Vienna Prelude

by Bodie Thoene

  “Please Elisa!” he insisted, slipping his arm around her shoulders. “You must call me Alfred! Beneath this uniform I am only a man.”

  Elisa could not help but wonder if this same man had not been one of those who had interrogated her father with the aid of rubber truncheons. “Yes. All right. Alfred, then. I would love to see the beer hall where the Hitler movement began.” She would flatter his insane pride, let him glory in all the things he had helped to create in Germany. Red banners draped every building. Uniforms were everywhere. Munich was an armed military encampment. When they arrived at the beer hall, a costume ball was going on. Steins of beer overflowed. Tables and long benches were packed with noisy revelers. A polka band played loudly as young soldiers and women dressed in native costume whirled about the dance floor beneath the swastika flags.

  In the noise and dim light of the vast hall where the Nazis had tried and failed in their first attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic, Elisa felt like a cat locked into a cage with a pack of hounds. Songs of Germany’s victorious future were sung again and again. Lusty voices boomed out the Nazi hymns with fervent passion while she listened and tried to look entertained.

  Alfred gulped his third beer and leaned across the table to shout above the din, “You will have to learn our songs, Elisa! Soon you will be singing them in Prague also! Glorious! We will soon all be one people! One Reich! One Führer!”

  She had heard the slogan before as Hitler had screamed his speeches over the radio. The masses had become infected with the disease, and now the slogans and chants tumbled from their mouths with the ease of breathing!

  “And where are those who opposed Hitler?” she shouted back. “Where are they, Alfred?” She could not help asking the question. Was there anyone still free in Germany who did not sing the songs and shout “Sieg Heil!” on command?

  He thumped his chest proudly, somewhat drunkenly. “That is my job!” He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her up. “You want to see? Ja? You want to see what we have done with them?” He was grinning wildly as he shoved his way out of the celebrating mass into the narrow Munich street again. “Come on, then! You can tell them how we clean the streets in Germany! You can tell the Germans back in Prague that we won’t stand for the Bolsheviks or the Jews when we get there.”

  He raced the engine of the car and careened through the streets of the city. He had drunk too much; he smelled of stale beer, and his eyes were red-rimmed in the soft light of the dashboard.

  “Where are we going?” Elisa asked. “It is longer than two hours now.” Her fear was close to the surface. “You promised you would be a gentleman,” she said as he drove out of the lights of the city and headed into the dark countryside.

  He simply laughed in reply, then turned sharply onto an unmarked dirt road. “You’re afraid of me?”

  “Please!” Her breath came faster. Where was he taking her? “You promised me if I would only escort you—Herr Oberleutnant! You promised me . . .”

  “And I am a man of my word. A German and a gentleman.” His words were slurred. The road was muddy and deeply rutted; the wheels spun as he drove up a small slope. “You see!” he shouted triumphantly. He stopped the car, and there before them was a brightly lit compound. White floodlights. Barbed wire. Huge stone walls. Guard towers and machine guns.

  Elisa did not have to ask the name of the place. She suppressed a groan, controlling the desire to scream the name of her father. Dachau! She swallowed hard and asked softly, “Why are we here?”

  Alfred laughed and pounded the steering wheel. “You asked the question! I told you I was your slave tonight! Am I a man of honor? You asked me where all the people had gone that had opposed the Führer!” He gestured out the windshield at the colorless compound. “And here they are!” He frowned. “You are not pleased?”

  Elisa simply stared. She wondered if he could see that the color had also left her face at the sight of the impenetrable fortress. Papa! her heart cried out. “It is . . . big,” she managed to say.

  “Yes. And we are constructing others just as big. It needs to be big. Jews. Bolsheviks. Gypsies—we need a place to put them. Clean up Germany.” His words had taken on an almost holy awe of the wonder of such efficiency. “And I am part of it all. I do my duty.” He droned on, but Elisa could not hear him any longer.

  Row upon row of buildings sizzled beneath the light. She could make out the silhouettes of the sentinels in the towers. Papa lives beneath their gaze. And yet they do not see him. They see only bodies.

  “This is our answer to the human debris.”

  Papa, I am here. Look up. Past the walls. Can you hear me call you? Please live for us!

  “They die quite easily here. The process of natural selection. Survival of the fittest. The Aryan will survive. We were meant to rule and the others . . .”

  The savage barking of dogs echoed through the night. A shot rang out, then a cluster of popping sounds as a machine gun flashed fire in the distance.

  She jumped. “What was that?”

