Finding the archival traces of “misery trains”: Early accounts of train transport before the Holocaust

Introduction

This essay explores experiences of the railway as a site of conflict transport, trauma, displacement and resistance before and during the Holocaust as expressed within a collection of early first-person survivor accounts recorded for the Wiener Library archive in the 1950s and 1960s. ¹ After briefly analysing the history of the Library which provides important context for the collection, the article draws on three case studies from an analysis of over 200 early narratives elicited and archived that contain reference to lived experiences of deportation and railway transport, including the implication of railway personnel and structures in resistance. This is significant because the accounts, gathered by survivors and refugees who urged fellow survivors to record the trauma and chaos of Nazi terror, provide an opportunity to query early postwar narratives that reveal emerging constructions of refugee identity (especially in this case, German Jewish identity), agency and survival through key memories deemed of particular “value” to the Library, an institution that was expanding its work as a collecting organisation that had sought to undermine the Nazis and their allies. Framing the staff's decisions through Eric Ketelaar's distinction between archivalisation and archivisation, which contextualises choices of what is archived and how archives are captured, inscribed and made accessible, this paper argues that narratives of trauma, displacement and resistance associated with deportation by train were of special interest to the Library's staff as it sought to build its collection conceptually. In addition to honing in on experiences of deportation and weaponised transport before the war, the accounts illuminate the social and cultural contexts in which the narratives were archived and constructed. ² This is all the more striking due to a lack of focus on these themes in scholarship until decades later. Finally, the essay considers how the publication of the collection as a digital resource has the potential to further magnify, expand and extend the “tacit narratives” (in Ketelaar's words) about transport that are embedded in the collection, including through links to other eyewitness accounts collections and digitised archival material that reference railway and other forms of conflict transport.

Although there is a long and rich tradition of scholarship on the association of train transport with danger, death and trauma (even though not named as such), scholarship that examined the logistics of genocide with a specific focus on the railway only emerged in Western Europe in the late 1970s and early 1980s. ³ Among the first comprehensive studies that examined the implication of the German railway in the Holocaust was Raul Hilberg's Sonderzüge nach Auschwitz, published in 1981. ⁴ Hilberg built on the work of German railway specialist Eugen Kreidler, arguing that the German Reichsbahn played a vital role in the process of the destruction of European Jewry and should no longer should be considered “ancillary or inconsequential”. ⁵ Other railroad historians, such as Alfred Gottwaldt and Alfred Mierzejewski, contributed significant analyses. ⁶ More recently, Simone Gigliotti's ground-breaking work, The Train Journey: Transit, Captivity, and Witness in the Holocaust, has moved beyond the clinical, procedural and logistical aspects of genocide transport to examine victims’ experiences of mobile persecution. ⁷ Building on spatial geographies, Gigliotti's work also prompted focus on sensory experiences of deportation and emotion in Holocaust studies more generally. ⁸ Her work was followed by studies from multiple disciplinary perspectives and methodologies, including by Ludivine Broch, Sarah Federman and Siegfried Mielke and Stefan Heinz, who analysed the agency and roles of French and German railway workers. ⁹ Other studies have focused on particular experiences of Holocaust transport, including flight and escape as well as narrative construction, witnessing and writing, as well as the materiality and iconography of railway artefacts in exhibitions and other representations. ¹⁰ Finally, digital methodologies and resources, including Yad Vashem's Transports to Extinction database, which aims to reconstruct all transports that took place during the Holocaust from territories of the Third Reich, as well as in countries occupied by or allied with Nazi Germany, have greatly expanded our understanding of the phenomenon of transport and the potential of interactive digital repositories to help visualise the geographic scale and frequency of deportations. ¹¹

