Marianne Faithfull Who Do You Think You Are?

It's very hard singing so early in the morning.

-Yeah, OK.

-Really.

-No problem.

-Yeah.

-No problem.

-Hey!

Singer and actress, Marianne Faithfull,

has a career spanning almost five decades.

She's produced more than 30 albums,

including the global hit, Broken English.

# Those who were good to go to bliss unalloyed

# Those who were bad are rejected for ever

# Gnashing their teeth gnashing their teeth

# Gnashing their teeth in a gibbering void. #

When I was growing up in this little house in Reading,

my mother would tell me these wonderful stories

about castles and parties and balls.

She liked to call herself Baroness Erisso.

It was faintly ridiculous, I think. Because it seems so fantastic.

Marianne's also known

for her infamous relationship with Mick Jagger

and a long struggle with drug addiction,

which earned her a label as the ultimate '60s rock chick.

This is the rehearsal for Tuesday for you?

Yes. And I'm very grateful.

-Yes.

-All right?

In terms of my mother's history, I don't really know what happened.

She was half Jewish, she told me.

She lived under the Nazis.

And my grandfather became a very brave resistance fighter.

It must have been terribly hard,

especially for somebody like my mother, with Jewish blood.

She also told me she was a young dancer in Berlin.

I'd love to find out more.

I want to find out the facts about what really happened.

It might not be as wonderful as I think. I don't know.

But it might be more wonderful.

That's the thing.

This film was made in 1965,

when convent girl, Marianne Faithfull,

had just become an overnight pop sensation.

She'd been discovered at a party

by the producer of the Rolling Stones.

I gave my mother a terribly hard time when I was young,

which she really didn't need.

And why, you know, just the '60s, why couldn't I just have...

It wouldn't have killed me to do what she wanted, it wasn't hard.

But no, no, no, I had to sort of leave home, go off, be a pop singer.

Marianne's first hit, As Tears Go By, was one of the first songs

co-written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

# It is the evening of the day

# I sit and watch the children play

# Smiling faces I can see

# But not for me

# I sit and watch as tears go by. #

A year later, Marianne married art dealer, John Dunbar,

and had a son, Nicholas.

But the marriage didn't last and she quickly became involved

in a high-profile relationship with Mick Jagger.

For four years, they were the golden couple of the swinging '60s.

But in 1970, the relationship ended when Marianne decided to walk away.

He loved me and I loved him.

And something in me just compelled me to not do that.

So I just walked away.

And I don't really know why.

But there was something about not being able to do that,

not allowed to do that, or not...

I had to move on.

And, of course, it was very painful

and very, very hard because I loved him.

And I think my mother, the way she was and this unconscious,

unspoken loathing of men,

had a huge effect on me.

And it was a big problem for me in the '60s.

Especially as I had to pretend that everything was so wonderful

and wild and sexual and it really wasn't, actually.

That same year, Marianne began to spiral down into drug addiction.

She lost custody of five-year-old Nicholas

and spent the next two years as a homeless heroin addict,

living on the streets of London's Soho.

I think heroin was my reaction to all that.

Because it was like living in cotton wool, you know.

I didn't have to feel anything.

So for two years, I quite honestly didn't feel anything at all.

I didn't want to be aware of how much...

I had sort of not lived up to expectations.

It was hard for Eva, I think, for my darling mum.

Marianne's Austrian mother, Eva,

met British soldier, Robert Glynn Faithfull,

in Vienna at the end of the Second World War.

They married in 1946

and Marianne was born later that year.

But by the time she was six,

her parents had gone through a bitter divorce.

I loved my father and I loved my mother.

I'd grown up at my father's house, which was beautiful or wild, anyway,

and I could run along the battlements

and, and have beautiful grounds to run about in. I loved it.

And then suddenly, my mother and I were put into Milman Road.

It was like the meanest possible house my father could find for her.

I'm sure he did it on purpose.

It was very hard watching her,

because she had all these huge pieces of furniture and tapestries

and things like that which she couldn't get into this little house.

Gradually, she got smaller and smaller and smaller.

She was depressed. She drank quite a lot.

She would drink whiskey and she took a lot of prescription drugs.

She had no-one else to talk to...

and so she talked to me.

It was overwhelming, really.

But she told me about the Russians coming into Vienna

and raping everybody.

Because they raped her and my grandmother.

I have a strong feeling that my mother and my father's marriage

didn't work because my mother hated men.

I didn't understand my relationship with my mother.

When I grew up with Eva in that little house...

..I had felt like I was part of her body.

So I pushed her away.

I had no idea and no real respect for what she'd done.

