Writer George Clare will be honoured this week in Galway - the city in which he and his mother found refuge when their fellow Viennese turned on Jews, writes Eoin Bourke

George Clare, a British citizen since 1947, was born in Vienna in 1920 and spent a happy youth there as the member of "an enlightened and assimilated bourgeois family which wore its Jewish descent and traditions lightly". He and his parents could hardly have been more typically Viennese. In his memoir, Berlin Days 1946-47 (1989), Clare elaborates: "First and foremost we considered ourselves Viennese and Austrians. My parents' and their circle's spiritual and intellectual home was not Judaism but the world of the great thinkers and writers in the German tongue. Indeed, Jews of our kind were not merely passive devotees but active protagonists of Austro-German culture. My father worshipped, never at a synagogue, but almost daily at the altar of German literature. By profession and with his brain he was a banker, but his heart belonged to the German classics, most of all their poetry. His daytime reading was the balance sheet, but in the evening he refreshed himself with Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Eichendorff, Rilke." The walls of their apartment in the Pichlergasse were covered from top to bottom with the works of Austrian artists. In the evenings Ernst Klaar would recite poems to his wife Stella, or she would read out her favourite authors, Dickens and Galsworthy, or the two of them would sit next to each other on the settee holding hands while listening to concerts on Radio Vienna.

Their devotion to Austro-German culture and rootedness in their beloved Vienna helped them not a whit when their fellow-Viennese suddenly manifested a rabid anti-Semitism in March 1938 on the occasion of Hitler's annexation of Austria. The SA (Brownshirts) broke into their apartment, seized Ernst and forced him to go down on his bended knees in public to scrub the political slogans of Schuschnigg's Fatherland Front off the pavements and walls. Shortly afterwards he was sacked from the Länderbank after almost 30 years of loyal and highly esteemed service as an auditor. The realisation dawned on the family that not only their welfare but also their lives were at risk. They were lucky insofar as Adolf Eichmann's brief in 1938 was still to drive as many Jews as possible out of Austria rather than, in accordance with the "Final Solution" of January 1942, to prevent them from leaving in order to transport them to the death camps.

The 17-year-old George, a free-and-easy adolescent, was catapulted into adulthood by the responsibilities forced upon him by the very stark circumstances the family found itself in. In George Clare's list of people who, he says, saved his life are various friends of his father from the European business world and - "last but not least" - Sean Lemass, then minister of trade in the Irish Free State, who was keen to invite foreigners, whether Jewish or not, to establish factories in Ireland. The friends devised a plan to acquire an entry permit for Ernst Klaar to Ireland to work for an Austrian-owned textile concern as a ribbon-weaver, although he "did not know the difference between warp and woof, or between the front of a loom and its back".

The visa was applied for and the Klaar family were instructed to travel to Berlin to collect it at the Irish Legation there. This they did in September 1938. "But if Eichmann was in a hurry," Clare writes in Last Waltz in Vienna (1980), "the Irish were most certainly not. The few weeks (in Berlin) became very many. All sorts of complications arose and were dealt with with the speed of a snail perambulating from the shore of the Liffey to the top of O'Connell Street and beyond. But they were no great exception. No country wanted Eichmann's Jews."

The staff of the Irish Legation consisted of two people, a very pleasant and concerned German secretary called Frau Kamberg and the envoy himself, Charles Bewley, who, as an out-and-out anti-Semite and Hitler enthusiast, obviously employed delaying tactics to keep Ireland free of Jews. It took the so-called "Night of the Broken Glass" of November 9th/10th, 1938, to force the issue: the Klaar mother and son were staying in a Jewish boarding house on the Kurfürstendamm. "With the other guests we sat in fearful silence in the lounge listening to the howls of the organised mob smashing the windows of Jewish shops." The next day Frau Kamberg called for them by phone, having either taken the issuing of the visas into her own hands or persuaded Bewley to relent.

During the dangerously protracted wait in Berlin the father had accepted the offer of a post in Paris when George and his mother travelled to Ireland. They were shocked by the slums and poverty of Dublin, more extreme than anything they had ever encountered. Galway, where George was to set up a factory for Hirsch Ribbons, seemed unbelievably remote.

"When I arrived in Galway with my mother in late 1938, a very nice local family - I seem to remember he was a teacher - asked us for tea. 'If you want to know where you find Galway,' our host said pointing to the table, 'then this is the world,' adding with his finger going beyond its edge, 'and here is Galway!'" But the mother pined not so much for her native Vienna as for her absent husband. "Galway was an ideal location for someone looking for a quiet refuge, for peace away from it all. Mother could have been very happy there if Father had been with her." As soon as she acquired a French visa she rejoined Ernst in Paris and spent six blissful months with him, until fate struck again in the form of the German invasion of France. The Vichy government placed them under house arrest in the small village of St Pierreville in the Ardèche and eventually handed them over to the SS to be transported to Drancy assembly camp in Paris, and from there to Auschwitz. Ernst's mother Julie, the formidable matriarch of the Klaar clan and an Austrian patriot who refused to leave Vienna, "died in misery and squalor" in Theresienstadt at the age of 82. "The wedding ring on her dead hand was not made of gold, but of iron. She had exchanged her gold ring for the iron one during the Great War to help Austria." Ernst's half-brother Felix, a psychiatric patient, fell victim to the euthanasia programme in Hartheim Castle. George left neutral Ireland and joined the British army in the hope to be able to help in the struggle against fascism.

After the war, George worked as a journalist and eventually became the international director of the Springer publishing group at its seat in London. His greatest literary achievement is the family chronicle, Last Waltz in Vienna, which John Le Carré rightly referred to as a "deeply moving book" and Graham Greene as "an admirable book, combining very cleverly the historical and the personal". Edward Crankshaw said of it, "Mr Clare leads us gently, but inexorably, to the edge of the pit and then leaves us to look into it," while Arthur Koestler wrote that the book's special cachet "is the contrast between the ordinariness of the characters and the extraordinary horrors which fate had ordained for them. They are like actors in a Lehár operetta suddenly cast in the roles of a Greek tragedy." The story of the parents' families, the Klaars and Schapiras, originating respectively in the Bukovina and Galicia, is by no means ennobled by reverential memory but told with all its family feuds, jealousies, snobberies, squabbles over inheritance, idiosyncrasies and neuroses. Nor does George Clare spare his own juvenile petulance. As the Jewish saying goes, the Jews are like everyone else, only more so.

But the abiding impression behind all the amusingly depicted foibles is one of enormously strong bonds and an endless parental and filial affection. And what Clare himself says of the book is absolutely true: "I know that this book, in the hearts and minds of those who read it, lifted Ernst and Stella, my parents, off the conveyor taking the ashes of the industrially slaughtered from the fire-ovens into the pit of anonymity. And, perhaps by portraying their life and their death, it also did a little to restore to the nameless millions, who died with and like them, some of the humanity lost in the corpse-count."

• George Clare is due to receive an honorary doctorate from the National University of Ireland, Galway on Friday

• Eoin Bourke is emeritus professor of German at NUI Galway and the author of The Austrian Anschluss in History and Literature, Arlen House, Galway, 2000