The fact that the creators of the Library's early accounts project focused on or included experiences of transport and deportation, prior to this emergent scholarship as well as the wider cultural and political recognition of and emphasis on the role of the Holocaust survivor witness, is noteworthy. ¹² Although sometimes brief, with little to no uniformity across the collection, and often exhibiting the limitations of what Gigliotti calls “instructed recall”, particularly in written form, the accounts are significant as emerging formulations of narratives of “Holocaust experiences”, before they were known as such and before rhetorical or representational markers of the experience of deportation became more defined. ¹³ These are accounts provided generally by unknown witnesses, often describing the mundane and every day in stark detail but with limited rhetorical flourish, and by many who never recorded their testimony elsewhere. Yet the Library collected and archived them, and an examination of the archivalisation process further elucidates their rendering as “visible”, a marker of how the creators and collectors at the Library linked “transit trauma” expressed in the accounts to Jewish forced migration, in particular shared experiences of German Jewish migration, before the events that came to be known as the Holocaust. ¹⁴

The Wiener Library: migrants, eyewitnesses and their archives

Following Eric Ketelaar's distinction between archivalisation (the socially and culturally driven choices that determine what material is worth archiving) and archivisation (the capture and inscription of documents), the origins of the Wiener Library's archive and its contexts need to be unravelled in order to understand the archive's “semantic genealogy”, or in other words, the different contexts ascribed to recording, storing and valuing particular narratives, with “recontextualisation” occurring each time an archive is activated or used, and the place of transport-related accounts within this conceptual framework. ¹⁵ This essay discusses both what happened before and after the creation of the collection, outlining conclusions about the relationship between archivalisation, the reconceptualisation of the Library's archive, and constructed narratives of transport through a close reading of what was archived intentionally.

As to what preceded the gathering of the Library's accounts, brief background will suffice. The Wiener Library (now called the Wiener Holocaust Library) is one of the oldest institutions collecting material about the years leading up to the Holocaust as the events unfolded, and therefore, particular social and cultural contexts undergird its collection. Rooted in interwar Germany, the Library grew out of the work of the German Jewish intellectual, Alfred Wiener, and his Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith) colleagues. ¹⁶ The predecessor to the Library, the Jewish Central Information Office (JCIO), formed by Wiener in Amsterdam in 1934, collected and disseminated information about the Nazi rise to power – the Library's foundation and collections are thus embedded in the concept and practice of collecting as a form of activism and information dissemination as political subversion.

From Berlin, Wiener moved his efforts first to the Netherlands in 1933, and then on the eve of war in 1939, to London – his information service and supporting collection, partially destroyed in transit, can be considered an archive of migration. ¹⁷ While Wiener's initial impulse to collect largely stemmed from communal defence and resistance to Nazism, it was soon enveloped by personal tragedy – deportation of his family to Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen, loss of his wife, Margarete (who died only days after her release from Bergen-Belsen), friends, and homeland. Yet his information service continued. As Fiona Siegenthaler and Catherine Bublatzky have argued, “Archiving is a way to adjust to the precariousness of life-worlds created through and in the state of migration, and may include various practices such as collecting and keeping objects, letters or photographs, but also of creating narratives beyond mere documentation and memory to articulate social relationships, aspirations, political activism and resistance”. ¹⁸ In that vein, Wiener's “Library” (as it came to be known) served different functions during the war (as a source of intelligence on the Nazis for the British government); after the war (supplier of evidence to the Nuremberg trials, for example), and then as an institution that fostered research on the rise of Nazism and its legacy. Within the self-defined space carved out as an “information office” that transitioned to a forum for further study of Nazism and the Holocaust after the war, the Library centred the importance of collecting on Jewish affairs and informing other organisations about the fate of Jews and Jewish life in Europe, even when this was not the priority of national governments or institutions. Its work can be viewed within the frame of other early documentation efforts, such as those in France, Poland, Germany, Austria and Italy, though it has not been treated extensively within the historiography. ¹⁹

