The Remarkable Journey from Vienna to Due West: Survivor Felix Bauer

“To get out of Europe, half the possibility, was great,” said Holocaust survivor, Felix Bauer, when learning about a chance to move to the Dominican Republic in 1940. On April 30th, 1992, Bauer provided his survivor testimony starting in Vienna, Austria and concluding in Due West, South Carolina via Diepoldsau, Switzerland and Sosúa, Dominican Republic.

Born January 2, 1914, to parents Rudolf and Risa Bauer, Felix Bauer was raised in Vienna, Austria. He grew up in a Jewish middle class family. His father, who was a World War I veteran, worked as a cashier for a bank. His mother stayed home to care for him. While in Vienna, Bauer was very aware of the antisemitism prior to the rise of Adolf Hitler. He studied architecture at the College of Technology and earned a degree from the Institute of Graphic Arts and Research in 1935. Bauer struggled to find work as a graphic artist in Vienna. He attempted to sell his graphic works to movie theaters but could not find steady work.

In 1938, Bauer noted a large membership of illegal Nazis in Austria during this time of a widespread economic depression. He knew that people were expecting Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany. After learning about Anschluss, he persistently attempted to get a passport to leave Austria but without success.

After two weeks, Bauer escaped to Switzerland by walking across a small part of the Rhine River called the Alter Rhein over an old bridge. He was met by Swiss border police who took him to a Swiss refugee camp. His parents stayed behind in Vienna.

For two years, Bauer stayed at the camp in Diepoldsau, Switzerland which housed about 150 people from Austria, Germany, Italy, and Poland who fled from Hitler. They had food and a cot in the camp, but they were unable to work in Switzerland or to make money.

While in camp, Bauer wrote letters and sent packages to his starving parents plus coded messages to his father. He discovered that his father was in a forced labor camp in Austria. Then, his parents were forcibly transported to a labor camp in Poland and then to Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia. Sadly, they did not survive.

In 1940, Bauer learned that through the Evian Conference the Dominican Republic was accepting refugees. Despite never hearing of the Dominican Republic, he was eager to leave Europe. His application was accepted, and he was on his way.

The trip to the Dominican Republic was truly unforgettable. Felix Bauer went from Zürich, Switzerland to Geneva, Switzerland, then by bus into France and over the Pyrenees to Barcelona, Spain, which was in the middle of a Civil War. Next, he boarded a train to Madrid, Spain followed by another train to Lisbon, Portugal. After a week in Lisbon, he boarded a boat to New York City. Upon seeing the Statue of Liberty, he cried. After a week at Ellis Island, he sailed to San Juan, Puerto Rico and then the Dominican Republic. He later learned the entire trip was funded by a Jewish-American relief organization.

The settlement was in the northern part of the Dominican Republic in Sosúa. Bauer was the chief architect (wooden structures only) and helped to make maps. There were approximately 150 people from China, Luxembourg, France, and Germany. In 1943, Bauer met and married his wife Martha Mondschein, who was a nurse on the settlement. They had their first child, Boris, in 1945.

While in Sosúa, Bauer organized an amateur choir that performed publicly. After a performance, he met American author, Ira Morris, who inquired about the possibility of Bauer teaching in the United States. Bauer informed him that he did not have anyone who could sponsor him in the United States. Coincidentally, Morris’ neighbor in Los An- geles was Dr. Ernest Kanitz, Bauer’s teacher in Vienna and former head of the music department at Erskine College in Due West, South Carolina. Dr. Kanitz contacted Dr. R.C. Grier, then Erskine president, to determine if he could assist Bauer. Dr. Grier offered Bauer a professor position at Erskine. In 1946, after receiving his visa, Felix Bauer and his family moved to Due West. In 1949, their daughter Linda was born.

For 33 years, Bauer taught music and art at Erskine College and started the Erskine Exhibition Center. His volumes of musical works, which he started creating before he fled Austria, can be found at the University of South Carolina Music Library. In 1996, Erskine awarded Felix Bauer with an honorary doctorate and two scholarships in Music and Art. In 2006, Felix Bauer passed away. ■

Herz was born in Stommeln (near Cologne), Germany on August 23, 1925 to Ernst and Karoline Herz, from a Jewish family that had lived in that area for at least several hundred years. His father was in the grain business, then when that was taken from him, he worked sending telegraphs and transporting items. Herz had an uneventful childhood until the Nazis took power in the early 1930s. On Kristallnacht, his grandmother was pushed down the stairs to her basement. The pipes were smashed, flooding the basement, and the neighbor who saved her was punished by the Nazis for her kind act. In his own home, SS officers warned his father that they needed to leave. Unfortu-