* * *
• • •
HE STAYED WITH ME the whole day, holding my hand as we watched the strange sights go by: the Old Viennese Ladies’ Band, country girls with giant headdresses, a steam train replica, a demonstration of sausage making, and even a miniature Riesenrad. We waved to our parents as they passed, my father’s elbow moving furiously up and down as he played and my mother blowing us kisses, looking elegant in a long violet dress with flowers on her hat. We added our voices to a group singing “I Want to Be in Grinzing Again.” We mostly carried the bunny head, but having it with us made me feel both protected and part of things.
Anneliese had gone to the festivities with her parents. We didn’t see them. When Willi and I came home, we found Anneliese had left two doughnuts on our doorstep with an apologetic note. “I didn’t have a choice,” she wrote. “You are my forever favorite flower.”
I crumpled the note in my hand and carried the doughnuts into the kitchen and stuffed them in the trash.
* * *
• • •
EVERYTHING WAS DIFFERENT after that. No longer was Anneliese’s door open to me every time I knocked. No longer did her mother send up little plum tarts on Fridays. No longer did her father take his hat off and give a little bow when he saw me in the hall. A hundred times a day my feet started for the stairs. A hundred times a day, I stopped them.
Ten
On February 24, 1938, Schuschnigg gives a speech urging his country to fight to maintain its independence.
My father tucked his viola into its case a few minutes before 8:00 P.M. on March 11, 1938, when Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg would make his final speech. He and my mother had just played Brahms’s “Sonata for Viola and Piano in F Minor, Op. 120 No. 1,” distracting us until it was time to switch on the radio. My mother had said she didn’t feel like singing, but her fingers were steady on the piano keys. My grandparents and our aunts and uncles had come for dinner. The adults were restless. My mother paced nervously from the kitchen to the table, reminding me of Willi. He had pushed his chair back from the table and was whispering with my grandmother. When I glanced down at the book in my lap, no one told me to stop reading. The music hadn’t eased the tension; it sounded like Eurydice slipping back into the darkness of Hades. I set down my fork and knife and hoped someone would suggest dessert.
My parents had had high hopes for Schuschnigg, for the plebiscite that would determine our future. The whole country was to vote on whether to become part of Germany. How could we possibly lose? It was inconceivable that Austrians would vote to dissolve their own country. Only crazy Germans could voluntarily submit to someone like Hitler.
My grandmother, however, was not taking victory for granted. As soon as Schuschnigg had announced the plebiscite two days earlier, on March 9, she had swiftly drafted flyers in support of an independent Austria, sending out a cadre of her friends and acolytes to scatter them across the city and to paint the sidewalks red and white. Willi and his friends had festooned Vienna with pro-Austria slogans. We were not Germans.
My mother had been too anxious to eat. Stefi frowned when she came to clear the plates and saw the untouched soup. The radio crackled and the adults shifted their chairs closer to where it sat at the end of the table. Too far away to hear properly, I slid under the table with my book without anyone noticing and crept closer. My mother’s wool skirt brushed my cheek. I wanted to press my face against it but didn’t dare distract her.
Above me, my aunt Thekla and uncle Tobias, my aunt Klothilde, Klara, Felix, my grandparents, my parents, and Willi leaned their ears toward the sleek Zenith tombstone radio. My parents had debated whether they could afford such a fine radio, but ultimately, sound was too important to them. My mother had purchased the Zenith with her own savings.
I sat clutching Felix Salten’s Fünfzehn Hasen: Schicksale in Wald und Feld. Fifteen Rabbits: Fate in Forest and Field —a book I’d read so many times I had most of it memorized—against my chest. Anneliese had given it to me for my seventh birthday. Its rabbit protagonists, Hops and Plana, bravely endured attacks by man and beast, dividing their energies between vigilance and love. The floor tiles pressed a chill into my bare thighs, but I didn’t want to stir and call attention to myself. I glanced down at my book.
“You can breathe for once,” Plana went on, “and feel yourself safe.”
Hops grew thoughtful, held his head tilted abruptly upward, twitched his nose and said, “We can breathe all right. Oh, yes . . . but we rabbits can never feel safe . . . never! Don’t ever forget that!”
The book was not helping. Gently, so as not to make any noise, I closed the covers.
The chancellor’s voice sounded scared. He was resigning! The man we hoped would save us was saying good-bye. He wasn’t saying it in that cheerful way people say good-bye when they know they will see each other again. He wasn’t saying it in a hopeful way that suggested better times ahead. He was saying it in the voice of a ship’s captain reluctantly abandoning his passengers to the mercy of Poseidon. (Not that I would have said or thought of it that way at the time, of course, never having been on a ship. I suppose it’s only in retrospect I think of it like that. I’m at an age where I think mostly in retrospect.)
Willi’s feet jerked from under the table as he jumped up.
“The coward!”
“Willi, shush.”
“God protect Austria.” Schuschnigg’s final words. God protect Austria because he could not.
The plebiscite would never happen now. We would not have a say after all.
There was silence around the table above me. I sat frozen in place, waiting for someone to say something. When I heard not only my mother, but my father, my stoic father, begin to cry, I knew that all was lost.
* * *
• • •
THERE WERE 185,000 OF US in Vienna then. And some 225,000 in Austria. Give or take.
Mostly take.
Eleven
On March 12, 1938, German troops enter Austria.
On March 12, 1938, the day of the Anschluss, the day the German soldiers came, my mother begged my father to stay home. He had a rehearsal at two o’clock in the afternoon. “Please,” my mother begged. “The streets won’t be safe.” But my father had not become a musician in order to be safe. He became a musician because there was no possible way that he could not be a musician. Thus, no matter what was going on in the world around him, my father would turn up for work. It wasn’t something he considered optional.
It was late when he returned, long after midnight. Stefi had tucked me in bed and was asleep in her own little room off the kitchen. My mother sat up at the table, staring into a cup of coffee that had long ago lost its heat. I know this because I was not asleep. I needed to hear my father arrive safely home before I could rest. From my bed I listened to the cheering in the streets, the shouts of men. I had propped my door open just an inch, so my mother wouldn’t notice, and lay in that slender strip of lamplight.