The ideological impetuses underpinning the Library's collections help contextualise, in part, its efforts to create the eyewitness accounts collection in the mid-1950s when other earlier commissions began to partially wind down their activities and when Holocaust historiography was in its infancy. ²⁰ Dr Eva Reichmann, the Library's first Director of Research and a fellow German Jewish intellectual refugee and Centralverein member, whose mother had perished in Theresienstadt, created the project to gather the accounts, and her scholarship and methodology shaped the collection. A prolific writer, Reichmann published Hostages of Civilization in 1950, which provided a critical treatment of the debate on the alleged failure of Jewish emancipation and its relationship to the Holocaust. ²¹ For Reichmann, the imperative to collect emanated from her critical work in the area of communal defence. Her team's efforts culminated in over 1200 reports (which also included letters, poetry, songs, etc.) compiled over a period of seven years, archived at the Library, and copied at other institutions, such as Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich. The interviewers were Jewish survivors or refugees, located throughout Europe and elsewhere. The archivalisation and archivisation of the accounts, as well as the content of the accounts themselves, demonstrate the underlying motivations, contexts and private positionality that supported, subverted or otherwise interacted with often publicly stated aims of scholarly and objective analysis that propelled the Library's work. ²² Private document collections and eyewitness accounts were seen to fill gaps in the Library's collection, to allow those who were silenced a voice and, as Reichmann noted in 1954, to enshrine “the memory of our dead … in a dignified account of their achievements and sufferings”. ²³

Funded by the Claims Conference, the collection consists of written narratives usually compiled based on interviews, although there is no evidence that interviewers were required to use a single, centrally agreed set of questions; moreover, no questions have survived within the institutional archive. ²⁴ Some reports were occasionally drawn up by the authors themselves. Interviewers throughout Europe traced, contacted and persuaded potential interviewees to participate. The compiled reports were sent to Reichmann and her team of cataloguers, subjected to “fact” verification through a handwritten correction process (also archived), and finally, in many cases signed by the interviewee and ingested, after which a team of mainly women staff cross-indexed and catalogued them. In short, these accounts were heavily mediated, co-creations drawn up by the interviewer and the interviewee, and then further mediated through the archivisation process. ²⁵

This mediation is recorded in the Library's institutional archive of correspondence between Reichmann and colleagues, and sometimes directly with eyewitnesses, which helps further describe the archivisation process. Structures of archivisation are also apparent in the classification of the collection conceived by Reichmann, as well as in the collection's newest iteration, a digital repository, published online in 2021 as Testifying to the Truth, discussed below. ²⁶ The collection was designated as the “P” collection within the Library's holdings, organised chronologically and then by subject. Although no set questions survive and there seemed to be few specific guidelines for the interviews, the subjects of concern demonstrate how Reichmann and colleagues evaluated and ordered developing narratives about the Holocaust, forced migration, and survival, as well as its precedents and aftermath. Broadly, the categories include “History up to 1933” (with a particular, and unsurprising, focus on Germany); “From the Seizure of Power to the Outbreak of War (1933–1939)”, “The Final Solution (September 1939-May 1945)”; and “Fate of Survivors”. Accounts related to “Deportations and Transports”, where one might expect to find descriptions of railway experiences, fall under Section 3, “The Final Solution”, which suggests that deportations and deportation experiences were figured primarily within the context of war and murder operations, and which had begun to emerge as part of what was “tellable” by survivors of the Holocaust. ²⁷

The case studies I explore here, however, illuminate earlier instances of deportation as part of large-scale roundups in Germany as well as resistance using rail structures on the German/Czech border prior to the 1940s, which although not catalogued specifically under “Deportations and Transports”, were still deemed significant enough to archive, in part due to their proximity to the experiences of pre-war flight and forced emigration after the November Pogrom (Kristallnacht) shared by many German-speaking Jewish refugees who managed to flee to the UK. These accounts are particularly useful for highlighting the representation of perceptions of “early” persecution, often later subsumed under the narrative and conceptual weight of the “Final Solution” and persecution within camps and ghettos. ²⁸ Yet, in order to find these instances of “transit trauma”, we have to navigate beyond the original classification of the archive, facilitated by its rendering as a digital archive, which can be searched, reordered and assessed differently – with potentially new narrative constructs and contexts brought to bear in their activation.

