The Nazis barreled noisily through our streets toward the Heldenplatz, and children scrabbled for the toy flags the soldiers tossed down as though they were sweets. Those swastikas were everywhere now, unfurling from balconies, falling down across the faces of our buildings like masks. Crawling across everything I loved.
“Juda Verrecke!” I heard a voice cry. “Perish the Jews!” our neighbors answered.
Except Anneliese.
Fear rose from my belly. Could people tell I was Jewish? Was there anything about my face that gave me away? The rust color of my hair? The green of my eyes? My hand in Anneliese’s went limp and cold. Then suddenly, she was pushed forward, propelled by the rapturous, roaring crowd. My hand was empty.
“How dare you!” I heard her voice somewhere in the crowd before us. “You are not Austrians!” She would get herself killed.
“Anneliese!” I plunged after her. She had been to our house on the Friday evenings we lighted candles, had even spent a Pesach at our table. Yet Jewishness had never been a topic of our conversation, just as we had never discussed the color of our skin or eyes. Religion wasn’t something that had concerned me until recently.
My family wasn’t particularly observant. Sometimes we lit candles on Shabbat, but only if my parents were not performing. It would have been impossible for an observant Jew to work as a musician in organizations that required them to play on the Sabbath. Yet their work created no inner discord for my parents; for them, singing or playing was a kind of prayer.
On Pesach, we gathered at my grandparents’ apartment for Seder. We answered the four questions, we searched for the hidden matzoh. But there wasn’t much else to differentiate us from our Christian neighbors. We listened to the same operas. Our parents sipped the same Einspänners and Franziskaners, took tiny bites of the same Apfelstrudels and Imperialtortes. We hiked in the Vienna Woods together on weekends. Anneliese took me with her to the Ostermarkt, where we marveled over the pyramids of colored and sugared eggs. It never even occurred to me that eggs were religious symbols. Surely eggs were eggs.
I struggled to catch up to Anneliese, but the crowd closed around her. I stopped to let them flow past me. She would turn around. She would come back for me.
Something struck my arm and I looked down to see a chubby, blond toddler grinning up at me. He was vigorously waving a red-and-black swastika flag. I stepped backward. I wanted to be home. Turning, I moved upstream through the jubilant sea of the raised arms of my neighbors and friends, a salute so synchronized it almost looked rehearsed. Ordinary people, turned into an army.
A tram swept by, its roof displaying a massive swastika. Across the street I could see a curly-haired girl who used to be in my class; my former math teacher; the waiter from the coffeehaus at the end of the block, their arms all flying upward. They threw flowers to the soldiers, blew kisses as they marched past, cheering the death of our country.
This was not how to greet an enemy. My neighbors—the butcher, the cellist, the lawyer, the hairdresser, the elderly woman who always sat in the park feeding pigeons, watching us play—celebrated the arrival of the men who had promised to wipe me and my family from the earth. Maybe they just didn’t understand Hitler’s plans, I told myself. They couldn’t possibly want to hurt my merry brother, my elegant mother. They couldn’t possibly want to hurt me.
“Orly!” My mother magically appeared in the crowd behind me. Turning toward her, tearful with relief, I reached for her hand. Yet just as my fingers closed around the fabric of her sleeve, Anneliese’s mother, Frau Meier, materialized beside me. Had they come together, noticing Anneliese and I were both gone? This seemed unlikely. The moment I saw Frau Meier’s face I felt afraid. This was the woman who had given me Lebkuchen—both the gingerbread cookies and the rabbit named after them. Who had wiped the tears from my eyes when I tripped over my own feet and fell up the stairs, my lower teeth puncturing my lip. Who had cooked for me countless times when my mother was traveling and while Anneliese and I told each other stories in the next room. Despite her recent distance, I couldn’t believe the ten years we had known each other now meant nothing.
Yet Frau Meier was unrecognizable, disfigured by feverish emotion. Her face split into a delirious and unfamiliar smile, her glazed eyes slid over me. She was happy about this, about whatever was happening. And my mother, reaching to fold me to her side, was not.
As we turned to weave through the crowds toward the relative safety of our home, I heard Ana’s mother call after me. “Orly!” I looked back at her. “Where is she?”
I gestured into the crowds, mute. I hoped Anneliese hadn’t gotten herself into trouble.
“Where is she, you little Jew! Where is my daughter?”
I stopped, my feet suddenly unable to move forward. I had been called a little Jew—and worse—by people on the street, but never by Anneliese’s mother. It took my mother a minute to realize I was no longer by her side. As she turned back, Frau Meier stomped toward me. “Did you bring her out here to defend you, Orly? What have you done with her? You stay away—” She placed her meaty hands on my shoulders and began to shake me. “You stay away from my little girl, you dirty little—you little pig!” With that last word she shoved me with such vigor I lost my footing and fell back into the street, where the passing horses had left a steaming pile of excrement. It was still soft and warm. For a moment I lay still, feeling it soak through my stockings and skirt, the bottom of my blouse.
Anneliese reappeared through the crowd at that moment, her face transforming into a horrified question at the sight of me struggling to my knees in the street. She halted so suddenly she tripped up a surge of merry revelers, who cursed her as they moved around us. “Orly! Who—?”
Moving faster than Anneliese, my mother stooped to lift me, stinking and dirtied, into her arms. I could not remember the last time she had carried me. Squeezing me to her chest, she made it all the way back to our building, hurling herself through the crowds, up the stairs to the apartment, and into the bathroom. My body began to tremble. With the bathroom door closed, she undressed us both, peeling off layers of clothing and piling them in the laundry basket. My legs folded under me and I sat huddled on the throw rug, pulling my knees to my chest. “I’ll be right back.” In the kitchen she heated the kettles of water, traveling back and forth as I sat paralyzed.
Go to Friedenglückhasenland, I told myself. You will be all right there. But for the first time, my mind refused to drift away. I was stuck here, in the present, in this bathroom, reeking of horseshit. Then my mother was lifting me again, settling me into the warm water, settling herself underneath me, wrapping her arms around my ribs.
“Why?” I finally asked.
It was the first of many questions she would be unable to answer.
* * *
• • •
I WAITED FOR ANNELIESE to come, to explain to me that her mother had gone mad. I waited for her to tell me that she was sorry. I waited for her to tell me how things were different in Friedenglückhasenland.