“Frau Meier.” Heinrich swept his hat from his head. “I felt it my duty to let you know the filth with whom your daughter has been consorting.”
“Thank you, Heinrich, but I will deal with my daughter myself.” She began to close the door. “I’ll leave you to deal with the Jew.”
I didn’t wait for her to turn the lock. While Heinrich was still speaking I flew down the stairs and was already halfway to our apartment by the time he started after me. I slipped inside home and closed the door against him.
But I no longer had any illusion that I was safe.
* * *
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING I found a paper slipped under our door. Anneliese had written me a story of Friedenglückhasenland, of our rabbits, their planets and solar systems, their lakes and mountains and apples and music and friendships. Curled in a corner of our sofa I stared at it, the promises of our world feeling empty.
I tried to write my own back to her, but my imagination failed me. My bunnies failed to be adorable, failed to be peaceful. They betrayed each other, starved each other. In the end I crumpled up my story and dropped it in the trash.
Fifteen
In mid-June 1938, the Nazis arrest nine thousand alleged criminals, including at least a thousand Jews, and send them to concentration camps.
My father fought in the Great War. This was something I sensed he was proud of even though he wouldn’t discuss it. Most Jews had fought for Austria in that war. The bayonet he had carried—that he had most likely used—hung on our wall over the fireplace, just above my reach. The blade still shone, bearing no mark of its grisly journeys. Even the two studs on its handle were kept carefully polished. Like the medal he kept in my mother’s jewelry box, it was a symbol of love, of what he had done for Austria. What he was still willing to do. I didn’t like to think about that bayonet. I thought of my father with only a stringed bow, committing music, not murder.
Austria, it turned out, was not as loyal to us as we had been to it.
I don’t remember the precise date it happened but I remember the city was warming and the lilacs were in bloom. It must have been a Friday in May, as we had already placed the Shabbat candles on the table next to a small loaf of challah and a vase of purple blossoms. We had no excuse to skip lighting the candles anymore, now that neither of my parents could work. I was in the kitchen with my mother, cutting raw potatoes into pieces after she peeled them with a knife. Not only would no one sell us meat, but we could no longer afford it.
As the potatoes sizzled in oil, our apartment door blew open.
This time, no one had bothered to knock. They were all noise and aggression and self-importance as they shouted to my father from the hallway. Borderless fear shot through me.
But I recognized their voices. The voices of the people who had come to take our home away. These were not the voices of German soldiers. These were not the voices of Nazis. They were the voices of two people I’d known all my life. Our upstairs neighbors. Anneliese’s parents.
They arrived accompanied by two police officers wearing swastikas. My mother’s hands froze when she heard them. The potato she was peeling slipped between her fingers and fell into the sink. I watched her to know how to feel. To know what to do.
But she did nothing.
Through the door to the living room I saw Willi standing on the threshold of his room. Surely he would have something to say? But he stayed silent, unmoving.
“We have put up with you Jews long enough. You will leave this house tonight,” Herr Meier said to my father in the hall. “Go on and get your things.”
Still, my mother did nothing! “Mutti,” I whispered. She turned to me then and shook her head.
“Did you hear me? This is no longer your apartment. There are good Christians who need it.”
Our home in Alsergrund, the home in which I was born, in which my mother was born, was not our home. I could not absorb that. How could there be life without our home? I wondered where Anneliese was. “You will go live with other people like you in Leopoldstadt.”
There are no other people like us, I wanted to scream. There are no parents like mine. No one else could lift me up to touch the golden ladies of the Musikverein or bring me pieces of famous chandeliers.
Leopoldstadt was the second district, a Jewish neighborhood where we often went to have dinner with friends or to go to the theater. It was crowded and noisy. Anneliese and I took the tram there on Sundays, to ride the Riesenrad, the tallest Ferris wheel in the world. It spun above the Prater amusement park, where I hear it still spins today. From the top we could see the river, winding away from us to unknown lands. “Some day we’ll drive a ship down that river,” Anneliese told me. “Someday we’ll take it all the way to Friedenglückhasenland.”
Who in Leopoldstadt would take us in? It’s almost laughable to me now that I imagined we would have to find someone with a spare bedroom. As if anyone had a spare bedroom. As if we would ever again be permitted to have any space of our own.
Even as I wondered all this, a more pressing question was throbbing in my mind. How would Anneliese find me?
My father finally spoke. His voice was low. I had to strain to hear him, my knife hovering over the cutting board. “We own this building. My wife was born in this apartment.”
“Do you know, Jew, that if I denounce you, you are going to go straight to a camp?”
My mother and I turned as one, stepping quietly toward the door. My father was standing between the door and the hallway closet, where my mother’s height had been scratched into the paint of the doorframe with a pencil each year of her girlhood. The marks were still there, next to marks for me and Willi. We were taller than she had been, every year.
No one was going to hurt my father. He was ours. Other fathers had already been taken, already stolen from their families and sent to the camps. They could not take mine. I would not let them. I curled my fingers around my knife. What did I think I was going to do? Go after Herr Meier with a potato knife? Stab Anneliese’s father? Any one of his broad fingers could have flicked it easily from my hand. And then there were his two Nazi friends.
One of the police officers who had entered with the Meiers walked down the hall into our living room and looked around as if it were his already. When he saw my father’s bayonet, he moved to lift it from the wall. Willi took a step into the room but my father shook his head at him.
“With that weapon I fought for my country, for Austria.” My father’s voice was clear and strong, though I saw his fingers twitching by his sides. “With that I defended her.” Under the bayonet was his certificate of honorable discharge: You are herewith assured of the Fatherland’s gratitude.
I knew Anneliese’s father hadn’t fought in the war. He had been too sickly, she said. Some kind of childhood lung infection.