Spies like Us

Julian Borger thought his family had survived the Holocaust almost unscathed, and that his great-aunt Malciin Vienna was a gentle oddball. Then he discovered her important role in the resistance during the second world war and its tragic consequences for her family

OUR GREAT-AUNT MALCI WAS OUR FAMILY'S LAST LIVING LINK WITH VIENNA. She was my father's aunt, an eccentric figure on the fringes of our lives, to whom my two brothers, my sister and I would write monthly letters in schoolbook French, the language we barely had in common. She knew only a few words in English and we spoke no German.

Her full name was Malvine Schickler, and she was the only member of the family to have returned to Vienna after the second world war and stayed. Every few years, she would visit us in London and we three boys would be told to hide away our toy guns as a gesture of discreet compassion for a woman who had survived the Holocaust.

I have a memory of her arriving on our doorstep, a small woman with a crooked nose and protruding, asymmetrical eyes. She looked as if she had dropped in from a different age, dressed in a dark green loden coat, lace-up brown shin boots and an oddly jaunty little Tirolean hunter's hat of a muddy colour with the rim turned up at the back.

On these visits, Malci was happy enough to sit at our kitchen table, benignly observing the noisy life of a family of four children. She would smile at us, often it seemed on the verge of tears, and try out her handful of English words.

Back in Vienna, she lived in a cramped one-bedroom flat in a sevenstorey block in Favoriten, the 10th district, where she led a life of extreme frugality, turning the heating on in winter only on those rare occasions she had visitors.

When we arrived on our first family trip to Vienna in 1975, it was Malci who made arrangements, which resulted in a highly ascetic form of tourism. We slept on heavy-duty metal bunks in a student hostel, and had meals in a college cafeteria.