  He laughed again. “Nothing. Sometimes they kill themselves. There is a forbidden zone, and those who are weak-willed go there. It is an invitation to be killed. At night, if you watch, there are always several. It is like watching for falling stars, ja?” He held up his wrist and grimaced at the time. “Alas, fair Elisa, I must get back. It is a thirty-minute drive back to Munich, and I have a train to catch.” He leaned close to her. His breath reeked of beer, and she felt sick at the smell of it. “Haven’t I been a good boy?”

  “Yes,” she answered hollowly, still unable to take her eyes from the tower where the fire had burst from the gun.

  “Then will you give me one kiss?” He was smiling.

  She turned her head to stare at him. What kind of man could ask for a kiss within view of such a horrible place? “Not here,” she said, feeling her stomach turn. “I am not used to thinking about people dying so easily.”

  He shrugged and started the car. “You will get used to it. You will see. We will make the world safe for those of German blood. You will not have to worry about your children. One day we will all live in a great state. The thousand-year Reich.”

  She sat silent and rigid as he talked on and drove back toward Munich. “Take me back to the beer hall,” she said at last as they entered the city. She was sure she would be able to disappear into the crowd there.

  He hurried around to open the car door for her, then pulled her up and kissed her hard on the mouth. The violin case was between them. Elisa gripped it tightly as though it were a shield.

  “Perhaps I will see you in Prague?” Alfred stepped back, then took her hand and kissed it.

  She felt her throat constrict. “Perhaps. Thank you for showing me what we might expect.”

  He waved his hand toward the beer hall, where the polka music boomed and the thump of feet kept time to the melody. “We are all good-natured people! We will bring such enthusiasm with us when we come.” He bowed, kissed her hand again and then, with a final wave, drove away.

  Elisa felt the world spin around her. She groped toward a parked car and dropped to her knees on the cobblestones. She was violently sick; her head throbbed as she pulled herself up and then walked carefully toward a waiting cab.

  The driver assumed she was one of the musicians. He smiled over his shoulder; then his smile faded at the vision of the pale, pained young woman behind him.

  “Where to, Fraülein?”

  “Bavaria Hotel,” she said with difficulty.

  “Too much beer, Fraülein?” he asked sympathetically.

  Too much. Too much everything. She stared silently out the window and prayed for her father . . . and for Thomas as he traveled through this sick, unhappy land to help her father.

  35

  Vision of the Apocalypse

  Since the night of the eight candles in Dachau, the scourge of typhus had raced through the weakened prisoners, and men died by the hundreds in the barracks of the camp. The eight of the Herrgottse
ck were spared for a short time. The priest and the cantor joined the man they called Jacob Stern, breaking rocks for road work in the day and comforting the dying men of the barracks through the night.

  There was no medicine to heal, nothing even to ease the pain of those racked by fever. The worn-out blankets did little to keep them warm. They died with the names of wives and children and sweethearts on their lips. They died calling out to God for mercy. They died cursing God for their fate.

  At five-thirty each morning, those who could walk staggered out to wait in ragged lines for roll call. The guards delighted in making them stand for hours in the cold until dozens more dropped to the ground to be kicked and beaten.

  On the bitter morning of December 31, 1937, Theo answered to his number as he had done for a year. He had almost forgotten his own name. His number and new identity had been crudely pressed onto a base metal tag, then locked onto his wrist on a thick bracelet made of chain like the collars of the guard dogs. But the dogs were treated more humanely than the men.

  Six rows ahead of him, Theo could see the swaying figure of the priest. Theo knew that the priest had also contracted typhus. The skin on his face and bald head glowed with fever. His eyes were red, and he could barely stand this morning. To the left of the priest, the cantor stood. His head was bowed and his breathing labored. So soon the candles flickered and dimmed before Theo’s eyes. Where was the light they had sung about? Where was the hope they had affirmed: “And Thy word broke their sword when our own strength failed us!”

  The priest was the first in his line to fall. The shouts of the guards filled the prison yard. Blows to his back and head failed to bring him to his feet. As prisoners watched silently, the priest lay still and lifeless beneath the furious blows of the guard’s boots.

  The cantor turned to look at Jacob Stern. Tears of anguished helplessness streamed down his face. The two men locked eyes. Remember the covenant! Remember what is done here!

  The body of the priest was left where he had fallen. Inmates marched around him, stumbled over him, grieving numbly for the loss of such a light.

  By nightfall the cantor too lay delirious on the wooden pallet. His soaring fever kept the men around him warm. Jacob Stern shared his ration of watery soup with him, holding his head and forcing some liquid down his throat.