Or of what happened to her.

Eva and her brother, Alexander, grew up in Vienna.

Their mother, Flora, was a Hungarian Jew.

Their Austrian father, Artur Sacher-Masoch,

was a minor aristocrat

and had served as a colonel in the First World War.

In the 1920s, Eva and her family relocated to Berlin.

Her father, Artur, worked as a novelist.

Her brother, Alexander, became a leftwing journalist.

And Eva began her career as a dancer.

Marianne has come here to see what she can find out

about her mother's life.

My mother did talk a bit about her life as a young dancer, you know.

Not enough. She was about 18.

She was arty and very Berlin, I think.

But I don't know where she played, what theatre.

In the 1920s, Germany was living through the Weimar Republic,

a fragile parliamentary democracy

that had replaced the imperial government

at the end of the First World War.

During this time, Berlin was enjoying

a period of unprecedented artistic and cultural freedom

that had earned it a reputation as the world's most thrilling city.

Marianne has come to the Renaissance Theatre,

one of only five Weimar-era theatres to have survived in Berlin.

It's incredible. Is this the '20s?

This theatre was built in the 1920s.

When everything was really cooking.

-Oh, a very exciting time.

-Yes.

She's meeting dance historian, Karl Toepfer.

That's gorgeous!

The dance world of that time, er...

I believe was unprecedented and unsurpassed.

Er...it had so many exciting personalities,

so much creativity going on.

Eva was a part of that.

She did so many different, interesting things.

Eva pursued modern dance, as well as cabaret dancing.

She told me she danced with her friend, Hede.

Yes, Hede, her partner.

They'd do duets and they did these kind of mirror dances,

where they emulated each other's movements.

These kinds of mirror dances with the same sex

had a homoerotic dimension.

-I didn't know that.

-Yeah.

Here we have a couple of board pictures.

And there, Eva and Hede have got this parody of marriage.

She's playing the lady and Hede's playing the man.

Audiences delighted in this kind of gender-bending performance.

I love that one. It's wonderful!

What a woman! I'd no idea what she was doing.

This is a contract...

for performing at the Barberina.

31st December, 1932 to 15th January, 1933.

If you look at these pictures,

-as you can see, it looks like a pretty opulent club.

-Wow!

The contract with the Barberina is pretty impressive

since the Barberina represented

the epitome of the Weimar nightclub culture.

You know, she's just 20 years old.

That's brilliant. Yeah.

Clubs in Berlin, like the Barberina,

where Marianne's mother performed,

were infamous for their erotic

and artistically-adventurous performances.

Their wild nightlife provided the inspiration for the film, Cabaret.

They did things in the theatre

that you weren't going to see in other cities.

-Was it really daring?

-Yeah.

They were places where people made connections

and different kinds of...

-Assignations.

-..sexual inclinations circulated.

And the stage acts encouraged it.

They had a kind of reputation for...

-Risque...

-Yeah.

-..and challenging, and...

-That's right.

But Eva's avant-garde lifestyle was coming under threat.

In 1929, a global economic crash

pushed Germany towards the brink of collapse.

As mass unemployment spread through the country,

the Nazis, at that point, a minor political party,

began an aggressive campaign for power.

Using a potent mix of rhetoric threats and violence,

they began pushing the German public towards Nazism.

Despite this politically-menacing climate,

Eva continued to push artistic boundaries.

You know what that is?

Well, I don't, really, but that's my mother.

And I've had this photograph for a long, long time.

I've grown up with it.

-If you look at these pictures...

-Mm.

This is, er...Hannah Rovina.

She played the role of Leah'le in a Jewish play called, The Dybbuk.

Eva's been inspired by that play.

That's a very powerful image of Jewish mistresses of...

And, of course, my mother was half Jewish.

The Dybbuk is a play about a young Jewish woman, Leah'le,

who rebels against her father's wishes

to marry her off to a rich suitor,

and instead, remains true to her dead lover.

Leah'le is a woman following her desires

independently of what this society around her wants her to do.

I'm fascinated! I can't believe it that she was really doing that.

The art scene in Berlin had been strongly influenced

by Jewish intellectuals and performers.

But by the early 1930s, as the Nazis stepped up their bid for power,

time for all of them was running out.

But Eva was determined to remain true to her art

and began performing in politically-radical shows,

despite the Nazis increasing attacks

on leftwing and Jewish artists.

That was a very, very scary time.

They intimidated the spectators in the theatre

-or they intimidated actors.

-They weren't in power yet.

That was just a few months away.

-Here we have some reviews.

-Reviews.

