Paterson Charles - Escape home: rebuilding a life after the anschluss

Table of Contents

Copyright 2013 by Charles Paterson and Carrie Paterson.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

PHOTOGRAPHS, DRAWINGS AND DOCUMENTS from the archive of Charles Paterson, unless otherwise noted

EDITORS | Hensley Peterson, Carrie Paterson, and Paul Andersen

DESIGN & MAPS | Curt Carpenter

TITLE PAGE: My father Stefan Schanzer and I (age 10), photographed by my sister Doris (age 12), at my fathers typewriter in a farmhouse apartment, Saint-Marc-sur-Mer, France, 1939.

Publishers Cataloging-in-Publication data

Names: Paterson, Charles, author. | Paterson, Carrie, author.

Title: Escape home / by Charles Paterson and Carrie Paterson.

Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. | Los Angeles, CA: Dopplehouse Press, 2017

Identifiers: ISBN 978-0-9832540-8-9 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH Paterson, Charles. | Schanzer, Stefan. | Jewish refugees--Austria--Biography. | Jews--Czechoslovakia--Emigration and Immigration. Australia--Emigration and Immigration--Biography. | Immigrants--United States--Biography. | Vienna (Austria)--Biography. | Austrian Americans--Biography. | Children of immigrants--United States--Biography. | Wright, Frank Lloyd, 1867-1959--Friends and associates. | Taliesin (Spring Green, Wis.) | Architects--Education--United States. | Aspen (Colo.)--Biography. | BISAC BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs

Classification: LCC E184.A9 .P38 2017 | DDC 975.2/00436/0092--dc23

DoppelHouse Press | Los Angeles, California

In memory of Stefan Bernhard Schanzer

TABLE OF CONTENTS

BY CARRIE PATERSON

I n 2005, my father Charles Paterson sold The Boomerang, a ski lodge in Aspen, Colorado that he began as a small log cabin, built into a thirty-five unit hotel, and continually managed since he was in his mid-twenties. Upon retirement from over fifty years in business, he began writing a memoir on index cards, episodes he had previously recounted for me in 2002 in a series of video interviews he titled Short Memories of a Long Life. Our friend Hensley Peterson, after hearing one of his tales around a campfire in 2008, encouraged him to expand his memoir into a larger book. She also began asking questions that led us to look more deeply into the history surrounding his lifes events.

And so it began. He started to go through old trunks, drawers, and collections of photographs, commencing to catalog his life. One day I found he had laid out all his hats in an arc by the piano. His efforts were accompanied by the clarity of my mother Fondas bright memories and research. Over their forty-four years of marriage she has kept her own files filled with articles and references that give context to his stories and those of his father, Steve Schanzer, survivor of two world wars.

Steve, my grandfather, was a legendary storyteller who inspired great affection and was an inspiration to many. When he emigrated to the United States in 1941, he changed the family name from Schanzer to Shanzer. He said he wanted to drop the c in order to get the German out, as if he could banish from sight all the sorrows in his life that had been brought about by the Anschluss, Hitlers annexation in 1938 of our familys homeland, Austria. In this book we have replaced the c in his name as a kind of restitution and amendment.

My father Charles and my grandfather Steve are the central characters of this book. However, excerpts from the letters of other key figures help to fill its pages, including those from my fathers sister, my aunt Doris Schneider, and a few rare memories from my grandmother Eva Beck Schanzer, who died in 1938.

Midway through writing this book, amongst my grandfathers records, we found one dusty red file that had remained unopened for many years. My father knew the tattered folder contained all the correspondence between my grandfather and members of our family who died in Europe during World War IImy great-aunt Claire Beck Loos and my two great-grandmothers, Olga Feigl Beck and Rosa Schanzerbut he had never looked closely through it. My mother wanted to read the letters. My father protested. Despite my fathers misgivings, my mother arranged for them to be scanned and translated. The letters were written in my fathers native tongue, German, which he no longer speaks. Many were difficult to decipher because they were penned in Kurrentschrift, an old script based on German cursive writing from the late medieval period. My grandfather had kept them laid neatly together in chronological order, like a book he had not written but was responsible for delivering.

With so many contributors to Escape Home, this book has become a chorus. The principal voices are a father and son separated by war and reunited, who shared a great love and were lucky to have each other. Some details of these stories have been challenging to write, and others to make sense of because even language can hide what has been lost, buried, or unspoken over the course of time.

BY CHARLES PATERSON

A t the time of the German annexation of Austria, the Anschluss, I was nine years old. Our family lived in Viennas thirteenth district. As I learn about that year and the violent manner in which the country was transformed almost overnight, I have changed the way I think about my childhood. I have no memory of the day the Nazis marched onto the Ringstrasse, but it altered my familys life forever. We were thrown to the winds. My father Steve, my uncle Max Beck, my sister Doris, and I survived to tell this story.

In this book, we must all turn a page on tragedy, nevertheless, and recognize that vision, intuition, and hope are guides for people in the most terrible circumstances. I am writing our story to give insight to what happened to people like us after our dispossession and to tell how somehow, against all odds, we persevered and even thrived. I believe that young people today, who see other times and their own difficulties, can learn from our challenges, as I did from my father, that it takes courage and tenacity to carry on, while you bring history with you.

When I was born in Vienna in 1929, I was named Karl Schanzer after my grandfather. I am the eighth generation in my family of Viennese. Through many twists of fate and the dramatic world influences that caused them, I became Charles Paterson, a Viennese-Australian-American. For the last ten years I have been rediscovering my past. As I recover memories and letters, I have gained a new perspective on the history I have known, and my life is changing yet again.

Since 1980, I have kept my fathers papers and many of his personal effects in an old, wooden filing cabinet in the basement of our house in Aspen, Colorado I designed and built in 1977 for my family. I had rarely opened it since my fathers death in 1979.

At the onset of a winter soon after my retirement, I went rummaging through the cabinet. The memorabilia brought back an intense feeling of loss as I began looking through the boxes and files that tell of my fathers life experiences first-hand. Old maps of trips spilled forth, photographs, and my fathers Masonic vestments. One drawer contained his favorite grey felt hat and a pair of antique Turkish wooden clogs said to strengthen the feet. In another was a box of keys. I also found my Ski Association pinsI was number thirty-one of the first Rocky Mountain ski instructors to be certifiedand mimeographed sheets of my fathers self-crafted gourmet Austrian recipes. Another surprise was the red silk necktie from the early 1930s of a famous Czechoslovak-Viennese architect, Adolf Loos, the husband of my aunt Claire Beck Loos.