A childhood that shaped the vision behind the Bonnart Trust

The events of Freddy’s early life – the political arrest of his father Julius, family exile from Austria as an 11 year-old refugee, internment, the fate of Europe’s Jews - all help to illuminate his motives for setting up the Bonnart Trust.

Below are first-hand accounts by his cousin George Newman (Hansi), excerpts from Finding Harmony, a family’s journey across Europe and beyond. Hansi’s mother was the sister of Freddy’s father. Vividly recalled after eight decades, Hansi, who was 10 years old at the time, describes how his 11 year-old first cousin “Fritz” stayed with him in Vienna for three days before fleeing his homeland. Also recounted below Freddy’s internment in England in 1940.

… My last weeks in Austria were, of course, only the final scenes of a tragedy. It started about five years earlier with Hitler’s rise to power. I became increasingly aware that for Jews across the border in Germany, life was terrible. I was only nine years old when the reality of Nazi Germany insidiously cast a growing shadow over our lives. Friends of my parents started to arrive from Germany, Gustav and Toni Stolper from Berlin and Irma Simon from Frankfurt. A year later, in February 1934, there was the civil war, lasting about a week, in which the clericofascist government of Dollfuss crushed the military uprising of the Social Democrats, and a few months later on the 25th July Dollfuss was murdered in a Nazi Putsch. Both events are deeply engraved in my memory. On the morning of the 12th February, the army raided the weapons depository of the ‘Republikanischer Schutzbund’ in Linz, the capital city of the province of Upper Austria. A year earlier, Dollfuss had suspended parliamentary government on a technical issue. He had no intention of recalling it, but instead was busy laying the foundations of a totalitarian corporate state. Austria had a small standing army, but it also had active paramilitary organisations: the Heimwehr, built on the model of Mussolini’s black-shirts, on the right, and the Schutzbund, the armed wing of the Social Democracy, fighting for the ideals of socialism.

Dollfuss closed down the Socialist daily newspaper Die Arbeiter Zeitung on the staff of which Julius Braunthal [father of Frederick Bonnart] had been a prominent journalist. Julius had also founded and edited the popular Das Kleine Blatt, a complementary weapon in the fight against fascism, to support the more doctrinaire eruditeArbeiter Zeitung. Das Kleine Blatt (the small paper) appealed to the ordinary worker. I remember the great novelty of the daily cartoon. It was called ‘Wamperl und Stamperl’. The two men discussed serious issues in satirical dialogue. Wamperl (‘fatso’ in Viennese slang) and Stamperl (the argumentative foot-stamping one) must have reminded readers of Laurel and Hardy whose comic films so often had a deeper message.

Julius was arrested immediately in the morning of the 12th February. Not only was he a prominent Socialist journalist, but he was on the executive committee of the party and of the Schutzbund. His political conviction was reflected in his family life. He married Tini [mother of Frederick Bonnart] appropriately on the first of May 1917, Labour Day, and he called his older son Fritz [Frederick Bonnart] after Friedrich Adler, a leading Socialist, a great friend of Julius and the son of Viktor Adler, the founder of Austrian Social Democracy.

Julius thought that he might be executed for High Treason. Three days before the coup, on the 9th February, he had been asked by Otto Bauer, the Socialist leader, to draft a ‘Manifesto to the People of the Austrian Republic’. Three type-written copies had been prepared, and Julius added a few sentences in his handwriting as a result of suggestions made by Otto Bauer. Force should be met by force should Dollfuss attempt to destroy the parliamentary constitution. One copy Julius managed to destroy, one was with the printers, but the third was in his office. In the event, after thirteen months in prison, Julius was released on condition that he immediately leave the country.

One can imagine Tini’s anxiety. Her husband was imprisoned by his mortal enemies. Her mother-in-law, Julius’ mother, my grandmother Clara, was watching the point blank bombardment of the Karl Marx Hof from her window in Heiligenstadt. She could see the terrible gashes in the long chain of huge apartment blocks, which housed thousands of workers. Tini immediately packed some clothes for her sons Fritz and Otto, similarly aptly named after the Socialist leader, Otto Bauer, and sent the boys to us in the Gersthofersstrasse. She wanted them out of her house, away from Vienna, out of Austria. She did not want them to watch at close quarters the terrible fate that might overtake their father. And that is how my cousins came to stay with us from the 12th to about the 15th February, after which they travelled to Brussels and lived with their aunt Hilde, a staging post on their eventual emigration to England. I cannot forget the two days they spent with us. Their father was imprisoned. They had lost their world. They were about to say farewell to Vienna. Little did I know then, that exactly four years and one month later I would also be leaving, and that my father would be imprisoned a few days later.