-In, er...October of 1932.

-Yeah.

And here's the translation.

"Four Ping Pong ladies have joined the four Ping Pong gents.

"One of them being Dora Gerson, the famous..."

"The ladies' foursome is complete with two young talents,

"Hede Mehrmann and Eva von Sacher-Masoch."

Yeah. So this is very interesting.

-Ping Pong was a very leftwing kind of political cabaret.

-Yes.

Composed of, um...Jewish talents from Berlin.

-Completely not the kind of culture the Nazis wanted.

-Oh, no.

I'm not sure what happened to other members of the Ping Pong collective,

but Dora Gerson's fate was unfortunately tragic.

What happened?

Er...she died in Auschwitz in 1943.

-No!

-Yes.

-Very sad.

-Yes.

You get a very rich and complex image of Eva

in so far as she's, um...she's got a message

that she's trying to communicate in different ways.

At the time, a very hard thing to do.

Talking to Karl has made the little bits I know

about her working life and her inner life in Berlin

and what she really was doing, much, much clearer.

I really didn't know she had that kind of consciousness.

And I'd love to find out more.

In January 1933, Hitler came to power in Germany,

promising to restore the nation's prosperity and purify public life.

He immediately brought in laws

excluding Jews from the civil service,

the legal profession and from schools and universities.

Next, he began targeting Jews working in the arts, declaring,

"Blood and race will once more

"become the source of artistic intuition."

For half-Jewish Eva,

the artistic freedom she'd enjoyed during the Weimar years was gone.

Almost overnight, her opportunities to work began to shut down.

Marianne is meeting cultural historian, Andrew Webber,

at Berlin's Volksbuhne Theatre

to find out what impact this new repressive era had on her mother.

-It's one of the, er...the great Berlin theatres.

-Wow!

And in the late 1920s in particular,

the Volksbuhne was famous.

It always had a left-liberal tradition,

but was quite revolutionary in the late '20s in particular.

-I'd like to show you a document here.

-Oh!

Um...from 1933.

"Der Bauer als Millionar."

Mm-hm. The Farmer As Millionaire.

This is a cast list from a production.

"Eva von Sacher-Masoch."

-She was Triton, which is...

-With, er...Neptune.

-Exactly. One of Neptune's messengers.

-Oh!

And this was a fairytale musical drama from the early 19th century.

And, um...a very different kind of theatre

to the sort that your mother was involved in during the 1920s,

beginning of the '30s,

which, of course, was more satirical and political.

-This wouldn't be political.

-It's work.

It's work. It's work, I think.

-It's not her dream, her ideal.

-No.

Eva was performing at the Volksbuhne Theatre

in Der Bauer Als Millionar in June 1933,

just five months after Hitler had taken office.

The play was typical of the kind of conventional productions

the Nazis approved of.

What we see here is a real move away from that left-liberal tradition

to a much more neutral kind of theatre.

-A straight theatre.

-Yep. Straight theatre,

spectacle, essentially.

And it would have been one of the many signs

of what was happening in the theatre world at that time,

the constraints that were being applied.

It will have been very clear to them at that point, to journalists,

to the people working in the theatre,

that their future was deeply uncertain.

The ensemble would have been made up of many people

who would be on the black list for the Nazis.

Absolutely! Look at them.

Jews, Communists, those on the left.

Genia Kurz, Ernst Karchow.

And indeed, the Volksbuhne Theatre itself

would be closed in the course of 1933,

as so many institutions, cultural institutions,

newspapers and others were.

But, of course, Hitler was elected earlier in 1933,

and in May 1933, there was a major historical event,

the book-burning.

(Oh, my God!)

-Which you are familiar with.

-Yes.

Taking place just one month before

Eva accepted her inoffensive role in Der Bauer Als Millionar,

the book-burning was the Nazis' first big public display,

warning that non-Aryan influences would not be tolerated in the arts.

Under the instigation of Joseph Goebbels, Minister for Propaganda,

Nationalist students all over Germany organised bonfires.

Goebbels himself led the proceedings in Berlin.

25,000 books were destroyed with 40,000 onlookers.

There was a huge crowd.

It was one of the first of those big national,

Socialist street spectacles.

-The books of Einstein, Freud, Brecht, all of them.

-Of course.

Perhaps we could look at what Goebbels had to say on that night.

-Oh, yes.

-On 10th of May.

-Tell me.

Um...and his speech is here.

Perhaps you'd like to read it.

"Un-German Literature on the Pyre.

"Then Reichsminister, Dr Goebbels, spoke.

"The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism has come to an end

"and the German revolution has again opened the way

"for the true essence of being German."

