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H-NET BOOK REVIEW Published by H-Holocaust@h-net.msu.edu (June 2001) Hannelore Froehlich, _Spurensuche_ (Search for Roots). Graz, Steirische Verlagsgesellschaft m. b. H, 1999. 175 pp. No index. DM39.80 (plus shipping, or about $35 in all). ISBN: 3-85489-023-0 Reviewed for H-Holocaust by Stephen G. Esrati, novelist He saved 120,000; Hero or Fraud? Ms. Froehlich (she spells it with an Umlaut) is maddening. She has written three books in one, all pretty bad. In one book she tells of her idyllic vacation on a Greek island to which she went to paint; in the second, she recalls her trip to see her "brother" Hans in Tasmania, in the third she glorifies Josef Schleich, her father, for having saved 120,000 Jews from 1938 to 1941. I will not bother you with the details of the first two books Froehlich has written. They are what the title refers to and are not of interest in this discussion. What is of interest is the alleged rescue of 120,000 Jews. The Yad Vashem web site makes no mention of Schleich, but a Google search finds several Austrian references to him as the "Austrian Schindler." They credit him with 20,000 or as many as 35,000 Jews whose lives he ostensibly saved. Schleich was a man of whom no one spoke well in his hometown of Graz, including his own children. He was a playboy who had children with several women other than his wife. Froehlich herself, reveals late in the book that the Aryan "mother" who reared her was a stand-in for her real mother, a Jewess, who supposedly ended up in Auschwitz. Froehlich's method is to try to make her "brother" take a favorable view of their father. For this purpose she takes a pile of documents to Australia and slowly peels away layer after layer of revulsion in Hans's view of his father. The documents show that Schleich was arrested 13 times by the Gestapo, with one leading to a prison sentence, followed by assignment to a punishment company in the Wehrmacht. There are letters of thanks from Jewish organizations such as the Jewish Emigre Association of Wuerttemberg and the Jewish Community Federation of Vienna (which carefully noted that Schleich was paid 150 to 500 marks per person). There are thank-you letters from various persons he smuggled to their destination in Zagreb. And there is a long, handwritten description of his exploits that he composed in jail while on trial in 1948 for cheating some of his Jewish charges. Froehlich confesses that she is surprised that her father was denounced by Jews, but she says she feels no anger. It is this long document that forms most of her reconstruction of her father's career as a Jew-smuggler, which began when Schleich, a poultry breeder, taught agriculture to Jews so that they could immigrate to the United States. He gave day-long lessons to people he housed and fed in his own home. After a supposed six months of instruction, he issued a diploma, which the American embassy accepted. Later, he simply issued diplomas without the instruction and, according to his document, the United States ended its practice of awarding visas to farmers. And then he started up his "business." He made contacts all along the eastern Austro-Yugoslav border (and some of this sounds totally false for people headed for Zagreb in Croatia), he supposedly went to Shanghai to arrange for 20,000 Chinese visas (but this was a cover-up for a supposed shipment through Italy to Palestine), he claims to have opened a central office for Jewish emigration in Vienna (which is also mentioned in the memoirs of Yitzhaq Ben-Ami, who worked with Dr. Willi Perl and Adolf Eichmann in ridding Austria of Jews). To do all this, he openly bribed people all over the place while always professing that he was obeying every part of German law. Among those he counted as helpers (and who was also arrested by the Graz Gestapo) was Ludwig Zwickler, a clerk in the Graz Gestapo. Some of the writing is extremely confused. For example, at one point it is stated that Schleich smuggled Jews to the border in groups of three. At another point, he gets paid for ten Jews and then takes three along free. He gathered, so the hand-written document says (it is reproduced in the book as normal type), people from all over the Third Reich and they all came to Graz. From there, he sent them by taxi to the "green border," meaning unguarded places along the border, where they were then housed by peasants, many of whom are quoted as stating their sorrow for the poor Jews. Here one of the book's weaknesses comes forth. Froehlich says the names of the people giving such testimony are known to her publisher. A lot of good that does! There is no independent reference to the figure of 120,000, which Froehlich repeats constantly, and which some Austrian references to her father quote without a hint of doubt. I cannot for the life of me understand how such a heroic figure as Josef Schleich could remain unknown and without honor -- if he, indeed, did the deeds his daughter credits him with. But it is also possible that the whole thing is a fraud not unlike that of Binyamin Wilkomirski. I had a telephone call from a former member of the H-Holocaust list who indicated that from the time of the Anschluss to 31 October 1941, 147,000 Jews are known to have left Austria. If the 120,000 number is correct, he said, then Adolf Eichmann was responsible for only 27,000 of them.
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