Blessings Body Gave

In 1960, Bronka and Joseph Schneider, Jewish refugees who had fled Nazi persecution in Austria, were living in Peoria, Ill. Looking back at their first year in exile, when they worked as domestic servants in a remote Scottish castle, Bronka wrote this memoir, which she sent to the Ladies' Home Journal for publication. It was rejected and put aside until 1995, when her niece, Bourguignon, an anthropologist and herself a refugee, recognized its value. Bronka was not a professional writer, but her story is related with affecting grace and honesty. Until March 1938, the Schneiders were an ordinary Viennese Jewish couple: he owned a leather goods shop, she was a bookkeeper. After the German occupation, Bronka describes how Nazi harassment of Jews escalated from small humiliations to arrest and deportation to concentration camps. Learning that a servant shortage in Great Britain might offer them a means of escape, the couple endured a harrowing six-month wait to secure travel permits. They arrived in Scotland with little knowledge of the language or culture and equally little experience of the daily routine of domestic service. Even the countryside was strange, the barren moors totally unlike Vienna's woods. The couple handled most mishaps with intelligent good humor and a curiously intense attention to the minutiae of daily life--after Warsaw was bombed, for example, Schneider devoted a long passage to cooking rice. Readers may surmise that the key to their survival was the couple's ability to concentrate on the present, neither looking back in despair nor ahead with fear. (Dec.)