AUSTRIAN REFUGEE

Greymouth Evening Star, 9 March 1939, Page 12

AUSTRIAN REFUGEE

NAZI PERSECUTION. [FEB PBESB ASSOCIATION.] WELLINGTON, March 8. A young Austrian teacher who was forced to flee from Vienna last December, because of his political views, arrived at. Wellington by the Arawa, to-day, from London. He has letters of introduction to prominent people in 'Wellington, and hopes to .find' Congenial employment in the Dominion. The young man has come to join his brother in Wellington, but is anxious that his name should not be published because, he said, harm might come to his mother in Vienna.

He is 25 years old and taught in an old-established private school, at the same time studying at the University of Commerce. He said his Socialist leanings had apparently caused someone to inform on him to the secret police, and he had been interrogated. He hud managed to satisfy his questioners, but. he decided, rather than to risk being sent to a concentration camp, to emigrate io New Zealand. He had had considerable difficulty in leaving the country, and had had to pretend that he merely wanted to visit friends in London:

In January he had been forced to join tlio army for one year and difficulties had been raised on that ground. People were allowed to take out of the country only 30 marks in .money (about £2/10/-). Permission ! had to be obtained to take watches, jewellery, and clothing out of the country, hnd there was an exp'ort tax of half their value on such articles.; jin London he had lived on the gener-j |Osiiy of friends. "AH is changed in ;Austria," he said. "Children are now educated from their /fth year in national spirit, and all their education is full of this idea. History has been rewritten to glorify the- German people. Girls are forced to join the Hitler Youth movement, and if they do not do so it is likely to react, on their parents should these hold public positions.”