Testifying to the Truth, the digital archive, affirms Reichmann's original objectives by pointing to the context and intentions of the collection's creators but also recontextualises it, in the first instance, by linking its metadata to other testimonies and collections found online. ²⁹ Most of the accounts are published online in high resolution in their original form and language and translated into English. ³⁰ Echoing scholarship that analyses digital archives and their conceptual frameworks, I suggest that what has been created is a new archive that both extends and expands beyond Reichmann's original intentions – evidenced by the curation and location of narratives related to forced migration and transport. ³¹ One of the conventions of the original collection is also recreated and published on the site – cover sheets that include basic information and emergent taxonomies to cross-reference the P collection and other collections held by the Library at this time.

To highlight the potential of the new digital archive to reorder narratives as originally conceived, the digital repository's developers have curated a section that points to themes of potential interest for searchers, which (based on federated search of metadata, including the transcribed original language and translations, as well as the transcribed cover sheets) presents results that eschew the original classification. For the purposes of this essay, the theme “forced migration” draws together material that refers to forms of the search terms “deport” and “migrate”, which overturns the original chronological classification: “This theme search gathers accounts that focus in particular on experiences of forced movement, either from a place of safety such as one's family home, or from a place of danger and persecution”. ³² It does not include more specific terms related to the mode of transport within this theme, such as “railway” or “rail”, which turns up 206 accounts using the keyword search.

Using this expanded search, I explore three examples that highlight narratives related to the lived experience of deportation as well as the use of transport structures for relief and resistance. In some ways they echo other accounts in the collection that reference railway transport, including as sites of forced labour, as a means of escape, or as contained vehicles from which deportees experience the sites, sounds and smells of their “previous” lives, but the accounts selected here focus more specifically on the weaponisation of the railway and its use for resistance. ³³ They chronicle the periods of “spatial constraint” and preceding years of “displacement and captivity” that by and large fall outside the scope of other scholarship on deportation experiences. ³⁴ All three accounts analysed below were catalogued as part of Section PII in the original classification (“From the Seizure of Power to the Outbreak of War (1933–1939)”), and some have related internal documentation and correspondence that reveal contours of the archivalisation process. All three accounts considered here were given by German Jewish refugees who fled to Britain under various circumstances, with one interviewee, Ottile Schönewald, a transmigrant who settled eventually in the United States. The eyewitness accounts collection, in both its original and digital forms, offers an opportunity to consider how archival traces related to deportation and transport are rendered “discoverable” as well as how lived experiences of transport were expressed, evaluated and archived by German Jewish refugees from Nazism. The accounts themselves help us consider how railways were used for murderous intention as well as insurgent and aid activity, in which we see “everyday objects metamorphose from banality to extremity”, in the words of Gigliotti. ³⁵

Ottilie Schönewald: railway aid and shared narratives of migration

The first case study focuses on an account written by Ottilie Schönewald, who authored her own report and submitted it to the Library in 1955. Schönewald was an eyewitness to a relatively “early” deportation within the history of the Holocaust, and a historical actor who leveraged railway structures and personnel to provide aid to Jews who had been rounded up in the Polenaktion, during which the Nazi regime ordered the arrest of some 17,000 Jews with Polish citizenship who were living in the Reich. This followed the so-called Anschluss and the law passed by the Polish parliament that made it possible to denationalise Polish citizens who had been living abroad. Responding to this perceived threat to its plans to expel foreign-born Jews, the German government then rounded up Jews with Polish citizenship, held them in various prisons and transit camps temporarily, then transported them by German rail to the German/Polish border, with some left in Zbąszyń, others to Konitz and Beuthen. ³⁶ In the chaos that ensued, many were forced on foot over the border across the fields of no-man's land. Furthermore, the creation of the account and its inclusion in the collection demonstrates proximate networks between Reichmann and some of the interviewees that shaped the collection and also infused it with deeper meaning as a paper memorial or monument to Jewish life and suffering. ³⁷

