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https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-murdered-because-he-was-a-jew-robert-manne-on-his-grandfather-chaim-and-the-hell-of-viennas-1938-pogrom-241344>
"My father’s father, Joachim Manne, or Chaim, as he was called, was a Galician
Jew born in 1872 and raised in Cracow, in the Polish lands of the Habsburg
Empire.
His family owned a substantial furniture manufacturing business, The Cracow
Furniture Company (KrakowskaFabryka Mebli), whose records go back to 1860. For
some reason, unknown to me, Chaim Manne migrated to the United States in 1900.
Not long after, he married Leonora Hötchner, his first cousin, which was not
uncommon then.
In January 1904 my father was born in New York, always Henry so far as I know,
never Heinrich. Chaim Manne failed in business in the Promised Land of America
– a surprising fact I like to think helps explain my own almost spectacular
lack of commercial acumen – and returned to Europe in 1910, not to Cracow but
to Vienna, the capital of the Habsburg Empire.
There he established his own furniture business, in part, it appears, as an
agency for the Mannes’ Cracow company and in part as a designer and
manufacturer of furniture for individual, wealthy bourgeois clients.
My father was expelled from his school in late 1918 at the age of 14 for a joke
that mocked the aged Habsburg emperor, Franz Josef: “The crown (the currency)
is no Crown (Emperor).” As a child I learned, as part of family folklore, that
from a very early age he ran the Vienna business.
On March 9, 1938, Henry Manne visited Prague to look over the exhibits at the
International Sample Fair. Two days later, because of the defiance of the
Austrian chancellor, Kurt Schuschnigg, who proposed a plebiscite on the
independence of his nation, Hitler ordered German troops to enter Austria, a
move forbidden under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. It is well known
that the German occupation of Austria was not only unopposed but welcomed
joyously.
It is not so well known that the Anschluss, as it was called, unleashed in
Vienna, where 90% of the nearly 200,000 Austrian Jews lived, was a violent,
vicious and lawless pogrom that historians have characterised as an “open
season” on the Jews."
My own father’s father, Max Pam, was also one of these Viennese Jewish business
owners who was sent to and murdered in a concentration camp.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
