Otta Fischl

Title: My Diary: 19 October 1943-15 March 1945
Author: Otto (Gerry) Fischl
Publisher: Sydney Jewish Museum
Place of publication: Darlinghurst, NSW
Year of Publication: 2011
Location of Book: Lamm Jewish Library, Sydney Jewish Museum, National Library of Australia and State Library of NSW
Cities/town/camps: Czechoslovakia: Prague; France: Paris, Salles d’Angles;  Australia: Sydney.
Note: those cities/towns/camps underlined are those which are most central to the narrative
Genre: Diary
Key events/experiences: in hiding; adolescent survivor

My Diary is a chronicle of 14-year-old Otto Fischl’s daily life as a Jewish adolescent in hiding in south-western France. After first fleeing Nazi-occuppied Czechoslovakia, the Fischls went into hiding in the Stacke family home in the village of Salles d’Angles where Otto kept a diary from 1943-45. It was found by Agnes Stacke, the daughter of Otto’s rescuers, in the 1980s, in the same house in which it was written. It was first published in the original French in 2009 before it was translated into English and published by the Sydney Jewish Museum in 2011.

The front matter is 35 pages in length and presents a biographical timeline of Otto’s life, a preface by historian Tal Bruttman, a foreword by Otto Fischl and an introduction by Agnes Stacke with photographs of Otto’s childhood. The first 196 pages present the first “notebook”. Pages 1-41 chart the period 19 October 1943 to 5 February 1944. Pages 42-196 cover 9 February to 6 August 1944. The second notebook, pages 197-346, begin on 7 August 1944, as the Allied forces are advancing towards Salles d’Angles and end on 15 March 1945 – the final page of Otto’s journal. Pages 347-62 provide photos of Otto’s wife, children and grandchildren.

Otto Gerard Fischl was born on 3 February 1929 in Prague to Heda and Kurt Fischl. An upper-middle class Jewish family, Otto’s father ran a wholesale leather business. Otto’s younger brother, Alex, was born in 1934. In March 1938, fearing Nazi Germany after the annexation of Austria, Otto’s father left Prague for Paris to prepare for the arrival of his family. Two weeks later, nine-year-old Otto, his brother Alex, and mother, left for Paris. On September 30, Nazi Germany annexed the Sudetenland and on 15 March 1939 invaded and occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia.

In May 1940, France was invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany. During their time in Paris, the Fischl family was subjected to antisemitic legislation and on 7 June 1942 were forced to don the yellow star. Through the intercession of acquaintances, Otto’s mother met with Joseph Stacke, an atheist communist and WWI veteran from Moravia. Already a father of a large family, Monsieur Stacke agreed to hide Otto and Alex. On 14 July the brothers, then aged eight and thirteen, travelled by train to Angoulême station where they met Monsieur Stacke. From there, they travelled by horse and cart to the family home in Salles-d’Angles, a town ten kilometres south of Cognac in the Charente region of south-western France. Madame Aneska Stacke, a twenty-eight-year-old Catholic from Slovakia, was pregnant with her sixth child. A few weeks later, Otto’s parents joined them, and Agnes Stacke was born.

On 19 October 1943, Otto began his diary after spending a year in hiding in the Stacke household in the hopes that he would finish the diary in another city after his liberation by the Allied forces. During this time, Otto spent most of his days confined to the upper floor. As Monsieur Stacke ran an antique business in the house, the family had constant visits which were a source of anxiety and possible exposure. The Fischl family was also visited frequently by the village priest and several nuns, who knew of their presence and came bearing news of the war and books to keep them occupied. They also provided the family with English lessons in anticipation of the arrival of the American army.

On 6 June 1944, Allied forces landed in Normandy. As the war drew to a close, the family endured food shortages and blackouts. On 3 September 1944, Salle-d’Angles was liberated. The following day, fifteen-year-old Otto left the Stacke house for the first time in two years. After liberation, he travelled to and from the city of Cognac where, on 15 October, he returned to school. On 15 March 1945, Otto wrote his final entry. In August 1945, the Fischl family returned to Prague in the hopes of resuming their lives, only to discover that their entire family had perished during the Holocaust.

In 1948, Otto, then aged nineteen, left Prague for Ireland, where his father had work connections. In 1949, the rest of the Fischl family joined him and in 1950 they emigrated to Sydney where Otto and his father established a successful leather business. After finding Otto’s diary in the 1980s, Agnes and Otto began corresponding and in 1990, the pair met in Prague where Agnes returned the diary. It was published in France in 2009 and Joseph and Aneska Stacke were posthumously recognised as Righteous Among the Nations.

My Diary is a literal translation of the original French publication. The diary includes daily entries usually a page or half-page in length. As the war neared an end, in mid-1944, the entries became longer, numbering several pages. The memoir was published by the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah and was edited and annotated by the French Holocaust historian Tal Bruttman. The English version was translated by Jeanette Kidron of the Sydney Jewish Museum which published the memoir in 2011, where it features as part of the Museum’s “Community Stories” Project.

Otto’s diary is a fascinating record of the everyday life of a Jewish adolescent in hiding, one who is both isolated from and closely attuned to the happenings of the outside world. The memoir is written chronologically, with dated, daily entries describing the key events in the author’s life. The narrative is largely driven by the author’s obsessive preoccupation with the course of the war as gathered from information provided by illegal radio and local villagers. It also focuses extensively on  his close observations of the relational dynamics between various members of Stacke and Fischl families. The diary is often humorous, with the author expressing his frustrations and adolescent angst, but it is also a ruminative and sombre account of the hopes, fears, and tribulations of a life in confinement.