Originally from Bochum, Ottilie Schönewald was the chairperson of the League of Jewish Women, which under the Nazis, came to support emigration of Jews from Germany, particularly women and girls. The League was disbanded in 1938, and after the November Pogrom of 1938, when Schönewald's husband was arrested, they fled Germany in March 1939 for the Netherlands for six months, from where she continued to try and help Jewish women and girls emigrate. They then moved to London, where Schönewald worked for the Association of Jewish Refugees, a social welfare organisation founded in 1941. After the war she emigrated to the United States and re-established her work on behalf of Jewish women. The Leo Baeck Institute commissioned her to write a history of the League of Jewish Women, but she died before she could complete it. ³⁸

Correspondence related to the eyewitness accounts collection reveals the professional and cultural links between Reichmann and Schönewald and provides further evidence of Reichmann's intentions and assumptions in collecting and archiving this account, which provides an extensive, detailed description of one of the Polenaktion deportations by train. Both Reichmann and Schönewald had worked in areas of German communal defence, and both faced similar excruciating dilemmas and decisions after Kristallnacht, when they helped secure their husbands’ release from concentration camps in order to emigrate. Although Reichmann seemed to have met Schönewald only after the war, she entreated Schönewald to contribute to the eyewitness accounts project as well as to write the history of the Jewish Women's League, with the soon-to-be arrival of her great grandchild no excuse to stop writing. ³⁹ From one-sided correspondence, Schönewald had apparently intimated to Reichmann that the eyewitness accounts collection she was building constituted a “dead monument”, which Reichmann categorically rejected:

What you mean by a “dead monument”, which you reject, I don't quite know… on this point I beg to differ, as they say so politely in English. Should an epoch be sunk and forgotten if the goddess of history has not granted it a longer life? Should not rather the testimony of thought, struggle and creation, which this historical era saw, be preserved? I wholeheartedly commit myself to the creation of such a memorial, when life itself has already passed into the past. ⁴⁰

By this time, Schönewald had yielded and submitted her account, which thoroughly impressed Reichmann, who explained that she became a kind of secondary witness through the act of reading it:

I read them through immediately - breathlessly, so to speak. The fact that you demand that I be honest to the point of impoliteness is an imposition that I am sorry to have to disappoint you in fulfilling. Honesty forces me to tell you that the reports have inspired me directly. However, as I have not expected anything different from you, you have represented the facts so vividly that one believes to experience them. ⁴¹

Schönewald's account focuses on the work of the League to assist Jews who were deported in October 1938 as part of the Polenaktion. She describes the ordeal and the logistical challenges to providing aid to deportees before they embarked on the train journey across the border. She recounts the fear she (re)experienced in writing about what she had witnessed, likening the process of recalling and writing to opening a wound that would never heal, and including in the account the physical and traumatic ramifications of her retelling. This perhaps explains her initial reticence to provide the account to Reichmann, since it loomed so centrally in her experiences of persecution. She began:

Why am I so frightened merely to write about this event, why does my heart beat so hard as to take my breath away, even today, as soon as I think about it? Events that directly threatened my own fate and life occurred before then and afterwards, but this day lives in my memory like an abyss, a tear that can never close, a wound that will never heal. And yet, it all happened so calmly, so “organised”, no murder, no manslaughter, no torture, I almost wrote. But that was exactly what it was, a long-drawn-out, cold, cruel torture. ⁴³

Her report also chronicles the emotional reactions to and the apparently shared aural experience of the arrival of the deportation train, incorporating a fair amount of self-reflection, which is somewhat unusual in early written accounts:

…when they were told at 10.30: “Everyone to the platform”, we experienced a mass psychosis of the purest form: everybody rushed, pushed, although nobody had longed for this moment. The mothers cried out for their children who were holding their hand or their skirt whilst the children cried for their mothers, any attempt to create order in this chaos was prone to failure….

Schönewald closes her account by emphasising that the cases of assistance she describes were exceptional and that other “misery trains”, as she called them, were transported much more quickly so that aid of this sort was not logistically or practically possible. The idea that there were many such transports beyond her or others’ assistance must have remained an integral, fixed part of her memories of the pre-war years, so much so that they occupied a significant portion of her account.

Schönewald's account is somewhat brief at 15 pages, yet its reflection on the seemingly mundane aspects of persecution, the self-reflective comments about the limitations of her singular perspective at the same time chronicling her emotional responses and the place of the instance in her memory, as well as the epistolary interactions with Reichmann, provide a window on early constructions of narratives related to forced transport and recorded by Jewish refugees in exile. The shared emotional and cultural terrain explored in the account ensured that Reichmann would ingest the report into the collection; indeed, subsequent correspondence (there is only one letter from Schönewald retained in the archive) reinforces their unfolding friendship, particularly in the wake of the death of Leo Baeck, with whom they were both connected. ⁴⁷ The cross-references to other prominent named individuals within the German Jewish intellectual elite refugee community, such as Bertha Pappenheim, Leo Baeck and Hannah Karminski, further demonstrate their shared network. The account was categorised under PII, “acts of violence”, and in response to Reichmann's urging, Schönewald's writing created a fluid, dual space in the archive for shared remembrance. ⁴⁸

Paul Rosten: brutal weaponisation of the railway

The second example focuses on a shorter, eight-page account submitted to the project by the German Jewish dentist, P. Rosten (previously Paul Rosenstein, 1887–1985), who was deported by train to Buchenwald after the November Pogrom. ⁴⁹ Rosten and his wife, Alice, lived in Breslau, where he was an active member of the liberal Breslau Jewish community. ⁵⁰ He recorded this account in 1938, not long after his experience of deportation and incarceration, and sent it to the Library's archival project in 1950. Rosten was likely in his early 50s at the time of his emigration to England after the Pogrom, like many German Jewish men who managed to emigrate after their release from the camps. His account offers a vivid, brutal description of transport to Buchenwald, and the guards’ sadistic use of train structures to torture prisoners even before their arrival at the camp – a narrative not always included or considered part of the historiography of Kristallnacht. ⁵¹ Rosten submitted his account to the collection in English, although it is unclear if he wrote originally in German.

In the introduction, Rosten strives to validate and reinforce his role as a reliable witness by citing sensory evidence of what he experienced, but notes that he would consciously separate it from information he gathered from others. Although Gigliotti's pioneering work has examined how “sensory witnessing” emerged in “spoken-word traumas” of the early interviews conducted by David Boder in Displaced Persons camps, contrasting the ways that sight-based witnessing has been upheld as the key, normative “truth” of later Holocaust testimonies, Rosten's written account also reflects assumptions about the senses that reliably reinforce the authenticity of his account: “In the following pages I shall describe, in the whole, only my personal experiences, what I have seen with my eyes or have heard with my ears. Should I mention events I have been told by other people I would make it quite clear”. ⁵² He describes his arrest as the events of Kristallnacht unfolded. Along with some 30,000 other Jewish men, he was rounded up for deportation, and he focuses specifically on the experience of being taken to a “special train” that was waiting for the men at the station: “The compartments were not crowded. In every compartment were posted [sic] a Police Officer, fully armed with pistol and rifle and an armed SS-man. Besides a kick with the butt-end of a rifle, if somebody was not quick enough in boarding the train, nothing happened. I reckon that we were about 1000 to 1500 arrested people”. ⁵³ The destination was, according to his report, already predetermined and the passengers knew it already on the journey, which framed their experience and his retelling:

The train left Breslau at about 10 o’clock in the night and arrived at Weimar next morning at about 8 o’clock. Long before, watching the stations where the train stopped we had no doubt about our journey's destination: Buchenwald. After the train had stopped in Weimar Station Police Officers with loaded rifles were placed at both sides of the train filled with unarmed Jews, their rifles directed against the windows of the train. During the time we had to wait for the order to leave the train we had ample opportunity to get to know the mentality of our future guards. ⁵⁴

Understanding that the account would be read by English-speakers presumably unfamiliar with German railway passageways, he explains how the structures were used to terrorise the deportees. The passage of time, tight quarters and sounds he heard are faithfully recorded, as is the suggestion that he had arrived in what is often a busy hub of transit, although it is unclear if he saw witnesses observing the roundup:

One hour passed. Then we were ordered to alight and to take off our hats and glasses. In order to make you understand what happened now I have to tell you that in German railway stations the travellers going from one platform to the other or leaving the station have to walk through subways below the rails. We were ordered to hurry into such a tunnel and had to run along a row of SS-men kicking and beating with the butt-ends people who, in their opinion, did not walk quick enough….Many men tumbled down the steps leading to the subway, one pushing the other in order to avoid kicking and whipping by the SS. They used long whips with a small ball made of lead on the end. …When we came into the subway the exit was closed by a cordon of guards and we were penned and pressed against the walls of the tunnel by the SS-men coming into the subway behind our backs. The guards whipped us and poured cold water into the crowd and threatened us with their guns shouting and ordering us to get closer together though we were pressed to the walls like sardines in a tin. In fear of death many men cried and moaned, everybody tried without any consideration what happened to the other people to escape the whipping and the rough treatment. I was sure that we would not leave this subway alive. ⁵⁶

Unlike Schönewald's account, there is no institutional correspondence between Rosten and Reichmann or other staff of the Library's project or other archival trails to analyse further his motivations for writing, and the biographical sketches of Rosten's life can be gleaned only from his interventions to the AJR Information journal, as well as an exchange he had with the German lawyer Hans Schaeffer, also from Breslau, on the occasion of the latter's 70th birthday. ⁵⁷ His account was seemingly recorded not long after Kristallnacht, in medias res and presumably from the relative safety of his refuge:

That is the story I have to tell you. We are in the middle of the fight against these dark and evil powers, or perhaps starting the last chapter. We are told and we read so often that after this war is over anything will be better than it was before. So the story might be true that one soldier told his pal: Well, if the world will be such a lovely place after the war why didn’t we start this war earlier?’ It is up to the younger generation to build up a better world from the shambles our generation left them. ⁵⁸

Josef Lampersberger and railway resistance

Finally, the third case study considers descriptions of the use of railway structures for resistance against the Nazi regime. Josef Lampersberger was involved in resistance within the German Social Democratic Party (or SPD). He was a member of the Reichsbanner, Schwarz-Rot-Gold, which while comprising several parties, became a paramilitary force of the SPD. He fled to England in 1939, after which he was interned, interrogated by British intelligence as a suspected Communist, and was later employed by MI19. ⁵⁹ Like his father, Lampersberger worked for the German railway which, as his account for the Library emphasises, facilitated his resistance activities – both the network and the form his resistance took. ⁶⁰ After working at the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten in Munich, where he observed the upper echelons of Nazi party hierarchy, Lampersberger worked as a waiter from 1931 on one of the Mitropa dining cars, and this employment provided an opportunity to build a network of trade unionist resistance among other co-workers and smuggled anti-Nazi newspapers, leaflets and other information into Germany. In his account, which was recorded in 1960 in London in English, his work on the Mitropa car gave him the chance to leave Germany and gather information.

Being able to read newspapers and listen to the radio of a different nature, it made me more determined than ever to carry on with my political beliefs and activated me in various ways. We often stayed overnight and whilst other members of the crew singled out to their various pleasure haunts, I spent as much time as possible with some contacts I made, and taken with me leaflets and literature which at that time was quite easy to take aboard the train, as the customs control for us was only very superficial. ⁶¹

