The Other Schindlers (27 page)

Her memoir records her awareness that failure to acquire a visa for emigration would mean ending up in a concentration camp. She describes how, armed with this knowledge, she contacted all her friends abroad asking them to help her get an exit visa to show the Gestapo she was entitled to leave. She wrote:

She describes how she had long had an interest in India and its dancing, as well as having Indian friends in Vienna. She received her papers through Petras. She describes how the money given to her for the trip by her kind aunts was stolen by a Nazi who threatened to denounce her to the Gestapo if she did not pay up. His behaviour was illegal but in those times ‘there was no law and no justice’.
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She left for India on 6 June 1939 and was very upset at saying goodbye to her mother and sister who came to the station to see her off – they knew they would not see each other again, and, in fact, fourteen members of Hilde’s family were murdered at Auschwitz.
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She travelled to Paris and from there by train to Marseilles where she got the P&O boat to India. She arrived in Bombay on 21 June 1939 and was met by Charles Petras and Dr Trivikram. She lived with the doctor and his young pregnant wife when she first arrived. He had his surgery at home and she is said to have slept on his consulting couch.

Initially, Hilde’s rescuer was a mysterious man because of the limited
information
I received from her about him, and the little written in her memoir. This was not helped by the variation in the spelling of his name. I believe he changed it from Karl Petras to Charles Petrarch to make it more English sounding in a country that was part of the British Empire. However, the spelling Petrasch is also found.

Dr Margit Franz of Graz University is researching
Exile to India during World War II
and has examined Hilde’s archive. I am grateful to her for sharing what she has uncovered. She has written that Hans Glas, an architect and one-time lover of Hilde, emigrated to India in July 1938. He had a contract as an architect in Calcutta and tried to get Hilde to come to India. There are several letters in the archive from him and one, dated 16 October 1938, explains how he had been finding out in Calcutta about earning an income as a dancer. He said it was not a good prospect as dancing was associated with prostitution, and apologised
profusely for not being able to be more helpful. Apparently, he was also trying to help his two brothers get to India as well. As a result of this information, Hilde undertook a course for
heilmassage
(medial massage) prior to her departure from Vienna, presumably to provide another source of income.

Karl Petras was already in Bombay when Glas arrived in India in 1938. Glas wrote to Hilde that he had been unable to meet Petras on his way to Calcutta but would write to him. So far, all that Dr Franz has discovered about Petras before he came to India is that he was a journalist and interviewed Gandhi in London on 29 October 1931.
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He appears to have been a Renaissance man who was interned as an enemy alien by the British between 1939–45, and during this period he wrote poetry and painted watercolours. He was interned with 1,500 other German, Austrian and Italian enemy aliens in the central internment camp Dehra Dun in the Himalayan foothills near the Nepalese border.
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Hilde tried very hard to get him released. There is a letter in the archive from the Archbishop of Bombay, dated 2 February 1940, apologising for the delay in meeting. On the envelope Hilde has written: ‘Historical letter when I tried to get out from the Camp for aliens my “Arian” friend Carl Petras who was accused to be a Nazi which was not true as he saved my life being Jewish.’

Karl and Hilde remained close friends during all these years and after his release from the camp he became her manager. Dr Franz surmises this was probably to prove that he had an occupation, because this was one condition for being allowed to stay on in India. He stayed in India for the rest of his life and, having been sympathetic to the Indian liberation struggle for some time, he set up an Institute of Foreign Languages in Bombay as a meeting and mediation place between India and the West. He was the director of what became a successful international centre and in 1950 it expanded to New Delhi as well. He arranged exhibitions, performances, cultural radio programmes, as well as the language courses. He helped young artists in Bombay by showcasing their experimental works in his centre – such as Sayed Haider Raza’s 1950 show. Raza, who was born in 1922, has become one of the most distinguished international Indian artists and he still exhibits around the world. In December 2009 I tracked him down in Paris. Both Primavera and I spoke to him on the telephone but unfortunately, although he remembers that Petras organised the exhibition for him and ran his language centre, he was unable to tell us anything about Karl and what sort of a person he was.

In the Holger archive there is a press cutting on faded
Financial Times
pink paper, dated 13 February 1951, describing the cultural activities at the centre in New Delhi. It refers to language classes in Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Russian and Spanish. In January 1951 the Swiss inister in New Delhi opened a posthumous art exhibition by the Swiss artist Molly Ruetschi. A play by Shaw was presented and a recital by ‘the British songstress Miss Victoria Kingsley’.
Future plans were for an ‘Indian Week’ with dance and music events, and
distinguished
Indian guests were going to lecture on aspects of Indian cultural life.
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When I visited Hilde’s daughter she showed me an invitation for Hilde Holger and Karl Petras to attend an Art Preview on 3 January 1949 in Bombay, and on 15 February 1951 Karl wrote to Hilde from New Delhi on rather ‘art deco’ notepaper for his Institute of Foreign Languages, where again he was described as Charles Petras, Director. I also saw wonderful photographs of Hilde dancing.

Hilde had a difficult life and her daughter Primavera enumerated her problems for me. She had become a dancer and then taught dancing to earn a living; she fled Hitler and lost many members of her family in Auschwitz and came with no money to an exotic country. Having married a Parsee doctor and homeopath, Dr Ardeshire Kavasji Boman-Behram, her first child was stillborn. Then she had her daughter Primavera and a son Darius, who had Down’s syndrome and holes in the heart. After the murder of Gandhi, whom she had met, she came to England in 1948, but around 1962 her husband left her for someone else. Her
daughter
eventually brought them together again many years later and they remarried. Subsequently, her husband said that although she was very difficult to live with, he had enormous respect for her.

Like many survivors, she suffered from guilt that she had escaped when
relatives
had not. She seems to have had the gift of friendship, supporting others and teaching young people right until the end. She kept up to date by reading the newspapers every day and the house was always full of people who she helped and who helped her. It is extraordinary to consider that but for Karl Petras, her eighty-year career as a dancer might have been tragically terminated with the rest of her family in the Holocaust.

Karl Petras, however, over-worked, and after suffering a heat-stroke, died in Delhi on 1 July 1952.
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But the mysterious Karl/Charles had saved a most remarkable woman. As Julia Pascal wrote:

Dr Franz has explained the visa/affidavit situation for refugees from Europe:

Apparently, as a result of the number of refugees seeking entry to India, the British had annulled the visa-abolition agreement with Germany and Austria following the Anschluss in March 1938. The refugees had to reassure two authorities and
administration units, the British in London and the British Indian government in New Delhi, of two essentials regarding their stay in British India:

The new rules for visas indicated that the applicant had to be in possession of a valid national passport bearing a visa for India given by a British passport or consular authority, a return-ticket – even if the possibility of return was restricted by Germany – and two affidavits signed and verified by British Indian or British citizens guaranteeing the refugee’s maintenance in India or a possible re-patrification. Additionally, a guarantee of employment was very helpful, and in some cases essential, as the number of sponsorships British or British-Indian persons could offer to refugees were limited. After intense negotiations, the Jewish Relief Association was able to sign for refugees’ maintenance and overtake these sponsorships with the beginning of the year 1939. Jewish families like the Ezras in Calcutta or the Sasoons in Bombay were able to offer financial guarantees that also contributed massively to the work of the Relief Association.

I note from my own parents’ Austrian passports that we too had similar
conditions
imposed on our entry into England on 24 May 1947. We were initially only allowed in for two months and forbidden from undertaking employment, paid or unpaid.

Before we leave the subject of rescuers, we should note that not all rescuers were altruistic. Some did it purely for money without showing any concern about their charge other than to keep them safe to ensure maximum payment. One Polish woman, who may well not have been alone, was paid both by Jewish and Polish Resistance groups for one child. Pani Borciñska took a young Jewish girl, Margarita Turkov, into her apartment in Warsaw on 18 August 1942 when she was 8½ years old. Margarita was to be known as Maria Konrad, nickname Marysia. Margarita was fortunate that her looks were not typically Jewish. With light brown hair and hazel eyes, she could pass as a normal Polish child. Months later she noted: ‘I was considered lucky to be able to go about freely, nothing about me to suggest I might be Jewish.’
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On her first night with this strange woman, an air raid forced them into the cellars. In a pause between blasts, someone commented, ‘Nothing to worry, they just want to drop a few on the Ghetto – finish off the kikes’ and giggled. This
made her cry and say she wanted to go back to her mummy. To cover up, Pani Borciñska told everyone in general: ‘this relative of hers had just arrived from the country because her parents had been sent for labor in Germany and the child was still confused’.
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Her recent traumatic experiences left her fearful, compounded now by the harsh treatment she was receiving, and she began to wet the bed. This caused her endless unpleasantness with her guardian who was not a kindly soul and beat her incessantly.
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But Margarita writes that she was not really cruel just bad tempered:

She contrasts his kindness to her with his wife’s behaviour, and notes how
difficult
she found it:

Perhaps the greatest shock Margarita received, not long after her arrival, was when she was told to call her hosts uncle and auntie. On that particular evening she was washing her feet before going to bed when the son, Bogdan: