• • •
THE QUEUES SENT my spirits plunging. Surely there would not be seats left on any ship for us. We waited all day, stamping our feet and clapping our hands to stay warm, but did not make it to the door. We began rising before dawn to join the throngs, with the hope that one day soon waiting would get us across the threshold. It felt hopeless. There were lines every day of desperate people willing to settle on any available vessel.
Yet a couple of weeks later, just before closing, we made it inside.
We can book passage from Italy for three people, the ticket agent told us, but not until April.
My father looked at him in despair. “We may be dead by April.”
The ticket agent sighed. Always the same story. “For the money you are willing to pay, I have April. If you can find more, I can get you on a ship in December.”
My father bought the tickets for April. We could still try to find enough money to leave earlier, he said, but at least now we had something. There was an exit sign in our future. We had to survive four months more. Just four months.
Twenty-one
On January 30, 1939, Hitler announces his desire to annihilate all the Jews of Europe.
On December 3, 1938, my parents’ driving licenses become invalid. “Good thing we don’t own a car,” says my father.
On December 5, we are no longer allowed to sell our jewelry. “Good thing we have nothing left,” says my mother.
On December 12, a new law is passed stating that we will not be allowed to leave the country with anything other than “items for personal use.” I look at my parents with bewilderment when we hear this announced on the radio. “What else do we have?”
On the first day of Chanukah, I present my parents with a handwritten book of stories from Friedenglückhasenland, written on scraps of paper torn from food cartons and discarded wrappings and held together with a piece of string. I suggest we light candles—one of the other families has a menorah—but my mother just looks out the window and pretends she doesn’t hear me.
In February, we walk past Fasching parades and celebrations. It seems a long time ago that I cared about Fasching, that I cared about anything as frivolous as a costume. We see a German man in a long-beaked stork mask handing a swaddled infant to a blond Austrian maiden. A group of children marches by in Roman costumes, followed by a pack of Amazon warriors. When a group of adults dressed as the blue-green Rhine begin acting out the rape of the Danube, my parents pull me away.
On February 23, You Can’t Take It with You wins an Oscar for Outstanding Production. Had we registered this, we might have noted the appropriateness of its title.
On February 28, the Reich’s transport minister announces Jews are banned from dining and sleeping cars on trains. Our anxiety increases. Surely we will be banned from regular cars next? I wonder if we could walk to Italy. I wonder if maybe we should start now.
We huddle in the apartment around the radio, awaiting a knock on the door.
* * *
• • •
THOSE FOUR MONTHS stretched out over an eternity. When my father offered to sell his viola, my mother took it from him until he promised he wouldn’t. “I married a violist,” she said. I bit my lip to keep from reminding her that he had married a singer. Twice more we were moved to different and smaller apartments, where even more of us were crammed together in increasingly desperate conditions. My parents grew thinner, my bones pushed closer to skin, my aunt and uncle became strangers. We began taking our meals from the soup kitchen opened by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee—the same organization that would eventually play a large role in our new lives in Bolivia.
During all of this—the paperwork, the incessant trips to embassies, consulates, and police stations—the idea of leaving for a new country remained in the realm of fantasy for me. I was nearly eleven. I had never lived anywhere but Vienna. Everyone I had ever loved, every food I had ever tasted, every game I had ever played was here. I simply could not imagine inhabiting a different landscape. Nor could I imagine a journey on a ship. While I had often traveled on trains for summer holidays and to visit relatives, I had never seen the ocean. I am not sure I had even seen a photograph of an ocean liner.
All of my parents’ preparations were happening, therefore, at a distance from me. Even in the final days I did not believe I would never again sit in the Golden Hall of the Musikverein, or climb the steps inside the opera house, passing beneath the sculptures of half-dressed children wielding instruments. I did not believe that the waiters at Sperl would never again set a silver tray in front of me bearing whipped-cream-bedecked hot chocolate and strudel. I could hardly entertain the thought that I would never play with Anneliese again. Anneliese was irrevocable.
While it’s true I had already lost the domestic landscape of my home, lost my Stefi, whom I mourned nightly, lost my proximity to Anneliese, this city was the only context in which I could imagine myself. Its streets terrified me, teeming with the boisterous, shouting Nazis and the regular, ordinary people joining in their sadistic fun, but they were still my streets.
Twenty-two
On March 15, 1939, Czechoslovakia ceases to exist.
Afew weeks before we left Vienna, in early April 1939, I sneaked out of the apartment for the last time, in the darkest part of morning, before anyone else was awake. So that my parents wouldn’t panic, I left a note saying I would soon return. They would worry anyway but it couldn’t be helped. As I made my way through the dim streets, I pulled my coat around me and almost wished for the protection of that swastika pin. Almost, but not quite.
I walked fast with my head down and made it to the cemetery this time without anyone seeing me. When I was sure no one I knew was on the street, I walked the rest of the way back to the building where we had been happy and where we had been made miserable. Our stolen home. It was so cold my toes went numb in my thin leather shoes. I knew it was dangerous to walk alone where someone might recognize me, that it was dangerous to walk through Vienna’s streets at all. Yet what other streets did we have to walk? My heart hurtled ahead of me, fearing the expression on Anneliese’s face almost more than the dangers all around me.
I stood in a darkened doorway across the street from our old building. I listened for the church bells that would tell me Anneliese would soon be on her way to school. I stood there forever, freezing, petrified, waiting. Wondering if I would find her changed. Wondering if Frau Floch would emerge to slice off my last dress with her butcher’s knife.
The bells had rung before she flew out of the house, late, her coat half on, skirt flying up around her, and her blouse untucked.
“Ana!” I took off after her at a sprint, but as she had stopped the second she heard my voice, I collided with her, knocking us both over. “Orly!” She dragged me to my feet and around the corner. “You’re alive, you’re alive! Come, farther away.” We ran toward the Lichtenstein gardens, toward clusters of trees and bushes, toward obscuring greenery, and fell to the grass. Our breath coming fast, we lay on that frigid April lawn side by side, our hands clasped. My Anneliese. Her soft, thin arms, her bruised legs, her skin. “I’m leaving,” I said. “Right away.”