A rather opaque character, Lampersberger gave his account to the Library via the publicist and writer on Sudeten Germans, Johann Wolfgang Bruegel, a fellow SPD member. ⁶² The account describes, in imperfect English, Lampersberger's manoeuvres, rumour and intelligence gathering, and how he navigated his contacts with railway workers and other resistance members to carry out his work. His kidnapping and capture, which was covered by international press, forms a significant part of the account. ⁶³ One of his Mitropa associates was discovered and pressured by the Gestapo to arrange a meeting with Lampersberger on the Czech border. He was captured there, brutally tortured, and forcibly returned to Germany, which caused some international incident and pressure for his release, though there were suspicions about his liaisons, with suggestion that he promised to work for the Gestapo to gain his freedom. ⁶⁴ Lampersberger was interned as an enemy alien after he arrived in London via the Netherlands. A file from the UK National Archives contains extensive investigation of his loyalties and potential to serve as an informant, which he apparently did for MI19 and for the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC), presumably in London. ⁶⁵

His account highlights the ways in which insurgent activity was facilitated by individual employees of Mitropa, even while Mitropa came to be used for Nazi propaganda purposes, and travel in the cars was favoured by Hitler and his associates. ⁶⁶ Eventually they were requisitioned and only used for so-called “war-related activities” from 1943. Lampersberger's account focuses on his twisting and turning manoeuvres, for which he exploited the infrastructure and his own contacts from the railway. He then turns toward a lengthy and detailed description of his brutal treatment at the hands of the Gestapo and the physical (and later on in the account) mental impact of this treatment; he closes his account by noting as a post-script: “after 25 years I am still under Doctors [sic] treatment to give me some relief from very frequent and very sickening headaches”. ⁶⁷ Little is known about Lampersberger's later years, but it seems that his postwar business went bankrupt and that he may have died in some obscurity. ⁶⁸

Lampersberger may have been somewhat better known, at least for a time, than Rosten, but his account is the only recorded, written description from his perspective of his experiences before he fled to England. In addition to the geographic locations he references, his account was also cross-referenced to resistance in Nazi Germany, Nazi party members, as well as one sympathetic secretary at the Munich police where he was interrogated. Political and professional links between Bruegel and Lampersberger can be inferred from the creation of the account, and although rather exceptional in many ways, its archiving within the collection reinforces its representation of the forces that shaped the lives of German Jewish refugees from Nazism and their agency, as well as the instrumentalisation of the railway.

Conclusion

These eyewitness accounts recorded by the Wiener Library in the 1950s/1960s refer to trauma associated with train journeys and infrastructures through highly mediated, written reports collected through an intentional process of archivalisation, which when examined closely, reveals the cultural and other contexts in which Reichmann and her associates worked and the narratives they valued. Although they provide individual perspectives of persecution and resistance, they illuminate the general contours of displacement and conflict and deportations in different regions and contexts prior to 1941. The fact that the accounts are now digitised – as Ketelaar has emphasised, technology changes what is archivable – means that what we have now are more than digital renderings of the paper archive, but rather a new, reordered and recontextualised digital collection. I have shown how the digital sources facilitate research into the lived experiences of railway transport, resistance and forced expulsion, and the ways in which archival sources, particularly earlier eyewitness accounts, reveal narratives about early experiences of deportation, even with the limitations and implications of “structured” memory in written versus oral accounts. The accounts demonstrate the Library's institutional priorities at the time and its contribution to the creation of early-postwar narratives about the Holocaust as well as the framing of such by its director, Eva Reichmann, in terms of “extracting” verifiable evidence from witnesses. Finally, the accounts recorded by the Library and its associates provide a window onto social networks facilitated and tapped into by staff of the Library and its network of interviewers, and the kinds of themes of particular import to these networks. They reveal that the experience of forced expulsion, transport and resistance, particularly in the late 1930s, was notable both to those who gave their accounts and those who collected them, which prefigured the scholarly attention paid to Holocaust transport only decades later. This is further reinforced by the reframing and repositioning of the collection as a digital archive, ensuring that narratives are recontextualised through further research and remembrance. Individual (micro) experiences recounted in these reports can be expanded, compared and elaborated through linking to available data in other large-scale digital repositories of testimonies and deportations, with the potential to gain further insight into how the Library's contributions, influences and objectives connect to other post-war efforts to record and archive conflict transport.