, who had also found employment working sixty hours a week as a chemist in a laboratory, was able to purchase a house where the family could finally receive their shipped container, though their china had broken.²⁷ Marianne recalls that her father kept their Biedermeier furniture, iconic of a successful, middle-class Austrian household, and likely a physical reminder of the cultural life they had left behind in Vienna.

The fate of family members still in Europe continued to impact the Winters as they settled into their new lives. Marianne recalls, “We had relatives who were stuck.” In addition to packages that her family sent, Marianne remembered that her father was able to rescue some of their relatives still in Europe. For example, in March and April 1941, Max secured funding to bring relatives Emile Baumsteiger and his wife, Annie, held at the French internment Camp Les Milles, to safety in the United States through the HIAS, the Rescue Through Emigration Campaign, and the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society in New York. Two years later, in 1943, Max completed an affidavit of support for the State of Pennsylvania for his brother-in-law and sister-in-law, both residents of Prague and rug manufacturers. Max was determined to bring any surviving relatives in Europe to the United States with equal sacrifice and commitment. Tragically and despite efforts to save him, Joseph's father died in Theresienstadt. Marianne remembers her grandfather and his death: “He was quite old when we left. That was tough. […] America was already in the war so this was part of our life.” Now in her late teens, she was aware of the horrors of the war and Holocaust: “I was grown up enough to be told what was going on.”²⁸

The wealth of archived materials additionally points to the role gender and age may have played in the opportunities and choices that Marianne and her brother had as they reshaped their lives as Americans. Marianne would go on to lead a rich life of work and travel. Although she may have initially felt isolated, she was able to make friends in Reading and ran her own dressmaking business until 1949. Here, the sewing skills she had acquired in Austria, her adaptability, and ingenuity served her in establishing a fruitful business. She met her first husband, David Rosenthal, in Reading and they married in 1946, raising two children born in 1948 and 1951. Of becoming a US citizen five years after arriving in the United States and having acculturated to her American life, she says, “I felt good. I wanted to be an American. I felt like an American pretty soon. I lived with Americans.” After gaining more experience as a seamstress, she moved to New York City and “got a fabulous job at a dress shop factory. I met some of my old friends in New York who trickled in.” After a few years in Reading, she and her husband decided to move back to New York, where they owned a designer furniture store. On surviving and thriving as a refugee and young American with the support and comfort of family while assimilating into a new culture, Marianne states, “We were very lucky that we left with our parents as a family. That made a big difference.”²⁹ In her interview with Zilberman, she underscores the importance of having emigrated with her immediate family, “The basis of my life was intact.”³⁰

After their retirement, Marianne and David lived both in Palm Beach, Florida, and Vienna, Austria, where she had inherited real estate from her grandfather and uncle. Marianne, who then identified as American rather than Austrian, became president of the American Women in Vienna, taking American visitors and residents to museums and translating from German to English. Navigating between her Austrian childhood and her American identity, she remarked, “I enjoy Europe, but I am a visitor.”³¹ When David passed away from leukemia in Florida, she married fellow Austrian refugee and recently widowed family friend Alexander Selinger in 1991. Until its closing in 1993, the couple managed Café Éclair in New York, a popular gathering spot for intellectually and artistically minded former Central European refugees that Selinger had co-founded in 1939 after his own escape from Europe. Through her involvement there, Marianne would continue to relive and appreciate the culinary and cultural traditions she had enjoyed as a child and young woman in Vienna preceding her forced exile.

Marianne's brother Stefan experienced his own unique journey as a thirteen-year-old school-aged refugee. Having anglicized his name from Stefan, Stephen's own experiences may have prompted his turn to religion as he would study Hebrew and celebrate his Bar Mitzvah in Reading. Unlike Marianne, Stephen would continue his education by attending Reading High School, pursue a B.S. in chemistry from Albright College, and earn a Ph.D. in chemistry from Columbia University in 1953. He retired in 1991 as an accomplished professor of education from Tufts University after having dedicated his life to public and applied education, “from Finland to Israel.”³² His commitment to pedagogy acknowledges the importance of education and mentoring in his upbringing when, as a young German-speaking refugee, he benefited from the support of strangers, classmates, teachers, and the Jewish American community of Reading.

The life Marianne was able to create for herself was rooted in her early years in Vienna. Marianne's upbringing, her academically robust education, her sewing skills developed through her apprenticeship, her involvement in swimming competitions and her experience with teamwork were all crucial in carving out a new life in the United States. But it was ultimately the correspondence with her American pen pal Jane that saved the family. Together with her family, she acted on one of the Camp Fire Girl manifestos, “That light that has been given to me, I desire to pass undimmed to others.” Marianne's story, as well as that of her brother Stefan, though unique, intersects with the fate of other young refugees who drew on similar resources that aided in their ability to thrive both personally and professionally while adapting to a new set of cultural norms and expectations outside of the familiar context of their Austrian heritage.