I heard Aunt Thekla’s cries.
My mother began to sing to me. To all of us, really, given that it was impossible to sing in that small room and not sing to us all. She sang in Italian, perhaps not wanting to sing in a tongue we shared with Nazis.
Perhaps the worst thing the Nazis did to me that night besides stealing my beloved cousin was fail to register my mother’s song. Arms full of our coats and our last items of jewelry, they pounded back down the stairs, moving on to the next Jews. “Earn your own money!” I wanted to yell. “You sing Elektra five times a week!” Was this what they called “a proper day’s work”? Taking our valuables? What lazy men, I thought as I lay there. Nothing but common thieves.
They were nothing but common murderers, too, of course. But I did not know that until the next day.
As the sounds from outside grew louder—I could hear the fracturing of the world, smell the smoke from the fires, hear their cries of Juda Verrecke!—her voice did, too, as if she thought she could hold up our walls around us with sound alone. I pressed my face against her skin, no longer scented with lilacs but with bitter sweat. I focused on the reassuring feel of her rib cage expanding under my fingers. Here she was, my mother. Breathing. Singing. If I could just narrow my world to that, I would be all right.
They took so many men that night. Broke into their homes, stole them from their wives and children. Some they beat to death before they even got to a camp. Some they tossed out of windows like refuse. Some they sent to the camps. Some they lined up in the street and shot in the head, one by one.
We never found out where they took Felix.
* * *
• • •
THE NEXT DAY, I slipped out of the apartment before anyone was awake. I wanted to see if there was anything left of our city. Someone had to see what they had done, I reasoned. I was small; I could easily hide. Besides, the Nazis were not after children, were they? They had only taken men.
Outside, the streets were silent, most people were finally sleeping or too terrified to emerge—or gone. I stared around me in shock. Splinters of glass crunched under my feet with every step. Anxiously, I scanned the sidewalks for remaining Nazis. I walked past shattered shop windows and spray-painted slurs. I stepped over the stiff body of a cat.
The window of Weiss’s shop, where I used to take the Groschen my mother gave me to buy Küfferle Schokoschirmchen and chocolate-covered marzipan balls, was gone, just a few shards of glass left around the edges. Chocolates had been scraped from the shelves, barrels of shiny boiled sweets emptied on the floor, crushed beneath boots. Where was kind Mrs. Weiss, who always gave us an extra piece of marzipan, shaped like a tiny cherry or banana? I crouched down to retrieve a marzipan bunny from the pavement, where it had fallen from a thief’s pocket or hand. One of its ears had been torn off. I wanted to burrow it into my own pocket, to place it somewhere safe. But I did not. Treading carefully, I stepped quickly through the glass and set the small rabbit back on a bottom shelf.
The department stores had been emptied, food shops robbed, flower shops reduced to a scattering of bruised petals. A few shopkeepers stood in the wreckage, looking around for something they could salvage. Scrawled on the walls, in ugly jagged letters: Jud. As if it were a curse word.
A charred shadow had replaced the nearest synagogue. Nothing remained but a field of cinders, a few still smoking. I saw a man on his knees, digging in the ash with his fingers, searching for something left. This is what they had been burning. Around the periphery, bodies lay scattered like broken dolls.
The orphanage in the next block was gone. Mobs of our delirious countrymen, I later heard, had hacked its contents to pieces and driven the children barefoot into the streets before setting it ablaze.
That was enough. I turned and ran all the way back to our room.
We heard the rest of the news on the radio. More than a thousand synagogues had been set on fire, not only in Vienna but across the whole of Austria and Germany. Sacred scrolls had vanished. Tombs were invaded. Even our dead were not safe.
We couldn’t stay inside forever or we would starve. I often volunteered to look for food. I couldn’t bear to stay in the crowded apartment for long. My mother didn’t want me to go, but she was quickly learning the limits of her ability to protect me.
Some days I passed among the crowds unnoticed. Some days an arm would stretch out before me, barring passage. “Dance for us, little Jewess,” someone would say.
And so I would do jumping jacks, my arms and legs opening and closing, opening and closing, as my braids danced across my back and my breath came in gasps. When my mother asked me why I came home sweaty and disheveled, I told her I’d been racing other children in the park. It could have been worse. So much worse.
One of my few treasured possessions was the dirndl that had been my grandmother’s when she was a girl. While my father’s parents had always been city dwellers, my mother came from the countryside. The red of the dirndl’s skirt had faded to pink and the blue of the apron had been washed to a pale grey, but to me it was as vibrant as ever. I loved its little puffed sleeves and laced bodice and that it felt like a kind of uniform. Even though city children sometimes teased me for dressing like a peasant, I loved it because it had always been ours. I loved it because it was Austrian, because I was Austrian. I had been wearing it the night we left home; it was one of the two dresses I still owned.
I kept forgetting we no longer were Austrian. And somehow my mother and I had missed the edict stating that Jews were no longer allowed to wear the national dress, including lederhosen, Styrian hats, and dirndls. Or maybe there was no edict. Maybe our Austrian neighbors did not need an excuse.
One afternoon while my parents were waiting in yet another line, I slipped out of the apartment and made the long journey on foot back to Alsergrund, grateful I had done it before with Stefi and Anneliese on our way home from the Prater. I had been waiting for the chance to go back to our neighborhood. I needed to see Anneliese, to tell her where we were, to be sure of her. I wasn’t going to go to our old building, I wasn’t that stupid, but I thought perhaps if I waited in the Jewish cemetery on our street, I’d see her walking home from school. I was lucky no one stopped me on my way. No one looked at me at all.
But I had only just rounded the corner onto our old street when our former neighbors set upon me. My second-grade teacher saw me first. “Orly, you can’t come back here.”
“And you can’t wear that anymore.” Frau Floch stood in the doorway of her intact butcher shop. I paused, unsure if she was trying to be helpful or mocking me. As if to answer my unspoken question, she stepped forward and tugged on the strings of my apron. “These clothes, they are not for you,” she said, like a stranger. “They’re for Austrians.”
By the time she tore the apron from my body, I was surrounded. A man yanked my right arm behind my back while another used his pocketknife to slice away the strings of my bodice. “It was my grandmother’s,” I protested weakly, still believing logic might make some difference. “We’re Austrian.”