The Heschel School

Wilhelm (Bill) Braun was born on June 29, 1921 in Vienna, Austria, where he was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home. Bill's father, Max, was a salesman and bookkeeper, who was born in Vienna in 1886. His mother, Sarah, was a milliner, and was born in a small town in Galicia called Tarnów in 1895. Sarah's family came to Vienna in the summer of 1914, after the outbreak of World War I.

The Braun family lived in Vienna's Fifth District, which was not a Jewish neighborhood. Bill attended public school and was sent to a Talmud Torah in the afternoon. He considered Austria to be his native country and thought of himself as an Austrian Jew. As a young child, Bill experienced little, if any, antisemitism, but attitudes began to shift dramatically when the antisemitic Christian Social party became dominant.

When the Nazis annexed Vienna in March 1938, the Austrians greeted them with great joy. Jews were stripped of basic rights and the Braun family was forced to give up their apartment and move to the Jewish District. In addition, Bill was tasked with marking Jewish stores and apartments with the word 'Jew' in brown paint. On the night of November 9, 1938, now known as Kristallnacht, Nazi troops swept through the streets, vandalizing Jewish businesses and burning synagogues.

At this point, most Austrians sensed that their lives were in danger. Bill's younger brother, Edward, went to Sweden on a Kindertransport with 40 other Jewish boys and eventually got a job working with a farmer. In the summer of 1939, Bill went on another Kindertransport, to England. It was difficult for him to leave his parents and his home, particularly because his father was ill but, after hesitating for a week, he he took his place on the rescue mission. First, he travelled for 24 hours to Brussels, Belgium, where he visited relatives who had fled there from Vienna. From there, he took a steamer to Dover, England, and then a train to London.

Bill was among roughly 200 Jewish refugees sent to Gwrych Castle, an abandoned castle in Abergele, Wales. After the Nazi's conquered Holland and Belgium and marched into France, fears rose that Britain would be attacked next. Rumors spread that the Germans had smuggled in groups of sympathizers who would support the invasion. As a protective measure, the British government began arresting people who held German passports, including Jews. Bill was classified as a 'B' alien and moved, along with other children in a similar predicament, to the Isle of Man. They stayed in an abandoned hotel there for a month, when the authorities decided to ship those without family to Canada.

This sense of displacement continued in Canada, where Bill was interned at three different camps in a period of two years, moving from the Quebec area to  New Brunswick, and finally to Ile aux Noix, an old fort on an island in the Richelieu River near Montreal. Bill left the internment camp in August 1942 and went to work on a dairy farm cleaning stables. After that, he moved to Toronto where he worked in a steel factory and then a uniform factory.

When the war ended in 1945, Bill enrolled at the University of Toronto. At that point, he also began tracing what had happened to his family. He learned that his brother emigrated to Israel from Sweden in 1941;  his father had died from complications of high blood pressure in the fall of 1940; and his mother had perished in a labor camp in Riga, Latvia. 

After completing his undergraduate work, Bill decided to get a Ph. D. in German Literature. He received his doctorate in 1953 and accepted a teaching job at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1956, he was hired by the University of Rochester, where he taught for more than 40 years. He married his wife Lousie in 1966 and had two children, Martin Zvi and Sarah Alisa. Martin and his wife, Deborah Ayalah Braun, are the parents of Heschel students Sofie, Talia and Ella.

You can read more about Bill here.