Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.
Today we have a letter written from Helene in Vienna to her children Eva and Harry in San Francisco.
Vienna, 1 July 1941
My dear children! Do you remember how much we once laughed when I asked Dr. W, a friend of Paul’s, how he liked Linz where he had moved to and he replied: “Yes, Linz is a lovely city. You can drive to either side of it, but you don’t realize that until your first year there. The second year you become used to it and you realize that it doesn’t do any good to wish that you could leave. The third year you’re already a fool, and the fourth year you’re a real Linzer native.” I am sort of at that point myself. I don’t know if Dr. W knew then how wonderful it is to have the possibility of driving in both directions. I doubt it. Another advantage he forgot to mention: after only 4 days you get a letter that was mailed from Vienna. That’s how it was at one point. But my membership in the Linz club as it were I can claim because of the condition of never getting any mail, and that I can’t even drive away in one direction. Certainly, our deus ex machina does not think it’s the right moment for this to happen or otherwise he would have already intervened. I wait for him, although I know that he will not appear even one second earlier than planned. He’ll be on time, but always at the last moment! If I were not so terribly worried about you, I would just wait patiently, but the way it is, it is very, very painful and the mail is merciless.
Today is the first day that Papa is an independent gentleman. This morning we gave our successor the keys to the shop. In the beginning of September, the shop will probably come out of its summer hibernation. They say that walls have ears. If they had a mouth too and could talk, they could really amuse many of us. When we were going on a walk through the city yesterday, Vitali showed me a shop that looked even more dusty than ours. It looked like Zwieback! (May it rest in peace.) Papa only goes downstairs to send a letter to you. It’s a real private life! But I [don’t] expect him back soon because many of his acquaintances haven’t said good-bye to him and they will not let him leave unless they can shake his hand. Today they will supposedly issue visas again. We’ll see if we’re included in the group.
I kiss you most fervently and I send you my best greetings.
We can feel the anticipation and anxiety as Helene and Vitali’s departure date of July 15 nears. The tale of Helene’s nephew Paul’s friend’s experience of Linz makes us feel the claustrophobia and paralysis they’ve felt the past several years in Vienna. It sounds Vienna was feeling like a ghost town, with many stores closed or abandoned. Certainly something we can relate to in the last year when the entire world shut down due to Covid.
In 2017, Vienna’s Jewish Museum had an exhibition in 2017 on Jewish-owned department stores, including Zwieback. According to an article on the exhibit, these stores had disappeared by 1938. On page 257 of this PDF link, you can see a picture of a changing room at Zwieback Department store in 1910.
In the last line, Helene mentions waiting for a visa — we learned in the June 19 post of their giving up their store and that the American Consulate was closed for vacation during the last two weeks of June.