-Dear me!

-Hm.

"Your libraries were inundated with trash

"and filth of Jewish asphalt literate."

Jewish asphalt literate.

It's the pavement, isn't it?

Yes.

And this, of course, was all about taking control of the streets.

-And the mind.

-Yep.

I can't bear it.

It, of course, doesn't show the full horror of what's to come.

It was the 19th-century German poet, Heine,

who famously said in one of his plays

that when they start burning books,

in the end, they'll also burn people.

And, of course, this was the year when so many left Berlin.

So many people who were Jewish and on the left.

And the last record we have of your mother on the stage

-is indeed this play we've been talking about.

-And then she left.

-She left after that.

-The dream was over. Yeah.

Yes, yes.

Marianne can find no further trace of her mother, Eva,

or her grandparents, Artur and Flora, in Berlin.

But records show that her half-Jewish uncle, Alexander,

decided to risk staying in the city and to keep working as a writer.

But in 1934, Goebbels tightened the noose again.

Alexander clearly would also have been terribly upset

-and worried, fearful.

-But in danger, too.

Fearful, exactly.

Um...and at this time,

part of what Goebbels did

was to make anybody who wanted to write, to publish,

belong to the Nazi National Organisation of Writers.

Writers who had any Jewish blood

were not allowed to be members of this organisation.

This, of course, was a problem for your uncle.

..Included Alex. Yes, he was half Jewish.

So I'd like to show you a document which was to do with that.

And here's a translation.

Board of Control.

-They're not messing around.

-No.

"15th May, 1935.

"Proof of Aryan ancestry.

"Dear comrade in profession!

"To complete your personal file,

"we seek for immediate presentation of documents

"proving your Aryan ancestry.

"Kindly greeting, Heil Hitler."

-Hm.

-And there was no way he could do that.

I think you're right.

Because of his Jewish mother.

So they followed that up with a further letter.

"Dear comrade in profession!

"Having received your letter from the 16th of this month,

"we have to inform you

"that records concerning only your father's lineage will not suffice."

"We have to ask you to fill in

"every part of the attached genealogical table."

"Birth name, birthday, date of baptism,

"day of death, marriage,

"first names, place of birth,

"place of baptism and church, place of death."

And here is the next letter.

"Dear comrade in profession!

"As you haven't, as requested on the 15th of May

"and the 26th of July of this year,

"provided proof of Aryan ancestry,

"we have to assume that you are unable to do so.

"Should we not receive this by the 30th of this month,

"we will be forced to request your exclusion.

"Heil Hitler."

The authorities are catching up with him.

They know that he's lied to them.

Ooh! Does that mean the Gestapo knock on the door?

This would be a sign that that might happen.

And so, another document.

"Dear Sirs, I herewith sincerely declare

"that I will cancel my membership

"with the Reich Association of German Writers

"as I am about to change my place of residence

"and will relocate in my home country."

Oh, my God! That's close, isn't it?

-This was the beginning of a process of dispossession.

-Yes.

-Being dispossessed of your career was one thing.

-Yes.

But the other kinds of dispossession have yet to come.

This kind of inch-by-inch,

moment-by-moment, terrible loss.

To have so much. Truth, beauty, love,

and it was hijacked by the Nazis.

So to me, it's terribly sad.

Marianne knows that after fleeing Nazi Germany,

her uncle Alexander went to Yugoslavia.

The rest of the family returned to Austria.

But she doesn't know when they arrived here,

or what happened to them.

I've come to Vienna to find out about my grandparents,

Flora and Artur Sacher-Masoch, and my mother.

I don't know exactly what they did.

I'm longing to know what happened.

She's come to the National Library

to see if she can find any records about her family.

She's meeting historian, William Godsey.

So, William, we were in Berlin when my family went,

and then, in 1933, they left.

And I would love to know exactly what happened.

I think I have some documents here

that might help us pick up the trail of your family.

The first thing I'd like to show you are their registration cards.

-Oh, yes.

-Your grandfather had to register with the authorities

when he moved back to Vienna in 1934.

Yes. 1934.

Your grandfather was listed here

as a high-ranking military officer in retirement.

Where does it say that?

Oberstleutnant.

Oberstleutnant. Oh, yes.

-He was a lieutenant colonel...

-In the First World War.

-In the First World War.

-Yes.

And also, he's registered with his full noble title,

Ritter von Sacher-Masoch.

Ritter is rank of knight.

Artur was almost 60

when he brought his family back to his homeland,

where he had contacts through his military connections

and his old family title.

I like this idea of the knight.

-Do you know where it comes from?

-No.

-Here we have a family tree.

-Ah!

Oh, this is what I've always wanted to see.

That's wonderful!

There you have the whole family, starting with yourself.

Here we have your parents. Your father, Robert Glynn Faithfull,

-and your mother, Eva Hermine von Sacher-Masoch.

-Yeah.

And then up the top here, your great, great, great grandfather,

-Johann Nepomuk Stephan Ritter von Sacher.

-Sacher.

-And he was the first member of the family to be ennobled.

-Wow!

He was the first person in your family

-who bore the title, Ritter von Sacher.

-Yeah.

So I think that's very interesting.

This is the original of the pattern of nobility.

I thought I would just, um...show you.

-Written in the old German script.

-Yes.

And we have the English translation of this document.

-Yeah.

-Of this document here.

"In consideration of the years of his effort and useful service,

"his proven loyalty and devotion to the state,

"we elevate Johann Nepomuk Stephan Sacher

"and all his legitimate descendents of both gender for all time,

"into knighthood in the Austrian Empire.

"We have granted the coat of arms

"shown in the middle of this document."

That's beautiful to see.

1832.

So it's not as old a family as I was told.

It's still pretty old.

She said it was back to Charlemagne.

I think we're probably all descended from Charlemagne.

Probably! MARIANNE LAUGHS

So, William, I'm fascinated by

my mother's use of the baroness title, Baroness Erisso.

I mean, this is after I've run off with Mick Jagger

and shamed her so terribly.

So she decided she didn't want to be Faithfull any more.

Well, in Austria, as you see, your family, as far as we know,

-had never received the title of baron here.

-No.

-Which is a rank above a knight.

-Hm.

I've got another explanation

-for how the title of baron might have come back.

-Oh, come on, then.

-You know, Austrian society, it's very addicted to titles.

-I know.

And especially with nobility.

Often, in daily conversation,

waiters might have referred to your grandmother

or your grandfather as Frau Baronin.

-Right.

-Or Herr Baron.

-Yeah.

-This is very common.

-Austrians can often be very courteous.

-Yeah.

They always give you a place slightly above

-the one you might be entitled to.

-Ah! OK.

-So this is...

-So, that's what she did, too?

-That's what she might have done.

My mum did exaggerate.

I knew it! Because I could sense it,

even then, when I was little,

that she was making things bigger and better

because of what she went through.

In the years since Eva and her family had fled Nazi Germany,

the safe haven to which Artur had brought them

was coming under increasing threat.

Hitler had always dreamed of making his beloved Austria

part of the greater German Empire.

By 1937, political pressure on the Austrian government to unify

brought Nazi rule one step closer.

Artur made another move to try to protect his family.

-I've got another document for you.

-OK.

-OK?

-This is the second registration card.

-Hm.

-This is from March of 1937.

-Hm.

They moved to the Museums Casa,

a Hungarian Cultural Institute,

which, at that time, was a part of the Hungarian Embassy.

I think in order to have gotten an apartment in such a building

-in the very centre of Vienna, they must have had connections.

-Hm.

-At that point, Austria was moving closer to Nazi Germany.

-Hm.

Um...and the pressure of Nazi Germany

-was increasing on Austria.

-Hm.

And they may have seen moving into the Hungarian Embassy

as a form of...of protection

um...against whatever might come.

-Maybe that was a little bit of diplomatic immunity.

-Possibly.

In spring 1938,

just four years after Artur had brought his family back to Austria,

Hitler annexed the country

and made it part of Nazi Germany.

On 15th March, a triumphant Fuhrer marched into Vienna,

calling it his greatest achievement.

Almost immediately, violence against Jews spread across the country.

And anti-Semitic laws forcing them into ghettoes

and restricting all aspects of their lives were introduced.

Life for Marianne's family was about to change dramatically.

My mother always told me that when the Nazis marched into Vienna,

she lived a very dangerous life,

because my grandmother was Jewish.

You know, it was a terrible game of tension and horror.

It's just waiting and pressure.

And you don't know what's going to happen.

I've often thought about it. I've always wanted to know.

Marianne has come to meet historian, Jeremy Noakes.

Jeremy, it's really nice to meet you

and I'm very, very curious to find out

what my family's life was during the war.

Um...and I'm nervous and I'm scared.

-I'm not surprised. It was a very dark period, I think.

-Hm.

-For all the people in the position your family was in.

-Hm.

Have a look at this document.

You see a Nazi official document with the swastika stamp.

Elisabeth Flora Sara. That wasn't her name.

