The events would change his life forever, but for 9-year-old Peter Kaus living in comfort in Vienna, Austria, the 1933 Nazi book-burnings barely registered a ripple"That was in Germany," Kaus, now 83 and living in Prescott, said of that long-ago assault on free speech. "Austria had its own problems."
So even though his mother, Gina Kaus (pictured, left), was among the authors whose books German Chancellor Adolph Hitler burned and banned, Kaus said his life went on much as it had before - at least for a time.
"I knew that money was getting tight," Kaus said of the years that came after the book-burnings. His mother had been a popular author in Germany, so Hitler's ban dried up much of her readership.
Even so, Kaus said his mother and her friends were more apt to discuss recent advances in psychoanalysis than political goings-on hundreds of miles away.
"I was aware of a problem, but I didn't associate that with Germany; I associated it more with the rising anti-Semitism in Austria," Kaus said recently as he reflected on this week's arrival of the national exhibition, "Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings" at Yavapai College. See a review of the show in The Scene.
Indeed, Kaus and his daughter, Prescott Library Director Toni Kaus, both have been particularly mindful recently of the events that helped to set their family's course for the next 75 years. Their tie to the Nazi book-burnings came up at a recent Prescott City Council meeting when David Hess, president of the local Jewish Foun-dation, emphasized the "very personal con-nection" that the Kaus family and the Prescott Library have with the historical event.
As the overseer of one of the community's largest repositories of books, Toni Kaus has an obvious bond with the written word.
"I really did grow up with a family where my parents and I always loved books. There were shelves of books everywhere," she remem-bers of her early years.
So it is understandable that she views the hard-ships of her grandmother and father in 1930s Vienna with special pain.
"It did end people's careers," Toni Kaus said of the book-burnings. "They couldn't be published."
For Gina Kaus, who was Jewish, the book-burnings were just an early taste of the persecution that ultimately would drive her and her young family from Vienna to Paris and, finally, to Hollywood. Like her father, Toni Kaus said the impact of the Nazi book-burnings was not central to her life growing up in Southern California.
With her grandmother living nearby, Toni said she grew close to the woman she describes as fascinating and adventurous. After her move to America in about 1940, and before her death in the mid-1980s, Gina Kaus went on to have a successful career writing and translating screenplays.
While family members were well aware of the history that caused the move from Europe, Toni Kaus said they did not dwell on it.
"I've always known my grandmother was an author," she said.
What she was not always aware of, however, was that Gina Kaus was a victim of the Nazi book-burnings. That fact became painfully obvious to Toni when, as an adult in the 1990s, she visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. There, in a display about the book-burnings.
"My grandmother's name is etched in the glass. It gave me a chill to see that," she said.
And even though Peter Kaus downplays the impact of the Nazi book-burnings on his life, the memories of his early years in Vienna still can evoke strong emotions.
"We lived in a very comfortable apartment near the opera in Vienna," he recalls nostalgically. "My mother had a pretty steady routine - she slept late, and then she went to her favorite coffee house, where she talked to people."
While his mother was Jewish, his father was Italian Catholic - a fact that helped to buffer young Peter from some of the blatant anti-Semitism that was growing in Austria throughout the 1930s. For instance, his mother, who Peter describes as a "very smart lady," enrolled him in Catholic schools to help protect him from harassment. Later - to further shield themselves from the Nazi persecution - the family donned the fascist pins of Italy to aid them in their escape from Austria.
"I wasn't really scared," Peter Kaus says of those days. "I felt reasonably immune, because nothing physical ever happened to me."
Even so, he has bitter memories of the seemingly overnight conversion of many Austrians to Nazism after Germany annexed the country in the late 1930s. He remembers Nazis forcing Jews to clean anti-Nazi graffiti off the sidewalks with toothbrushes, for instance, as well as people cheering in the streets after the German arrival.
Perhaps because of those final memories, Toni Kaus said her father always had positive views about his move to America where he would go on to become a physicist.
The Daily Courier
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