Oct 03 2024 34 mins
The object of our attention in this episode is a well-travelled letter of 21 pages, received in 1997 by Professor Albert Lichtblau, in response for an appeal for "unpublished biographical memoirs" of Holocaust survivors he had posted on behalf of the Institute for Jewish History of Austria as well as the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. The letter was written by Norbert Abeles, an Austrian living in Malawi, and its arrival prompted an exchange of further letters between Malawi and Austria, unravelling in the process the remarkable story of a young Jewish boy's escape from Nazi persecution and his journey across three different continents to find home.
Abeles was born in Vienna, Austria in 1923 to Siegfried Abeles, an author of Jewish children's books, and Sabine Abeles. Abeles's life was already marred with hardship even before the Nazi occupation of Austria, having experienced the traumatic suicide of his father in 1937, when his mother signed him up for the Kindertransport, an evacuation program for Jewish children in Nazi-controlled countries that took them to the United Kingdom. By the time he said goodbye to her on the platform in December 1938, he already knew it would be the last they ever saw of each other. Indeed, Sabine Abeles was deported to Maly Trostinec on the 6th of May 1942 and was murdered days later on the 11th.
Once in the United Kingdom, Abeles attended Hakhshara, an agricultural school intended to prepare young Jewish people for emigration to Palestine. This school was located in Stenton, East Lothian in Scotland at Whittingehame House, the former home of the Earl of Balfour. The house and the grounds were leased to The Whittingehame Farm School Ltd., a non-profit organisation which aimed to educate and train Jewish children in the range of agricultural skills. Students were instructed in agriculture and horticulture in a combination of English and Hebrew, and days were structured around a half work, half study routine.
Before the end of his time at Whittingehame, Norbert was one of a handful of refugees who were interned as “enemy aliens”. This, along with the trauma of being torn away from their parents and the vastly different backgrounds and beliefs of the children staying at Whittingehame made for turbulent years at the school, which according to Norbert was very much in a “disorganized state”.
After leaving Whittingehame in 1941, Abeles found work as a lock smith's apprentice whilst attending evening school for a Diploma of the Royal Technical College in Glasgow, which sparked the beginning of a professional career that would take him around the world.
He married his first wife in 1950, who had also emigrated to the UK from Austria. Together, they left the UK and emigrated to Africa in 1956, living in Nigeria. Norbert would go on to live in different places across Africa, taking various postings in the British Colonial Service, predominantly in the educational department and taking posts as a lecturer.
Featured guest:
In this episode, we are joined by Albert Lichtblau, former Deputy Director of the Center of Jewish Culture History and the History Department, at the University of Salzburg in Austria.
Podcast host is Katharina Freise.
Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks - Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0).
Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14