Farewell Sidonia     by Erich Hackl, Translated by E Mccown Original title: Abschied von Sidonie Original language: German Published by Fromm International Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: 1991 Format: Hardcover, 144 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 8.58 x 0.71 x 5.80 ISBN: 088064124X Edition: 1st USA Edition List Price: $16.95 Not available for ordering Published by Cape Pub. Date: 1992 Format: Paperback, 135 pages List Price: £5.99 Not available for ordering

An infant is abandoned outside a church. The local authorities try to pass it on to the next town to avoid having to pay for its upkeep, but eventually find a working-class couple to foster it. The couple and their own children, despite economic difficulties, come to love the child, which they name Sidonia, and feel it is part of the family. She starts to grow up happy, wanted, protected. The authorities, however, under the motto of ‘A child’s best with its real mother, isn’t it?’ continue to search for Sidonia’s biological parents. Ten years later they find them, and Sidonia is sent to join her presumed mother, to the desolation of her foster family, who never see her again.

But this is Austria, the year is 1933, and the abandoned Sidonia is a gypsy child whose swarthy complexion proclaims her racial difference to everyone. Her ‘black’ colour automatically arouses prejudice, but that often disappears in her presence, dissipated by her charm and vivacity, and, before the German invasion of 1938, the locals are often half ashamed of their feelings. The doctor, for example, although regarded as a ‘soft touch’ who treats the poor for free, refuses to take Sidonia because ‘she doesn’t belong here’, and then afterwards he regrets it and offers to help.

After the Nazi takeover the situation does not change radically. Although the prejudice against her has official sanction and the authorities’ search for her parents is now racially motivated, there are still neighbours who are not afraid to show they care for her. The decision to send Sidonia back to them is shown to be as much the result of an uncaring attitude on the part of individual officials, who take what seems the most straightforward course, as the direct implementation of racialist policies. Immediately Sidonia has rejoined her parents the whole gypsy clan is deported to Auschwitz.

Sidonia’s foster-parents, Hans and Josefa Breirather represent a side of Austrian history often ignored, especially in the picture presented abroad. They are active socialists. Hans spends eighteen months in jail after the abortive uprising against Chancellor Dollfuss’ authoritarian state in 1934; the couple are blackmailed and browbeaten into joining the Catholic church; after 1938 they secretly collect for the families of comrades who have been imprisoned by the Nazis, and Hans is involved in resistance sabotage; Josefa is denounced for giving food to forced labourers.

For the English-speaking reader, Farewell Sidonia presents a picture of Austrian society which evokes the poverty of the early 1930s, and the atmosphere of menace and suspicion of the Nazi period. In the Breirathers Hackl has created two figures who have the strength of character to act according to their beliefs and who refuse to join the majority of the population in cringing acquiescence, yet do so not with heroic declarations, but as a matter of course. In this portrait of a working-class society under great economic and political pressure Sidonia is not so much the main focus of the story as the touchstone which brings out the attitudes of those around her with particular clarity.

After the war Hans Breirather is briefly elected mayor of the town, but then suffers from the anticommunism of the incipient Cold War. After he has discovered how she died, he wants Sidonia to be remembered, but he is regarded as a troublemaker. Sidonia has been forgotten and is never mentioned; it is as if she never existed. Besides being a vivid evocation of the 1930s, Farewell Sidonia has much to say about attitudes to the past in the Austria of the Waldheim affair (Kurt Waldheim became secretary-general of the UN and in 1986 Austrian President although accused of involvement in genocide during World War Two).

‘There were new developments in the apartment house. The Krobaths moved in, national comrades from the Sudetenland in their mid-forties... Neither ever tired of stressing how happy they were to be on German soil, at which Frau Krobath would point to the linoleum at her feet. They were childless, the woman would not have the opportunity to earn a Mother’s Cross, and he was unfit for duty at the front, so a Medal of Honour was a long way off. Lux, the cell leader from next door, helped them move in and introduced them to their neighbours that evening... In the name of all your neighbours, I heartily welcome you. And what is that? Frau Krobath asked in a shrill voice, that black thing? And into the silence that followed, as all eyes were fixed on Sidonia: Heinz, I think we’ve fallen among negroes. She laughed affectedly, her husband and Lux laughed with her.’ p59