What happened was that in 1938, the Nazis introduced a rule

that all Jews had to take on an additional name.

Women had to take on the name of Sarah or Sara

and the men had to take on the name of Israel.

Oh, dear, dear.

Here's the translation.

"The Jew, Elisabeth Flora Sara Sacher-Masoch,

"wife of a lieutenant colonel,

"has accepted to carry the name Sara as of today."

It meant that officials would see immediately from their name,

-"A-ha! We've got a Jew in front of us."

-(My God!)

Jesus!

And this is her identity card,

-made a few days later.

-Hm.

And as you will see, there's a big J for Jude.

I'm shocked. Um...

My grandmother, my lovely granny, Nana, we called her.

But, er, that's, in a sense, the beginning of the story.

Your grandfather, her husband, was a protection, in fact.

The point was that the Nazis introduced a distinction

in Jewish and German marriages

between privileged and non-privileged.

And they were in a privileged marriage.

Jewish women like Flora married to an Aryan man

created a problem for the Nazis.

They couldn't deport them for fear of a public backlash,

so they created a category of, "Privileged Marriage,"

which protected these women from the most extreme anti-Semitic laws.

Within a year of the country being annexed,

Austrian Jews faced the same fate as German Jews,

as the Nazis began transporting them to the concentration camps.

Those who could, fled.

But in 1941, the Nazis closed the borders to Jews wishing to exit.

Now there was no escape.

But because they were married,

Artur hoped he could keep Flora safe.

What would have happened if he had not been there?

It would have been a much, much worse situation

for her without Artur. There would have been no question,

she would have been sent to the extermination camps.

That's just horrendous.

Hm. Hm. I think there's no question about that.

Well, so far, we've been talking about your grandparents,

but, of course, your mother was affected by all this.

And I'd like you to have a look at this document.

This is simply a registration of address,

-basically, where they're living.

-Yeah.

But if you look at the top of the document.

What does that mean?

"Mischling ersten Grades."

That means Mischling, first degree.

And that's what your mother was.

Now, the Nazis had a problem

-with defining who was a Jew.

-Yes.

They wanted to get rid of Jews, but who actually was a Jew?

-How Jewish did you have to be to count as a Jew?

-Hm.

In 1935, they introduced a regulation

with a sort of intermediate stage between Jew and non-Jew.

-Hm.

-And that intermediate stage was called a mischling.

Now, mischling in German basically means mongrel.

-Oh!

-It's a term used for dogs.

No!

In 1935, Hitler had issued the Nuremberg Laws,

which defined degrees of Jewishness

and outlined respective laws restricting a person's life,

depending on how Jewish they were.

His goal had been to eliminate

even the smallest degree of Jewish blood from Aryan life.

A mongrel first degree

was somebody who had one Jewish parent, like your mother.

So this is another extraordinary document.

-Have a look at that.

-Yes.

-Heavens!

-I don't know whether you've ever seen anything like that before.

No. What the hell is it?

This was published by the racial office of the Nazi Party.

And you'll see they were subject to restrictions

in marriage and sexual relations.

"Forbidden! Marriage between those of German blood and Jews."

Oh, dear!

"Further, one should not enter into a marriage

"if it is expected that the offspring

"will jeopardise maintaining the purity of German blood."

-They are insane!

-They are.

But basically, what it meant was that your mother

would not have been able to marry somebody who was non-Jewish.

She would have been forced to marry

somebody who was half-Jewish or who was a Jew.

They couldn't have children, they couldn't contaminate...

-Exactly!

-..the blood line.

-That's right.

And, you, of course, would have been a mischling, second degree.

-Quarter Jewish.

-Quarter Jewish.

And so, you would not have been allowed to marry Germans.

They would have had to get permission.

And the permission, basically, was a fraud.

You would be subjected to a physical examination.

Oh! But why?

And they would look...Know all aspects of your physique...

They really did that, this physiognomy thing?

This was, you know, serious stuff from their point of view.

For example, an historian interviewed

a large number of mischling after the war

and there was one woman who wanted to be a nurse.

And she was given a physical examination

and it turned out that her earlobes and breasts

were not considered to be racially satisfactory.

And so she was denied the possibility of becoming a nurse.

Your mother wouldn't have been able to get employment at all

because she was half-Jewish.

It's all completely insane.

-Yes.

-Hm.

-It's horrendous.

As the war went on, the Nazis' plans for the Mischlinge, like Eva,

were becoming more and more ominous.

The noose was tightening towards the end of the war.

-There was a major dispute going on at the top of the regime.

-Yes.

