“And if we don’t?”
She shrugged. “You might get a visa, but I cannot guarantee.”
It wasn’t the Bolivians, however, who gave us the most trouble. I cannot complain about the Bolivians. Before we could leave we had to acquire a tax clearance certification from the new government—proof that we owed no money in taxes.
The SS used all of their sadistic bureaucratic might to toy with us. Every time we arrived with a signed document we were told it was the wrong one, that we needed to start again. Or that we had failed to provide an adequate photograph. Or that there was a fee we had neglected to pay.
In October, we again had to apply for new passports (after having already been forced to trade our Austrian passports for German ones) that identified us as Jewish, with a large red stamp. It says something about our state of mind that this did not even seem bizarre to us, given everything else that had happened.
“If they want us to leave, why do they insist on making it so damned impossible?” I had rarely heard my father curse. He was not an angry man.
My father and mother waited endlessly in lines while the Gestapo men shouted at them, kicked them, and, worst of all, laughed at them. This struck me hard. I could understand anger, could understand shouting, but that anyone could actually derive pleasure from—could laugh at—the misery of another person was an unpleasant revelation.
One late afternoon at our local police station, one of these black-booted men tripped my mother as she tried to leave, so that her papers (apparently filled out incorrectly, again) went flying in every direction and my mother collapsed onto her knees. Wincing, she pulled herself up from the marble floor, slick with tracked-in rainwater, and crawled after our documents. One of her hairpins fell from her hair, loosing a lock of it that dragged in through the slush. The men around us laughed uproariously. “Stupid, clumsy Jewish cow.” I stared at the square face of the officer who had spoken. What had happened to our world to turn it so upside down? Men had once stood outside of my mother’s dressing room with flowers. Men had once traveled from other cities to hear her sing. Men had once wept when she opened her mouth. Now, as angry tears streamed down my face, I couldn’t help turning back. My mother’s fingers dug into my arm, urging me forward. “My Mutti,” I called to them as she dragged me away. “My Mutter is Arabella. She is Isidora and Liù and Eurydice and Ariadne and Salome and—” I tried to think of another. Just as my mother pulled me through the door I yelled, “My Mutter is a nightingale.”
I am guessing their surprise at my audacity is all that kept them from taking me from my mother to teach me a lesson. By the time they had registered my words and started toward the door, we were gone, my mother breaking into a run. “Don’t you ever,” she said, stopping in a nearby alley to shake me by my shoulders so hard my back teeth rattled together, “do that again. They could take you away from us, Orly. They could hurt you. Oh, don’t you ever, ever again!” And then sobbing, she pulled me into her arms in an embrace so tight it drove all of the air from my lungs.
* * *
• • •
WE ALSO REQUIRED MONEY to purchase passage on a ship, although we didn’t want to buy tickets before we had visas in our hands. The Italian ships were less expensive than the English or Dutch, so it was an Italian ship on which we hung our hopes. There were several leaving from Genoa in the autumn, and we wanted to sail as soon as possible.
Every morning, my mother rang the Bolivian consulate from a neighbor’s still-working phone to check on the status of our visa applications. At least once a week, I walked there with one of my parents, in the hope that the sight of our abject faces would move them to mercy. But all they saw all day were abject faces.
We could only wait.
* * *
• • •
WE WERE RUNNING out of money. No longer could we buy fish or fresh fruit. Strudel was out of the question. I was always hungry. At night sometimes I woke to feel my mother’s fingers tapping along my ribs, as if counting how many of them she could feel through my skin. I didn’t want her to worry. I started rummaging in the dustbins in the streets and alleys around us, especially near food markets, to find the occasional half-eaten roll or rind of cheese. I brought back bits of bread or carrot for the smaller children when I could find them.
One night, sometime after the Anschluss but before the end of the year, we were listening to the radio over a dinner of soup without bread when Hermann Göring said, as if this were a rationale for it all, that the Jews had controlled art, theater, and everything else. In case his meaning was unclear, he added, “The Jew must clearly understand one thing at once, he must get out!”
So why was he making it so hard to leave?
Nineteen
On November 7, 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a German-born Polish Jew, assassinates German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris. On November 9 and 10, the Nazis use this pretext to burn down or vandalize more than a thousand synagogues, rob and destroy thousands of Jewish stores and businesses, arrest approximately thirty thousand Jewish men, and murder at least ninety-one.
I remember the sound of shattering glass. Call it Kristallnacht if you want, but for us it was Pogrom Night. Kristall is too pretty, too glittering, too pacific. The word “kristall”—for me—evokes the shimmer of the Musikverein, of the opera, of the eleven tons of glass suspended over our heads. So I cannot call it Kristallnacht.
Two nights before the pogroms, the dark erased the moon, hid her face from us, took away even her reflected light. An eclipse, my mother said.
Everything before that night has a dreamlike quality to it now. As if my entire life until then had been a diorama I was observing from the far side of the glass, a pretty whirl of lights and music that disguised the festering hatreds all around us. The hatred we had been too caught up in our own world to see. I only woke up when the last vestiges of our world broke apart. My memories of that night are so sharp they could slice through skin.
As soon as we heard the first cries demanding Jewish blood, we locked ourselves in the apartment, although we knew even there we were not safe. I huddled close to the others and waited for someone to come murder us. On that filthy, overcrowded mattress, we listened to our fellow citizens calling for our death. We waited, listening to screaming from the street, the sounds of gunfire and beatings. I lay curled against my mother’s warm back. “Why?” I kept asking her, as my father paced by the windows, keeping watch on the street. “Why are they doing this?”
My father started to explain about the Jewish boy who killed a German diplomat in Paris, but faltered. It was too flimsy an excuse for the enormity of what was happening. This had clearly been planned. All around us things shattered—things, and people.
Only the very youngest children were asleep; the rest sat up with the radio. We kept our lights out, not wanting to draw attention to our continued existence. And then they came. They banged on the door until it opened, locks splintering. My mother wrapped herself around me, pulled my head to her chest. In the dark of her embrace I listened to the boots trampling through the apartment, the bloodlust in the voices ordering us to turn over our money, our jewels. I heard my father’s voice, explaining we had nothing left. I heard the voices of the other men, the other women, pleading for their wedding rings. The children next to us cried when their brothers and fathers were taken, while their mothers tried to keep them quiet. I heard my cousin Felix’s voice above them all. “Don’t wait for me, Mutti. Go when you can.” But they didn’t take my father. Perhaps they took one look at his spindly violist’s body and could think of no possible use for him.