Auntie took dinner guests to shoot Jews
IT’S NOT unusual for descendants of Nazis to confront their family history. Even if the connection is distant, the story can be dramatic, bringing on a whole host of questions about whether guilt and responsibility can be inherited.
Swiss journalist Sacha Batthyany first plunged into those depths seven years ago, and has been promoting his resulting book on a speaking tour in Israel.
Published last year in Germany and recently translated into English and Hebrew, A Crime in the Family focuses on the massacre of about 200 Hungarian Jewish forced labourers during a party hosted by Mr Batthyany’s great aunt, Margit (daughter of business tycoon Heinrich Thyssen), and her husband, Count Ivan Batthyany, at their residence on the Austro-Hungarian border, Rechnitz Castle.
Mr Batthyany, born in 1973, said he first became aware of this story in 2007 — around the time that author David RL Litchfield published The Thyssen Art Macabre. In that work, Mr Litchfield — who recently panned Mr Batthyany’s version of events — laid bare the details of how the Batthyanys hosted a ball in March 1945, with Russian forces only a few days away. During the party, Gestapo civil servant Franz Podezin, a secret lover of Margit, invited her and about a dozen of her guests to take guns to “go and kill” Jewish slaves deemed unfit for work. According to Mr Litchfield, local residents remembered that the countess took part in the shooting.
In 1995, an association succeeded in having a memorial set up on the site of the massacre; commemorations have been held annually since 1997.
One year after Mr Litchfield’s book was published, Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek dramatised the story in her play, Rechnitz (‘The Exterminating Angel’).
Reportedly after reading an article by Mr Litchfield in 2007, Mr Batthyany Countess Batthyány talking to a jockey at the races in Hamburg in 1979
was driven to confront his own family’s past. He talked to his father and discovered that the 1945 massacre was an open secret that no one discussed.
In addition to researching in archives, Mr Batthyany interviewed other family members, and drew the ire of some who preferred to let the story rest.
Mr Batthyany reported on his own journey of discovery, starting with a 2010 article for Sueddeutsche Zeitung magazine. There, he recalled the elderly “Tante Margit” whom his family would visit twice a year until she died in 1989. “She is tall, with a large
upper body on thin legs; her crocodile leather bag is Bordeaux-red with golden clasps, and when she speaks… during the pauses she stretches out her tongue between her teeth like a lizard, the way other people play with their hair or touch their noses. I sit as far away from her as I can; Tante Margit hated children…”
In a recent interview with Haaretz, Mr Batthyany said: “You always carry the past with you, it’s what you are. There are those who don’t want to be aware, but if you feel the burden of the past you will see the connection to the present, to who you are.”
SIMONE VEIL, a Holocaust survivor who later became the French minister for health and was instrumental in the country’s legalisation of abortion, has died aged 89.
Mrs Veil was born Simone Jacob, to a Jewish family in Nice. In March 1944, at the age of 16, she was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and later transferred to Bergen-Belsen.
After the war she returned to France. She became a lawyer and then a magistrate, before joining the government. As health minister, she eased access to contraception, and — in her most famous political fight — legalised abortion.
Mrs Veil later became an MEP. She was elected President of the Parliament, the first woman to hold this position.
As a survivor, Mme Veil served as President of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah. She received the French Chevalier de l’ordre national du Mérite.
Emmanuel Macron, the French President, tweeted: “May her example inspire our fellow citizens as the best of what France can achieve.”
Mrs Veil’s mother, father and brother died in the Shoah. She married Antoine Veil in 1946, a marriage which lasted until his death in 2013. She is survived by her three sons, Jean, Nicolas, and Pierre Francois.
You always carry the past with you, it’s what you are’