62
PARTISAN REVIEW
without another attempt by the Nazis to have him give up his re–
maining assets, 14,000 Dutch guilders .
But Freud had yet another fear. On November 12, 1938, he
wrote to Marie Bonaparte: "The most recent horrible events in Ger–
many intensify the problem of what is to happen to the old ladies
between seventy-five and eighty. It is beyond our means to support
them in England. The money we left them when we departed, about
AS 160.000, is probably already confiscated, will certainly be lost,
once they leave . We are thinking of a stay at the French Riviera,
Nice or thereabouts. Will this be possible?"
It was'trlOt possible, Freud's four sisters, Rosa Graf, Maria
(Mitzi) Freud:, Adolfine (Dolfi) Freud and Pauline Winternitz could
not leave Viel ma due to their ages and states of health. Later efforts,
at least for Rosa Graf and Pauline -Winternitz, came to naught, in
part due to the inability to pay what the Nazi authorities demanded.
In the beginning of the 1930s Sigmund Freud , togetp.'er with his
brother Alexander and his sister Anna Freud who lived in the
United States, set up a small fund whose income was to insure the
financial security of the sisterS: From the AS 160.000, they had to
pay "tax arrears" for ten years, advance taxes, the so-called JUVA
(twenty-five percent of all assets belonging to Jews , the "guilt
payments" imposed after the
Reichskristallnacht).
Thus the assets of
the four old ladies - who had to move together into Alexander
Freud's former
apartment'~ melted
away. Their disposable monies
were put into a closed account whose use was determined by their
Vermogensverwalter-the
lawyer Erich Fuhrer.
,- Fuhrer apparently did all he could to help Freud's sisters . In
March 1940 the available funds were exhausted. On March 26, 1939
Anna Freud- had written to Paul Federn : "We will have to do
something
1
to get the aunts out of Vienna.... In Vienna, under the
guise of taX· penalties their money has been almost totally taken
away , they can't last longer than a few weeks." Harry Freud alerted
Indra who got in touch with Fuhrer. Sauerwald, who also h'ao tried
to help the sisters, was unreachable; he was in the army . .
On July 20 , 1940, Indra sent Harry Freud the following
telegram to New York: "Aunts will be destitute by August, all
valuables gone , aid is urgently needed ." A week later Harry Freud
answered: "Trying my best for aunts increase 120 dollars per month
impossible." The payments to the old ladies which at first were about
RM
250 per person went down to
RM
200 , then to
RM
175 and in
