For Melissa Hough, an impromptu purchase at a flea market provides insight into the experiences of a Jewish girl as the world changed around her in the 1930s.
Hough, president of the Slate Belt Heritage Center, said she has been translating and researching a handwritten notation book that appears to have belonged to girl who lived in Vienna before and after Germany annexed Austria in the lead-up to World War II.
Hough said she saw the book five years ago at a Philadelphia flea market. It was nestled among various other knick-knacks and the man selling it said it was a diary written in German.
When Hough examined the book, she said she realized it was actually a friendship book or what is also known as an autograph book. The book had drawings, poems and well-wishes from friends mostly directed at someone named Nitti.
Hough, who briefly lived in Vienna while in college and speaks some German, began to translate the words written by Nitti and her friends.
Hough estimates Nitti was about 8 years old when the writings began in 1934. The inscriptions are initially happy and upbeat, such as “Life is a dream/ sweet dreams/ To memories/ of your schoolmate.”
Colored-pencil drawings of flowers and animals adorn the pages.
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However, a few years later, those happy words and pictures are replaced with sentiments of a much darker tone, Hough said.
German troops marched into Austria in March 1938, and soon after, Jewish children in Vienna were banned from attending regular schools. The fear and gloom that many felt at that time are reflected in Nitti’s book.
“Friendship in despair/ friendship in death/ friendship in the midst of treachery/ that makes three lasting bridges…,” reads one of the later passages.
“It was clear she was responding to the political changes that were taking place,” Hough said.
The German inscriptions seem to stop at about the time of Kristallnacht, which was a wave of anti-Jewish violence that took place in Germany, annexed Austria and other German-occupied territory on November 9 and 10, 1938.
Hough said she wondered what happened to Nitti after those fateful times. Hough discovered Nitti’s full name, Anita Schiller, lightly pressed in the soft leather cover of the book.
There were two English inscriptions dated 1940 from a place called Cockley Cley.
“Nitti had escaped to England,” Hough said.
Through research, Hough said she found a picture on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum website of Anita Schiller and other children who migrated to Great Britain through a program called Kindertransport, which transported about 10,000 Jewish refugee children from Germany and German-annexed territories from 1938 to 1940.
Hough also found an online interview of one of the Kindertransport children who mentions Schiller.
She is determined to find out what became of Schiller after she arrived in England — and how the book found its way to America, Hough said.
“I want to find out how her book came to be in Pennsylvania,” Hough said. “Did she emigrate to America?”
Hough said she would like to discover the outcomes of Schiller and her friends and eventually donate the book to an appropriate museum.
John Best is a freelance writer. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
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