Um...with the party, the Nazi Party leadership

and the SS leadership pushing for Mischling, first degree,

your mother, to be deported with the rest of the Jews.

My poor mother!

Your mother's fate was, you know, in a sense...

-Hanging in the balance.

-That's right.

It must have been an extraordinarily stressful time for your grandparents

and for your mother,

living, not knowing almost from day to day, you know, what might happen.

And that was very real.

Because anything could have happened.

And just to show you how vulnerable and the kind of pressures,

if you look at this er...red line there?

Yes.

It says, "Gestapo..."

-Yes.

-"..for A1."

That was the department in the Reich Security Headquarters,

-which was basically the Gestapo.

-Yes.

And it says, "We should be informed of any change of address

"for these people."

In other words, the Gestapo had their eyes on them.

-They were marked people.

-Yes.

This department of the Gestapo

specialised in dealing with opposition.

Um...so it may well have been that they, um...

believed that your family were engaged in some kind of...

-Resistance. Subversive...

-Subversive activity.

Quite possibly. Something like that.

My mother did talk a bit about the resistance,

but the actual truth, I don't know.

The first shock was my grandmother having to call herself Sara

because she was Jewish.

I've never seen a document like that in my life.

It makes it very much more real, what the whole family went through.

How incredible!

If the family were involved in some form of resistance.

Marianne's on her way to the documentation centre

of the Austrian Resistance to meet Dr Winfried Garsche

to see if she can find any evidence confirming her mother's story

that her family were involved in anti-Nazi activities.

-We got some documents here and I'll show you something...

-Yeah.

Maybe that would be interesting for you.

Do you know who that was?

No.

This is Walter Kampf.

He was one of the leading figures of a group of young Communists.

He got arrested in 1942.

Yeah.

Walter Kampf was among those few people who dared to send

secret messages from the Gestapo prison to the world outside.

And so maybe that would be interesting for you, this one here.

Walter Kampf learned inside the Gestapo prison,

these people are in danger, and he wanted to warn them.

"Major Hahn - used public phone to call him.

"Might be imprisoned already.

"Also Fritz and Karl, Lieutenant Colonel Sacher-Masoch knows them

"and shall warn them against informers."

So you see, your grandfather was crucial for that warning.

It was your grandfather...

Who did it.

I knew it, I knew they were involved

in some form of resistance.

Mm-hm.

It's incredible.

This document is one of two secret messages

smuggled out of the Gestapo prison by the resistance

that mention Marianne's grandfather, Artur Sacher-Masoch.

These messages are the only contemporary evidence

linking Artur to the network.

Unsurprisingly, those in the resistance were careful

about what they wrote down.

-We have very little documents...

-Yeah.

..about how he behaved. It was oral,

he gave the information.

He warned other people,

but because he was connected with Jews...

Yeah.

It was too dangerous.

Artur had become involved with the communist Resistance

through his leftwing son, Alexander, who'd already fled to Yugoslavia.

In an interview Alexander gave to a researcher in the 1970s,

he explains how he introduced his father to the Communists,

and how close the Nazis came

to discovering Artur's involvement in the Resistance.

"This is a friend of mine.

"He helped me out here and he will help you too.

"Make sure you are there for him when he needs you.

"My old father had to see the Gestapo five times."

Oh!

"Once, they hanged him from his hands."

Jesus Christ!

Do you know how old your grandfather was when he was arrested

-and hanged by his hands?

-I have no idea.

-Well, he was in his late sixties already.

-Was he?

Yeah, and they tortured him in that manner.

SHE EXHALES

-He gave them no names.

-No, he wouldn't.

I don't know what he would have done if they had brought

Flora and Eva to the prison and said, "We're going to kill them,

"we're going to send them to Auschwitz now unless you tell us."

You can hardly overestimate

the danger what it meant for a person like your grandfather.

Hm.

He had a Jewish wife.

-He had a half-Jewish daughter.

-Yeah.

-He joined the Resistance.

-Yeah.

-In that situation... It was his personal choice.

-Yeah.

And it was very brave and it was not that easy, I think,

-to endanger the most beloved ones, but he did it...

-Yeah.

Because of his principles, because of his beliefs...

-Yeah.

-Because he loved his country.

My mother told me she was involved too.

And my grandfather treated her and taught her to behave like a soldier.

We don't know anything about your mother...

-We only know something about your grandfather.

-Yes.

But resistance was possible only by the help of

all those people who were nearby.

So you see, the whole family was complicit

with the Resistance network.

The whole family was aware...

-Oh, yeah.

-..of the danger.

Imagine what that meant for your grandmother.

Being Jewish.

