My father picked up a silver-framed photo from the mantel over the fireplace, turned it toward the officer. I knew that photo well; it had always stood there. It showed my father young and round-faced, smart in his uniform, bayonet in his arms.
“I give this to you, to remind you who we are.”
I didn’t understand why my father would give them something so dear. That image was precious to me. I expected the man to smash it, to send it to the ground with the rest of our hopes. Instead, he tucked the photo of my father into his jacket.
He had known, before it dawned on the rest of us, that nothing in that apartment was ours anymore.
There ended my memories of my first home. With the blur of our departure. With the monsters at our heels. With the sound of my knife, dropping useless to the kitchen floor.
Sixteen
In July 1938, delegates from thirty-two countries meet in Evian, Switzerland, to discuss what to do with Jewish refugees. Nearly all refuse to relax their immigration quotas. Australia says it has no “racial problem” and is uninterested in importing one.
We moved first to 2 Czerinplatz, where we were crowded into a one-bedroom apartment—a forced communal apartment called a Sammelwohnung—with my Vienna grandparents, Aunt Thekla, Uncle Tobias, Aunt Klothilde, my cousins, and a dozen Jews from other families. My grandfather had lost his ophthalmology practice. My aunt Klothilde had been expelled from the Medical University of Vienna, along with the rest of the Jewish students. I remembered her telling us about the day a band of Nazis had lined up in front of the steps to her classroom building, to keep Jews from entering.
The apartment was filthy and stank of excrement. The toilet was always overflowing. We slept in our clothes on the floor, pressed tightly together. We had left almost everything behind—the piano, our books, Willi’s soldiers, the green-and-white dress my mother had made me for my first piano recital. Stefi. I had no memory of life without Stefi. She had always been there, chastising me for ripping another skirt, insisting that I stay at the table until I finished my dinner. Yet there was hardly any time to say good-bye. She had been out buying bread when they came for us and returned just as the men were prodding us through the apartment with their guns, as we gathered the few things we could carry. She clutched the dark loaf of rye to her chest like a child. No one bothered to speak to her. She was not Jewish.
“Stefi!” I ran to her, squishing the bread between us. Her warm arms wrapped around me, brief reassurance that some good remained in Austria. I pressed my face into the rough cloth of her dress, breathed in the faint scent of perspiration and dishwashing soap. What would happen to her once we were gone? “Orlanthe,” she said in a strangled voice. “The Meiers?”
“Not Ana!” I pulled back, anxious to defend her.
“Of course not Ana.” Stefi set the bread on the counter, took a breath, then picked it up and handed it to me. “What else do you need?” With renewed purpose she pulled me into my room and yanked my dirndl off a hanger and pulled it over my head, on top of the plain green dress I had on. “Wear this, it’s your favorite.” She tied my apron and stuffed my pockets with clean underpants. “Wash them out every night. Comb your hair. Help your parents. Where is Lebkuchen?”
I had time only to tuck Lebkuchen into the waistband of my apron, wrap a coat around me, and extend my hand and for the briefest caress of the worn posts of my bed. The only bed I had ever known, the bed that had seemed the stable foundation of my life. Never again would I lie beside Anneliese as we fought off sleep with our stories. Never again would we jump up to touch the carved lion heads on either side of our front door, telling them hello and good-bye. Never again would I run through the halls to her apartment, taking the stairs two at a time in a hurry to be with her. Never again would my mother or Stefi pull our breakfast rolls from that oven. All of the loss happened so quickly it was impossible to absorb. Loss must be assimilated in increments.
As the men and the Meiers urged us over the threshold of our front door for the last time, Stefi watched from the kitchen. When the Meiers passed her, the last to go, I heard her unmistakable whisper. “You should be ashamed.”
* * *
• • •
I HATED THE APARTMENT on Czerinplatz. There was always someone climbing over me, always parents or uncles or grandparents or cousins or strangers quarreling. My grandmother, my powerful socialist grandmother who had been evicted shortly after we had, fell mute. My grandfather, who couldn’t stand to stay inside, paced the streets despite the dangers. My father stared out the one window, absently patting his pocket for the pipe that he could no longer afford to smoke. The pipe he had sold months ago. No one was in the mood to entertain me, not even Aunt Thekla. No one was optimistic enough to offer me comfort. I could never go to the toilet without someone hammering on the door the entire time. Chronic embarrassment constipated me. I shared the bedroom with five other children and four adults. We put the littlest ones in the middle of the two beds, so they wouldn’t fall out, and at least once a week one of them wet the bed. Those who couldn’t claim a spot on the edge of a bed slept on the floor on mattresses or in nests made from blankets. I preferred to sleep with my parents on the floor. The other nine adults who couldn’t fit in the bedroom slept on the floors and sofas of the living room and the kitchen. Every other day I washed out my underwear in the sink, as Stefi had instructed.
I tried not to complain to my parents. They were miserable enough. They were powerless enough. They didn’t need to be reminded of my discomfort. What could they have done?
Because Willi was so much older and had often been out with his friends and activities, I had been accustomed to a tranquil home, with only Anneliese, Stefi, or my parents for company. I liked quiet, in which I could lie on my bed dreaming up new adventures from my old life in Friedenglückhasenland. I liked hearing nothing but the scratching of my school pencil on paper. Or when my parents were home, a stream of sonatas and fugues. But Leopoldstadt was full of people, and all their sounds. Perhaps because it was so loud, everyone shouted to be heard.
Now there was not even music.
At first the only place I dreamed of going was back home. Back to the scratched wooden surface of the kitchen table where I did my sums and read my schoolbooks while listening to the controlled tremor of my mother’s voice. To those soaring notes that were the background of my life. I dreamed myself back into Stefi’s comforting arms, to picking out songs on the piano with Anneliese, to racing with Willi through the paths in the Vienna Woods.
Yet eventually I was forced to dream forward instead of back. No longer could I dream of Friedenglückhasenland. I could not remember its contours or believe in its magic. I dreamed of escape to somewhere my mother could sing. A place where my mother would smile. It took too long for me to believe it, but it was becoming clear that this place was not in Austria.
* * *