The first time I heard my mother sing, I took Anneliese with me.
My grandparents chaperoned us that day in December 1936. My father’s father didn’t often make it to the opera, overwhelmed as he was with his work. He was a remote man, though not unkind, and often let us sit in the big chair in his office and look through different types of lenses. My cousins and I would compete to see who could read the tiniest words on his eye charts, without magnification. I usually won, though possibly because I sneaked in to memorize the charts when no one was around.
Willi also joined us that night at the opera. My grandmother preferred him over me because he was an enthusiastic participant in her political salons, while I would get bored and end up daydreaming under the chairs with Lebkuchen. Every other week she invited a select group of friends to discuss both literature and politics. When the Social Democratic Workers’ Party was outlawed in the wake of the 1934 rebellion, she had been incensed. “What kind of future can there be for a country that doesn’t allow pluralism?” she raged to my brother. “We’re going to end up like Germany.” She and Willi helped the Kultusgemeinde to settle German Jewish refugees in Vienna in 1935, after new German laws took away their citizenship. It was my grandmother’s fault Willi was always threatening to join the resistance—any resistance group that talked of standing up to the regime, to Hitler. It frightened my mother.
When I tried to talk with my grandmother about things that mattered to me, like stories and animals, she grew impatient. “I don’t have time for these frivolities,” she’d say crossly. “You need to pay attention to the world. Important things are going on.”
Fortunately, in our family opera was not considered frivolity.
Sitting between Willi and Anneliese, I was overcome with contentment. Willi bent over his book—something in French I could not decipher—as we sat waiting. Anneliese and I leaned our heads together over the program. She always smelled like celery, as if she had just come from making soup. Almost everyone I needed was in this building. Only my father was missing, but that was often the case. When my mother was performing, he was also at work.
Slowly, the lights faded. The curtains drew apart, revealing the inner courtyard of a palace and the vicious, gossip-singing maids. The dissonance of the opening chords startled me, flooding my veins with fear. Notes and voices scraped at me, strummed my nerves. I pulled Ana’s hand into my lap and pressed it between mine.
“Wo bleibt Elektra?” a servant began, her voice soaring over me. “Where is Elektra?” The others paused in their scrubbing of floors, their beating of laundry, to lacerate their mistress with song.
My mother sang Chrysothemis, Elektra’s gentler, pragmatic sister. She was the only one in the opera whose heart did not bend to murder, my mother said.
“Ich kann nicht sitzen und ins Dunkel starren wie du.” I cannot sit and stare into the darkness like you, sang my shimmering, shivering mother to her Elektra. “Ich hab’s wie Feuer in der Brust.” In my breast there is a burning fire.
I had heard my mother’s voice before, nearly every day of my life, but never like this. I had never heard it expand to fill a space so vast, soar to the highest of the balconies. Anneliese tugged her hand free of mine so she could lean forward into the sound. That is my mother! I wanted to stand up and cry to everyone around me.
“Eh’ ich sterbe, will ich auch leben!” she sang. Before I die, I also want to live!
When the lights came up for the interval, I felt I had been blasted back into my seat. This opera was not so much music as a summoning. A calling forth of the fiercest of human emotions from the pit of my belly. I sat there, unmoving, until a line of operagoers stood to our right, waiting for us to rise so they could get to the aisle. “Come, Peanut.” Willi took my arm and hauled me to my feet. “You too, Ana. Clear the way!” Slowly, our bodies cramped from sitting, we joined the crowd.
My grandparents ran into friends in the lobby and stayed there to chat, while we headed to the bar for a snack. The café was at least half the reason I’d looked forward to going to the opera. Anneliese was unusually quiet, even when Willi braved the line to fetch us hot chocolate and a slice of Himbeerschnitten. We stood by the window of the salon, gazing out at the gilding of our city by the early evening sun, as we licked raspberries and cream from our forks. “Ana,” said Willi, smiling at her, “has the opera put you into a trance?”
She shook her head. “It’s just . . .” She looked away from us. “I wish my mother . . .”
I knew what she wanted to say. And I wanted to say to her then that I had often envied her for having a mother who was home every evening to tuck her into bed, who made her cakes in the afternoons, who never traveled outside of the city except to go to a lake in the summers. My parents worked all summer, performing and teaching at festivals across Germany and Austria. The Vienna Philharmonic closed for the summer because the concert hall was too hot. The windows could not be opened, as street noise interfered with the music. In the winter, it was often too cold, but the orchestra sent for soldiers to run around the place, panting and sweating in the Golden Hall until it warmed a degree or two.
But that night, I didn’t envy Anneliese her mother. So I said the next best thing.
“But Anneliese, your mother in Friedenglückhasenland—our mother—she sings too.” I passed her the fork we were sharing.
The shadow of a smile crept across Anneliese’s face, but she didn’t join in like she usually did. “You’re so lucky, Orly,” she said quietly. “You don’t even know how lucky you are.” She took a bite of torte and sucked on the tines of our fork.
“Oh, but we do!” Willi said gaily. “We have you, Anneliese, to tell us stories! We are the most fortunate people on earth.” Among the many reasons I loved my brother Willi, his kindness to Anneliese ranked high.
“Kinder,” said my grandmother, appearing by our table. “Enough talk.” She wasn’t the kind of woman one could ignore, standing inches taller than any other woman in the room. The way she wore her hair, swept into a shelf of wide curls on the top of her head, made her even more imposing. After a longing look at the last smears of cream on the plate, which we didn’t dare to run our fingers through in front of her, we returned to our seats.
During the second half, I drew Anneliese’s hand onto my lap and held it with both of mine. This time, she didn’t pull away.
Even those who live are covered with blood, my mother sang. And marked by many wounds.
I was relieved she was one of the few to survive the opera’s bloody ending, and proud that her words Orestes! Orestes! were the last the audience would hear that day. It was her voice that would linger in their ears as they filed out onto the street.
Seven
In July 1937, the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps opens the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany.