Escape Home: Rebuilding a Life After the Anschluss - Softcover

Charles Paterson: Charles Paterson was born Karl Schanzer in Vienna, Austria in 1929 and now lives in Aspen, Colorado. As a Jewish child he and his sister were adopted by the Australian Paterson family. An architectural designer, Paterson was one of the last apprentices to train under Frank Lloyd Wright.

Carrie Paterson: Carrie Paterson is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. She writes for contemporary art journals, lectures at Southern California universities and is Publisher and Editor in chief at DoppelHouse Press.

Hensley Peterson is an editor based in Aspen, Colorado.

Paul Anderson: Paul Anderson is a writer of books and essays. He is a columnist for The Aspen Times.

"A compelling story of one family's escape from Austria and Czechoslovakia at the beginning of World War II. With grace and courage, Charles Paterson, his father Steve, and his sister Doris, coped with the hardship that transformed their lives."
—William J. Cabaniss
United States Ambassador to the Czech Republic, 2004-2006

"This historical memoir is an engrossing saga, profusely illustrated and fully documented, the stuff that makes an intriguing feature film. I heartedly endorse it."
—Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer
Former Director of The Frank Lloyd Wright Archives

March 12, 1938—The Anschluss. Hitler annexes Austria into the Third Reich. For Karl Schanzer, a nine-year-old Viennese boy of Jewish heritage, life is irrevocably altered.

Fleeing Austria and then Czechoslovakia as the countries fall to the Nazis, and then France only steps ahead of the German invasion, a father makes the heart-rending decision to send his children to safety under the guise of adoption by the Paterson family in Australia. There, Karl becomes Charles Paterson and with his new name reinvents his identity in a foreign land. Based on memories of events as well as newly uncovered documents and accounts found in letters between family members, Escape Home is a riveting story of discovery and coming to terms with a past that casts a long shadow.

Refugees and immigrants, the small surviving Schanzer-Paterson family who reunite in the United States only after many years, together tell a story that reaches beyond specific events. Escape Home also speaks to concerns of our present times, where war, economic hardship, and disaster make forced migration increasingly common.

The emergence of modern architecture plays an important role in this story, from pre-war innovations in Central Europe that were part of the family’s heritage and surroundings, to the late 1950’s, when as a young man Paterson came to formulate his own philosophy of life and design as an apprentice under Frank Lloyd Wright.

Escape Home is at once an engaging tale of a young refugee from Hitler’s Europe making a new and fascinating life for himself in post-war America and a reverential homage to his Viennese father’s survival after living through not one, but two, world wars. This is a memoir of family love, personal adventure, and discovery as both father and son put the tragedy of their European past behind them to build a fresh and promising future in their new world of America."
—Loren Jenkins
Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent

Escape Home is a hope-filled meditation on the way people adapt the past to present conditions, learn to see the world with clarity even through tribulations, use humor as a tool for stability, and integrate their heritage into utterly new circumstances.

"A compelling story of one family's escape from Austria and Czechoslovakia at the beginning of World War II. With grace and courage, Charles Paterson, his father Steve, and his sister Doris, coped with the hardship that transformed their lives."
—William J. Cabaniss
United States Ambassador to the Czech Republic, 2004-2006

"This historical memoir is an engrossing saga, profusely illustrated and fully documented, the stuff that makes an intriguing feature film. I heartedly endorse it."
—Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer
Former Director of The Frank Lloyd Wright Archives

March 12, 1938—The Anschluss. Hitler annexes Austria into the Third Reich. For Karl Schanzer, a nine-year-old Viennese boy of Jewish heritage, life is irrevocably altered.

Fleeing Austria and then Czechoslovakia as the countries fall to the Nazis, and then France only steps ahead of the German invasion, a father makes the heart-rending decision to send his children to safety under the guise of adoption by the Paterson family in Australia. There, Karl becomes Charles Paterson and with his new name reinvents his identity in a foreign land. Based on memories of events as well as newly uncovered documents and accounts found in letters between family members, Escape Home is a riveting story of discovery and coming to terms with a past that casts a long shadow.

Refugees and immigrants, the small surviving Schanzer-Paterson family who reunite in the United States only after many years, together tell a story that reaches beyond specific events. Escape Home also speaks to concerns of our present times, where war, economic hardship, and disaster make forced migration increasingly common.

The emergence of modern architecture plays an important role in this story, from pre-war innovations in Central Europe that were part of the family’s heritage and surroundings, to the late 1950’s, when as a young man Paterson came to formulate his own philosophy of life and design as an apprentice under Frank Lloyd Wright.

Escape Home is at once an engaging tale of a young refugee from Hitler’s Europe making a new and fascinating life for himself in post-war America and a reverential homage to his Viennese father’s survival after living through not one, but two, world wars. This is a memoir of family love, personal adventure, and discovery as both father and son put the tragedy of their European past behind them to build a fresh and promising future in their new world of America."
—Loren Jenkins
Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent

Escape Home is a hope-filled meditation on the way people adapt the past to present conditions, learn to see the world with clarity even through tribulations, use humor as a tool for stability, and integrate their heritage into utterly new circumstances.

Prologue
by Carrie Paterson

In 2005, my father Charles Paterson sold The Boomerang, a ski lodge
in Aspen, Colorado that he began as a small log cabin, built into a
thirty-five unit hotel, and continually managed since he was in his mid-twenties.
Upon retirement from over fifty years in business, he began
writing a memoir on index cards, episodes he had previously recounted
for me in 2002 in a series of video interviews he titled “Short Memories
of a Long Life.” Our friend Hensley Peterson, after hearing one of his
tales around a campfire, encouraged him to expand his memoir
into a book. She also began asking questions that led us to look
more deeply into the history surrounding his life’s events.

