I glanced around my room. There was nowhere they wouldn’t find me. I could crawl under the bed or into my wardrobe, and those would be the first places they would look. Both of them were too big and too heavy to shift. All of our furniture in Vienna was heavy and immovable. Permanent. Or so we thought.
I was too big to try to flatten myself under the quilt. A humming had started up in my ears that made it hard for me to think. I had dropped to the floor to start under the bed when the door opened behind me. “Gut! On your knees already! Filthy girl, come with us.” Two men stood in the doorway, their arms wrapped in swastikas, their guns as shiny and black as new toys. Two men with guns, I thought, to fetch a ten-year-old girl? Then I looked at them more closely. I knew the dark-haired young man; he was the older brother of one of my schoolmates. “Fritzl?” I said, astonished.
“Shut up, Jew!” He yanked my arm. “Where is your toothbrush?”
The demand confused me. Were we going overnight somewhere? Down the stairs they hauled us, jubilant with their success. My mind reeled with the discovery that Fritzl, who knew us, was a Nazi.
I wanted to say something to my mother, to apologize for my failure to hide, but these men did not need further provocation. Outside, they flung us to the pavement and shoved a bucket of cold, dirty liquid stinking of lye toward us. “Go on,” they said. “Do a proper day’s work for a change.” The Schuschnigg plebiscite slogans we and our neighbors had painted on the pavements with such nationalistic passion only days before had become the means of our humiliation.
I slid to my knees close to my mother, trying to see her face. I wanted to lift her back to her feet, to tell her to sing, to show these men who she was. “Orly, don’t argue,” she whispered.
We did as we were told, crowds gathering around us as more and more of our neighbors came to watch or were forced to their knees beside us. A proper day’s work for a change. The heat those words aroused.
My fury warmed me as I channeled the violence of my emotions into my tiny toothbrush. What would I use for my teeth tonight? My mind could focus only on the smallest problems. I had looked up to see elderly Herr Grunberg the tobacconist pushed to the ground in front of me, and been unable to bear seeing anything else. I looked only at the paint below my fingers, and my mother’s wrist, red and raw, to my left, to be sure of her.
By early evening, our ranks had swelled. My clothes were damp from spilled water, my fingers burning from the lye and my toes numb with cold. Our fellow Viennese stopped to laugh or to spit on us. I started humming to myself so as not to hear what they were saying, but it was hard to drown it out. I paused to switch hands, and my breath caught in my throat when the girl next to me put her hand on mine. The scent of celery and sage nearly made me sob with relief. But terror immediately followed. “Ana!” I whispered in disbelief. “Ana, you’ll get in trouble.”
“I am not the one in trouble.” The ferocity of her scrubbing rivaled mine. She had covered her hair with a kerchief and her father’s glasses disguised her face. Our neighbors had not recognized her yet.
“You will be.” I looked up, to see if anyone had noticed. “Keep scrubbing, swine!” taunted a teenage boy who had seen me pause. Flushing, I bent back to the pavement. Ana kept her scarf on and her head down. With her brush she wore a hole in the word Schuschnigg. Had she brought her own? Surely a soldier hadn’t dragged her from her home? I whispered still more quietly. “Ana, I’m serious. Your mother . . .”
“My mother,” Anneliese spat.
“Ana.” I was afraid of Anneliese’s mother. I was afraid of what she would do to Anneliese almost as much as I was afraid of what the Nazis would do to her for talking to me.
“Orly, I will say this one more time and hope you believe me. What I am, you are. What you are, I am. Promise me you believe me.”
I couldn’t look at her, but I nodded at the ground. I no longer needed fury to keep me warm.
“Promise me, Orly!”
I risked a brief glance at her, though not a smile. “I promise. I promise you.”
Thirteen
In late April 1938, the Gestapo rounds up some fifteen hundred Jews deemed “unwilling to work” and sends them to concentration camps.
I never went back to school after the Anschluss, although I knew some children did. My mother was afraid of what might happen to me on the streets. I worried I would never share a classroom with Anneliese again. Even if my mother were to let me out of her sight, I’d have to go to a Jewish school now. When Anneliese and I met in the hallway of our building, she told me that the crucifix at the front of the room had been replaced with Nazi flags. She and her classmates were expected to sing “Deutschland über alles.” (I swear I don’t sing, Orly; I just mouth the words.)
Against my parents’ wishes, Willi insisted on going to a swim meet a week after the Germans arrived. “Are you insane?” my father shouted at him. “Do you have a death wish?”
“The kids on my team are nice, Vati. They know me. And no one else is any good at the butterfly. They need me.” My mischievous spark of a brother had always been popular in a way I never was. People sought his company—girls especially. He made them laugh with his imitations of cabaret and film stars, put them at ease with his lopsided smile. Everything about school came easily to him, though he was too lazy to achieve top marks, and he excelled in fencing and swimming. He could not imagine himself unloved.
“That doesn’t matter anymore. Are you not paying attention?” My father’s shoulders trembled with the effort of raising his voice. “Are you somehow missing that this city is now wallpapered with swastikas, as if Hitler has branded the entire city? Have you missed the flags from every building, from the trams, the light posts?”
“I’m paying attention, Vati. I was paying attention when you were still refusing to think about anything but music. But allow me to think I know who my friends are.” With that, he turned and slammed out of the apartment.
By the time Willi got home that night it was dark and I was already in bed, though wide awake. My mother had not moved from the front window since 6:00 P.M., when she expected Willi home from the pool. When she heard his key in the door, she flew at him, ready with sharp words for making her worry. But after he closed the door and stepped into the light of the kitchen, she stopped midsentence. I crept to the door of my room and peered out.
I couldn’t find my brother’s face. Blood poured from a cut in his forehead and both eyes were swollen and purple. His shirtsleeves were torn and he had lost his jacket. He stood with his arms dangling as though they didn’t belong to him, and did not speak.
“Sit,” said my efficient mother, who was already readying a washbasin and cloth. Then, as she touched the damp cloth to his split skin, her composure slipped. “My beloved boy.” She choked on the words. “Those beasts.”