Knowing that your husband endangers himself,

and by that the whole family...

and if he would have been arrested and executed,

she will be sent to an extermination camp.

Jesus Christ!

I mean, that's the...

She lost it just before the end of the war

while it was still going on, but it was nearly over.

My mother came into a room in the Hungarian Institute

and Flora was on the windowsill, about to jump.

Because she felt this was all her fault because she was Jewish.

To give you a sense how lucky they were

in that nothing happened to them - 65,000 Viennese Jews had been killed

in the extermination camps.

-Hm.

-65,000. 5,000 survived.

-Hm.

And so your grandmother and your mother were among those 5,000,

and not the 65,000.

They got through.

-They got through.

-Yeah.

My goodness, I am... I'm really astounded, you know.

I didn't know exactly what my family did in the war here.

I knew they were involved in resistance,

and to get the actual facts and the details is fantastic.

They were extraordinary people.

On 13th April 1945, almost half a million Red Army soldiers

marched into Vienna and liberated it.

Artur, Flora and Eva had survived the Nazi era.

But their suffering did not end there.

Marianne is meeting historian Barbara Stetzl-Matz.

This is a difficult bit for me.

Hm.

My mother told me at the very end of the war when the Russians,

the Red Army came, marched into Vienna, erm,

they raped every woman in Vienna.

Erm, very violently.

My mother was raped and my grandmother was raped.

I wonder what you can tell me about the context of this.

-It was a very, sort of, difficult situation...

-Yeah.

..at the time.

In Vienna alone, approximately 100,000 women were raped

-which is a...

-Good God!

-..very, very high number, of course.

Yeah, and they just came and raped everybody.

When the Red Army soldiers entered Austrian territory,

there was this feeling of hatred in them.

There was this strong Soviet propaganda

that encouraged the soldiers to take revenge.

Good God.

And they did not make a difference then, in the end in 1945,

who was Austrian, who was German,

because Austria still was part of the Third Reich.

Yeah.

It was a dangerous situation, miserable situation and...

Awful, between the trauma and the horror and the lifelong trauma.

Yeah.

My mother, particularly,

and my grandmother, naturally enough, really, really hated men.

It twisted them both.

My grandmother turned away from my grandfather, who adored her.

And Eva never got over that and always hated men.

Yeah, this is something...

And passed it onto me, actually.

I think this is something that happened quite frequently,

that because of this trauma of having been raped

that some women were not able to have a good, er...

-Normal.

-Normal affair or a normal, a relationship with men.

A sexual relationship, yeah.

This is really sad that the trauma was passed on

-from your mother onto you.

-Onto me.

She wouldn't even have realised it.

It just happened, you know.

It took me years, until by the time I'm 50, I'm actually able

to be in a relationship and love,

and not have to take to drink or take drugs to have sex.

Yeah.

It's good that you were able to, to come over it, finally.

Finally, yeah.

Hm.

What I'd like to ask you,

do you know what your mother did at the end of the war?

I do, well, I know what she told me.

She told me that she started a magazine called "Frau und Mutter".

"Frau und Mutter" was not a new magazine,

but your mother restarted it after the war.

We have got the first issue...

Wow, wonderful.

This article was written by your mother in August 1945.

Yeah.

Only a couple of months after your mother was raped by the Red Army.

"Every single woman who felt the powerful fist of oppression

"was united with all other women in their thoughts of retribution,

"even those women who did not have the enemy in their country,

"but who nevertheless had to make tremendous sacrifices

"in the name of humanity and equality.

"And those hardships include the terrible crimes in Austria

"and all the other countries of the rapists who poisoned our souls.

"But now we are free of suppression and coercion.

"And so we can and want to be ourselves again,

"real, true women filled with an eagerness to do good,

"to be good mothers, full of love for all mankind."

And I'm sure she believed that, that's very strong.

-Yeah.

-You know, she was not crushed.

She was not crushed, yeah.

Your mother's voice comes across here so strongly.

Ah! It's incredible.

That article is extraordinary, I've never seen that before.

It's always a thing to realise

that your mother is much more than your mother.

That she's a human being and a person with a real mission in life.

What this programme is doing for me

is helping me to have much more understanding

and compassion of Eva's, sort of, craziness when I was little.

This journey has given me facts about my family.

And truth and...

This is what I needed, this is what I really wanted and I understand now.

Erm... Much more than stories and fantasies and illusions.

The amount of bravery and courage

and integrity they had is pretty awe-inspiring.

'Your family is the ground you stand on.

'And what has happened is that the ground has been put back.

'I'm very lucky.'

Thank you.

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