And so it began. He started to go through old trunks, drawers, and
collections of photographs, commencing to catalog his life. One day I
found he had laid out all his hats in an arc by the piano. His efforts were
accompanied by the clarity of my mother Fonda’s bright memories and
research. Over their forty-four years of marriage she has kept her own
files filled with articles and references that give context to his stories and
those of his father, Steve Schanzer, survivor of two world wars.

Steve, my grandfather, was a legendary storyteller who inspired
great affection and was an inspiration to many. When he emigrated to
the United States in 1941, he changed the family name from Schanzer to
Shanzer. He said he wanted to drop the “c” in order to “get the German
out,” as if he could banish from sight all the sorrows in his life that had
been brought about by the Anschluss, Hitler’s annexation in 1938 of our
family’s homeland, Austria.

My father Charles and my grandfather Steve are the central characters
of this book. However, excerpts from the letters of other key figures
help to fill its pages, including those from my father’s sister, my aunt
Doris Schneider, and a few rare memories from my grandmother Eva
Beck Schanzer, who died in 1938.

Midway through writing this book, amongst my grandfather’s
records, we found one dusty red file that had remained unopened for
many years. My father knew the tattered folder contained all the correspondence
between my grandfather and members of our family who
died in Europe during World War II —my great-aunt Claire Beck Loos
and my two great-grandmothers, Olga Feigl Beck and Rosa Schanzer—
but he had never looked closely through it. My mother wanted to read
the letters. My father protested. Despite my father’s misgivings, my
mother arranged for them to be scanned and translated. The letters
were written in my father’s native tongue, German, which he no longer
speaks. Many were difficult to decipher because they were penned in
Kurrentschrift, an old script based on German cursive writing from the
late medieval period. My grandfather had kept them laid neatly together
in chronological order, like a book he had not written but was responsible
for delivering.

With so many contributors to Escape Home, this book has become
a chorus. The principal voices are a father and son separated by war
and reunited, who shared a great love and were lucky to have each other.
Some details of these stories have been challenging to write, and others
to make sense of because even language can hide what has been buried
or unspoken over the course of time.

Introduction
by Charles Paterson

At the time of the German annexation of Austria, the Anschluss, I
was nine years old. Our family lived in Vienna’s thirteenth district.
As I learn about that year and the violent manner in which the country
was transformed almost overnight, I have changed the way I think about
my childhood. I have no memory of the day the Nazis marched onto the
Ringstrasse, but it altered my family’s life forever. We were thrown to
the winds. My father Steve, my uncle Max Beck, my sister Doris, and I
survived to tell this story.

In this book, we must all turn a page on tragedy, nevertheless, and
recognize that vision, intuition, and hope are guides for people in the
most terrible circumstances. I am writing our story to give insight to
what happened to people like us after our dispossession and to tell how
somehow, against all odds, we persevered and even thrived. I believe that
young people today, who see other times and their own difficulties, can
learn from our challenges, as I did from my father, that it takes courage
and tenacity to carry on, while you bring history with you.

When I was born in Vienna in 1929, I was named Karl Schanzer
after my grandfather. I am the eighth generation in my family of Viennese.
Through many twists of fate and the dramatic world influences
that caused them, I became Charles Paterson, a Viennese-Australian-
American. For the last ten years I have been rediscovering my past. As
I recover memories and letters, I have gained a new perspective on the
history I have known, and my life is changing yet again.

Since 1980, I have kept my father’s papers and many of his personal
effects in an old, wooden filing cabinet in the basement of our house in
Aspen, Colorado I designed and built in 1977 for my family. I had rarely
opened it since my father’s death in 1979.

At the onset of a winter soon after my retirement, I went rummaging
through the cabinet. The memorabilia brought back an intense feeling of
loss as I began looking through the boxes and files that tell of my father’s
life experiences first-hand. Old maps of trips spilled forth, photographs,
and my father’s Masonic vestments. One drawer contained his
favorite grey felt hat and a pair of antique Turkish wooden clogs said to
strengthen the feet. In another was a box of keys. I also found my Ski
Association pins—I was number thirty-one of the first Rocky Mountain
ski instructors to be certified—and mimeographed sheets of my father’s
self-crafted “gourmet” Austrian recipes. Another surprise was the red
silk necktie from the early 1930’s of a famous Czechoslovak-Viennese
architect, Adolf Loos, the husband of my aunt Claire Beck Loos.

Then I found a treasure trove of letters in a stack of old, well-kept
file folders. Like puzzle pieces, these letters, many written in German
and French, have provided the key to remembrances of a lost time that
remain with me still and bring this memoir alive. To my amazement, in
addition to these letters, my father also kept all the correspondence I had
ever sent to him from my first days in Aspen, Colorado starting in 1949,
and from Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin, where I studied architecture
under Frank Lloyd Wright in the late 1950’s. He also diligently kept
copies of all his replies.

The adventures we told each other through the years lay before me
undiluted and unedited by memory. I had never thought of that room
as an archive for our lives and our relationship. Yet I have been living
with it right near my drafting room and my busy life all this time. The
discovery gave me great motivation.

Later my daughter and coauthor Carrie and one of our editors,
Hensley Peterson, delved a little deeper into the files. In what looked to
be a stack of old newspaper clippings, Carrie found my father’s journal
from 1914-1920 when he was made a prisoner in Siberia during the First
World War. Hensley made the important discovery of all the letters sent
by my sister and me from Australia to my father in New York when we
were separated for over eight...