“How will I find you?” she asked. “How?”
“You can’t. I will find you.”
My mother had forbidden me to tell anyone where we were going. “Not even Anneliese,” she had said. “Promise me, Orly.” I had never kept a secret from Anneliese. How could I keep this one, this most important one? But then I thought of her father’s belt, and what it might draw from her.
“I will write to you. You mustn’t move, Anneliese. You must stay here. You must wait.”
“But I need to write to you. How can I not write you?”
“I’ll send you our address when I can. When this ends. Just don’t move. Stay right here so I know where to find you. Promise me.”
“I don’t want to let you go. It’s been horrid, Orly, I can’t—”
We stayed there longer than we should have, until the sun rose in the sky and warmed the air, until we could hear people entering the park around us. Finally, I knew it was getting too late. I couldn’t let my parents worry too long; I didn’t want them to try to look for me. This fear drove me to my feet, pulling Anneliese up with me. Letting her go, I linked my thumbs and raised them over my head, my fingers fanned out on either side, like wings. The international sign language for “I am a citizen of Friedenglückhasenland. I come in peace.”
Smiling, tears sliding down her cheeks, she linked her own thumbs above her head in response, her fingers fanned out on either side, her thin elbows forming a diamond around her head.
Then I turned and I ran.
Twenty-three
On April 28, 1939, Hitler renounces Germany’s nonaggression pact with Poland.
We walk all the way to the train station. We have four days to get to our ship in Genoa.
At the Südbahnhof, the SS holds each of our precious belongings aloft, displaying them to the entire station. My mother’s spare dress. My father’s top hat. The stuffed rabbit named Lebkuchen, who is everything I have.
“I don’t think you’ll be needing this in Bolivia.” I watch as the man rips Lebkuchen apart, searching her stuffing for hidden wealth. He doesn’t even give her remains back to me, though I salvage one small bit of fluff from the dirty floor as we’re prodded forward. I refuse to cry in front of these men.
My father is—miraculously—allowed to keep his viola.
The last thing we hear in Austria is the rhythm of the wheels on the tracks, beating out a song of exile.
Caesura
There is so much I do not remember. Things my mother and father remember, things the dead remember.
I do not remember the failures in Evian, where no asylum was offered. My mother never told me that it wasn’t just Austria who abandoned us. My father never told me the world had given Hitler permission to do with us what he wanted.
I do not remember the five thousand disabled children cavalierly slaughtered, their tender young bodies stretched awkwardly upward by the faceless hands I saw in photos many years later.
I do not remember the roving bands of teenage boys urging each other to deeper hatred, greater crimes.
I do not remember when journalist Dorothy Thompson reminded the American public that eradicating the Jews had always been part of the Nazi platform. I never heard her too-lonesome voice reminding the world that the Nazis were doing exactly what they had always said they would do.
I do not remember the little girls with their dark braids, holding their mothers’ hands as they were prodded into train cars.
I do not remember when the Wagner-Rogers Bill, the bill that might have saved twenty thousand children, was defeated.
I do not remember November 23, 1938, when the Nazis reminded the world that the Jews would be wiped out if no one evacuated them. Even though I was there. Even though I should have been listening.
I never saw the skeletal women. The skeletal men. The skeletal children, their eyes still absurdly hopeful. The children.
I do not remember the inside of the train cars bound for the camps.
I do not remember watching my family members murdered. Waiting for my turn.
I do not remember the mountains of shoes, hair, bones. I do not remember the bulldozing of the bodies, the obscene flapping of desiccated breasts and buttocks.
I do not remember the drawings of the children. The drawings that survived, the children who didn’t. The thin-stemmed flowers, the black-capped soldier, the man with the drooping mustache. The crayon-sketched rainbow, insisting the world still contained beauty.
I don’t remember because I was too young. Or I wasn’t there.
My parents gave me that.
Second Movement
BETWEEN WORLDS
Twenty-four
My mother, who had always had all of the answers, didn’t have them anymore. She knew how to tie my shoes and how to make a frog with her fingers and how to plait hair. She knew songs in many languages; she knew when a piano was only slightly out of tune; she knew how to take a breath so deep it would last for an entire song.
Now, as we hurtled away from Austria, she didn’t know anything. She didn’t know where we would stay in Italy. She didn’t know whether there were rabbits in Bolivia. She didn’t know if Bolivians had toilets inside their houses. She became impatient with me when I asked.
Yet questions were all I had left. When I asked her if Willi would find us, if I would see Anneliese again, if we would ever return home, my mother only laced her fingers through mine and turned her face to the window.
I fell silent, rubbing the bit of Lebkuchen’s dirty fluff between my fingers until it disintegrated.
* * *
• • •
WHEN I TRAVEL from one city to another, I can’t help but see connections between the two places. For me, Vienna and Genoa are irrevocably linked, not only by my presence in both cities in 1939, but by the scent of coffee and butter drifting from the doors of cafés, by the glazed Falstaffs in bakery windows, and by thick, warm chocolate. I saw faces on the streets in both places I was sure I recognized. The church bells rang in the same key.
Other than those things conjured by my own circumstances, the cities are utterly different. Genoans moved to a softer, more arrhythmic beat. In April, the sun had already gained the heat of spring. People looked at me, at my face, and smiled. Some of the older women paused to pat my cheek. Perhaps they did not know that I was Jewish. In Genoa, I was freer than I had been in years. I could taste things with every part of my body, my tongue, my fingers, my ears—the wind off the harbor, the clouds, the voices of the grocers calling to their customers.
I could almost convince myself we were on holiday as I wandered through the pretty streets listening to the strains of opera drifting out of the open door of a café. I could almost convince myself we were on holiday—if I never looked at the faces of my parents.