My great grandmother never spoke about why she had to leave Austria. By the time I was old enough to remember her, she was well into her eighties and widowed, living in a small council flat in west London. We used to visit her there once a fortnight, and for an afternoon my sister and I would sit patiently, sometimes on her knee, and answer questions about school and whether we were studying hard. “He’s taken up taekwondo,” I can remember my mother telling her once. That one took some explaining. When it was time to go, she would push big £20 notes into our hands in that irrefusable way kind old relatives do. I now see how important those visits would have been to her, alone and frail in a country that was never really her own.
We called her “Abuelita”—although I don’t know why she was given that Spanish moniker. She was forced to become a refugee in 1938, travelling with her husband to England after the Nazis invaded Austria. This fact recently enabled me to gain Austrian citizenship, more than eight decades after my great grandmother was stripped of hers. Thanks to an amendment to the Citizenship Act passed unanimously by the Austrian parliament in 2019—effective since September of last year—descendants of up to three generations of victims of Nazi persecution can now reclaim Austrian nationality in a simplified process.
While the legislation goes some way in reconciling the historic injustices of Nazi rule, it will doubtless mean confronting painful history for numerous applicants. But in pursuing my own claim to citizenship, I discovered that the persecution was far from over for my great grandparents, Hilda and Egon Heym, when they arrived in England. Caught up in the Home Office’s hostile treatment of European refugees, Egon was placed in an internment camp and faced deportation back to Austria, where his Jewish ancestry was as good as a death sentence, or relocation abroad by Royal Navy convoy.
After the fall of France in 1940, the growing number of Axis émigrés in Britain caused the government to panic and round up the tens of thousands who had found sanctuary. Winston Churchill’s order to his war Cabinet to “collar the lot!” would begin a series of controversial transports of German, Austrian and Italian refugees to British colonies across highly dangerous waters. It was on one such voyage to Canada that the Andorra Star was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat, killing 805 people. The surviving internees were promptly shipped to Australia aboard the Dunera, which narrowly avoided the same fate in the Pacific. The final straw for this shameful and too often forgotten policy came when another ship—the City of Benares—was sunk in the Atlantic, this time carrying 80 child refugees, of whom 77 died.
The attacks prompted a rapid re-evaluation of Britain’s attitude to “enemy aliens,” a term condemned by one MP at the time as “an undeserved slur on many persons loyal to the democratic cause.” Most internees were freed following public outrage at the loss of so many innocent lives at sea.
By the summer of 1940, Egon was reunited with his wife. A skilled sculptor, he had led a successful career as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in his previous life and went on to work in the restoration department at Harrods, with a little help from Hilda, who became his assistant. They lived happily married in London until Egon’s passing in 1966.
I never met my great grandfather and, until now, knew little of him beyond the extensive collection of Habsburg-era walking sticks he left behind, two of which Abuelita came to depend upon in later life. Stories of separation and strife can be hard to retell for the generations who witnessed them. Austria’s latest approach to dealing with its history goes further than traditional admissions of guilt and culpability, extending beyond borders to repair family ties severed during the Second World War. Yet tracing these links shows how wrongdoing was not always limited to those on the conflict’s losing side.
There’s a saying about never knowing what you’ve got until it’s gone. In a way, the reverse is also true: it’s possible to never know exactly what you’ve lost until it’s returned. This perhaps best encapsulates how many people, but especially those like me who have never even been to Austria and don’t speak a word of German, will feel as they take up citizenship. Becoming Austrian is more poignant than practical for me, as I have no intention to relocate permanently to Vienna and wouldn’t even know where to begin with Austrian politics or who to vote for. There’s also a small point about national service, which I’m sure will have to be addressed at some stage. For now, the unexpected sense of being close again to a loved one, long passed away, is enough to have made all the paperwork worth it.
