Books, Arts & Manners: Genocide near the Mall

THE CERTIFICATE, from an institute in Vienna, was stamped February 2, 1939. It certified that my wife’s parents were now in a condition to leave Austria because they had been retrained as “domestic servants.” My father-in-law, Leopold Sonn, had been the comptroller of a textile firm spread through the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. His wife, Theresa, had come from a rather comfortable family, with a father in the foreign service. But the only way for them to leave Vienna, after the Anschluss and the Nazi takeover, was to secure jobs, strikingly out of character for them, as a butler and maid at an English country house in Surrey.

We came across that certificate last summer as we were sorting through some of the papers we had still not managed to scan in the years since their deaths. In the same collection we found the notice that my father-in-law had received in 1947, confirming officially that his mother had died in the camp at Theresienstadt.

About the Author

Hadley Arkes

Hadley Arkes is the founder and director of the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding.

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THE CERTIFICATE, from an institute in Vienna, was stamped February 2, 1939. It certified that my wife’s parents were now in a condition to leave Austria because they had been retrained as “domestic servants.” My father-in-law, Leopold Sonn, had been the comptroller of a textile firm spread through the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. His wife, Theresa, had come from a rather comfortable family, with a father in the foreign service. But the only way for them to leave Vienna, after the Anschluss and the Nazi takeover, was to secure jobs, strikingly out of character for them, as a butler and maid at an English country house in Surrey.

We came across that certificate last summer as we were sorting through some of the papers we had still not managed to scan in the years since their deaths. In the same collection we found the notice that my father-in-law had received in 1947, confirming officially that his mother had died in the camp at Theresienstadt.