On the first morning of their stay, my mother asked me to take Fritz and Otto, later called Freddy and Tom, to the Türkenschanzpark, the park of the Turkish fortifications, only about half a mile from our home.

In 1683, the Turkish army brought its victorious march through the Balkans right up to the gates of Vienna. Kara Mustafa, the Grand Vizir at the head of a 100,000 strong army, calculated that the city would fall after a short siege. But Christendom came to the rescue in the form of King Sobieski of Poland. After a series of forced marches, his twelve thousand men were positioned on high ground, overlooking the city, on the Kahlenberg, one of the last foothills of the Alps. Kara Mustafa, to guard his rear, built a stockade, a redoubt and dug ditches and trenches. Archaeological remains of the earthworks still exist. But it was of no avail. On the 12th September 1683 a bloody battle was fought there, the Turkish army was defeated and the siege was lifted.

Two and a half centuries later, on that 12th February in 1934, a second siege was enacted near the site of that memorable battle. As I walked with my cousins to the Türkenschanzpark we passed an improvised army machine-gun post. One soldier was lying on his stomach in the traditional posture, his belt of ammunition neatly spread at his side. The gun was pointing at the Gemeindehaus (the large municipal complex of workers’ flats) in the Gersthoferstrasse. Standing behind the soldier on the ground were two men drawn up in support. Another soldier was patrolling the courtyard, his rifle at the ready, directed at the windows. Large white sheets were hanging from them, in the traditional gesture of surrender. After it was all over, the government announced that large quantities of illegal weapons had been discovered in the various Gemeindehäuser, but people were sceptical and thought a lot had been planted for propaganda purposes. The strange thing was the eerie silence of the scene. As we drew near we stopped speaking. There were no cars, but then in 1934 cars in the Gersthoferstrasse were few and far between. The tram, the number 41, was not running, at any rate none passed us. We were the only pedestrians. When we came back about an hour later, the soldiers were still there. The tension was great. Vienna was waiting. My mother was upset that she had sent us out at such dangerous times. Word had got round that the Gemeindehäuser were under siege and that one might get caught up in cross-fire.

It was all over in about three to four days. Nine members of the Schutzbund were hanged. Only the intervention of England and France prevented further executions. There were hundreds of casualties on both sides. I remember photographs in the newspapers, of a long line of draped coffins being driven along the Ringstrasse, past the Imperial Palace to the cathedral of St. Stefan for the state funeral. That was for the army and the police. The Socialists buried their dead with the bitterness of defeat.

But in the event, there were no victors, no winners, only losers. The Austrian Nazis watched from the sidelines as the government destroyed Socialism, their real enemy. Dollfuss was doing their work for them …

Freddy’s internship in England in 1940:

… As the overall German occupations progressed, stories began to circulate of treachery and betrayal by pro-Nazi collaborators and sympathisers in areas overrun by the German army. The popular press in England whipped up a panic scare about the thousands of enemy aliens in the country, and the government took military advice in case of invasion.

The first step in this new policy of internment was taken on Sunday May 12th 1940, the third day in the battle for Holland and Belgium. A wide coastal belt, stretching from Inverness to the eastern edge of Dorset was declared a ‘protected area’. German and Austrian men aged 16 to 60 were rounded up for temporary internment. At the time, my cousin Freddy [Frederick Bonnart] was studying at the London School of Economics, which had been evacuated to Cambridge. That was within the coastal belt. He was interned and sent to Canada, facing the dangers of German submarines. After about a year, he was repatriated and released. In 1943, he joined the army, as by then refugees were allowed to enlist in the armed forces. Prior to that, they had been accepted only in the non-combatant Pioneer Corps and not allowed to carry arms.

After the war he stayed on and with his language skills of English, German, French and Russian achieved a successful service career, retiring with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. He acted out the paradox of his family history, as high-ranking army officer, his perfect English without the slightest trace of a foreign accent to disturb the officers’ mess. Little did they know that he, Frederick Bonnart, was the son of a prominent Viennese Socialist, who himself had suffered imprisonment for his support of revolution, of armed insurrection, of the stand on the barricades. On retirement, Freddy settled down in Brussels and combined his military expertise with his inherent flair for journalism, contributing articles on NATO strategy and the Cold War for the international press. …

from Finding Harmony: a family’s journey across Europe and beyond, George Newman