  Brown eyes, pleading, looked up. “Tonight I call you Theo, Jacob Stern.” There was a hint of a smile on his cracked lips. “There is no need for me to fear what they do to me. Theo Lindheim. We know. We all know you.” The eyes were glazed with fever.

  Theo stroked the man’s head. “You must not talk, Nathan,” Theo said softly. “Save your strength.”

  “Why? I will not need it by morning.” He knew. He licked his lips. “Promise me—”

  “What is it?” Theo asked, bending his ear close to the mouth of the dying man. “What, Nathan?” There was pain in his voice. Could the cantor leave them so soon? After such a night of hope, could they lose the light of two such men in one day?

  “Say Kaddish for me.” The words were soft. “Remember my Jahrzeit.”

  “You must get well,” Theo insisted.

  “No. Too tired. No oil in the lamp.”

  “You must not die.”

  The cantor’s eyes suddenly became clear. “Remember the covenant. Live, Jacob Stern . . . Theo. And tell them. My wife and children are in Strassburg.”

  “I will tell them how you sang for Hanukkah. I will tell them about the lights.”

  “Yes, the lights. My wife’s name is Reba . . . tell her.” He slept.

  Theo sat clutching his knees and watching the cantor through the long night. He dozed, then jerked his head up to watch and wait again. Some time before daybreak, the rasping breath of the cantor fell silent, and in a broken voice Theo began to sing as the spirit of the cantor soared above the walls of Dachau.

  ***

  By ten-thirty that morning, Elisa was already in the Marienplatz of Munich, waiting as Leah had instructed her. At precisely 10:45, she entered the public restroom and placed the watertight package containing seven passports into the tank of the toilet in the last stall.

  The old woman who worked as the restroom attendant simply smiled at her and handed her a towel after she washed her hands. That much of the assignment had gone easily.

  Elisa emerged onto the Platz again just before eleven o’clock and searched the teeming crowds of market-day shoppers. She was to meet the young couple Leah had described to her and the two tiny children she was to take from them.

  Her own grief for her father was still sharp and intense. The thought of taking two children from their parents, possibly forever, simply piled grief on top of grief.

  At eleven, in the tower above the huge square, the Glockenspiel clanged out the hour as figures of knights and ladies danced in front of it. All eyes in the Platz were turned upward for the show—all, that is, except for Elisa’s. As her eyes scanned the square, she prayed that she would find them, and prayed again that the parents would have changed their minds. How could anyone give up children?

  Behind her, she heard the cooing of a baby. She turned to face a young man whose features were so anguished that there was no mistaking who he was or why he had come. Two young children were in a covered pram. Elisa’s gaze fixed on the father. Her eyes brimmed with tears of sympathy for him. He bit his lip, looked one last time at his little ones and then at Elisa. They did not speak.

  As the clock above them finished chiming, he turned on his heel and disappeared into the market crowds. For a moment Elisa stood beside the pram, then put her hands on it and pushed it through the throngs of people. The children did not even notice that their father had gone. They did not protest or complain or cry. Wide-eyed, they stared at the bustle around them. The baby was soon rocked to sleep by the bump of the wheels against the cobblestones.

  Soon little Max was also asleep. It was a small miracle for Elisa. She had spent the night imagining that they would gape at her and scream hysterically for Mommy and Daddy.

  Even as they boarded the streetcar for their ride to the Bahnhof and the train to Prague, the children slept without noticing that the hands that guided the pram were not those of their father. They slept on and on.

  Amid the clamor of the public address system in the station and the whistle of the trains, they still slept. As Elisa struggled with violin case and small suitcase and the pram, a porter assisted her onto the train. She was worried about the little ones when they lay so still beneath their blankets. Still, she was afraid that she might wake them and begin a wail that would not go unnoticed. She left them in the pram and rolled it between the seats in front of her. She could see the faces of the children, their cheeks pink and healthy. They breathed deeply and peacefully as the train chugged back across the German countryside toward the border of Czechoslovakia. Beautiful children. How could their parents bear such a parting? She wondered now what the mother must be feeling. And how would the children react when they finally woke up and saw the worried face of a stranger staring down at them?

  Elisa pulled the small suitcase from beneath the pram. She opened it, relieved to see an ample supply of diapers, bottles of milk, and a tin of biscuits for the two-year-old. On top of it all was a large bottle of cough syrup with instructions scrawled on the outside. For restlessness when traveling. Baby 1 tsp. Max 2 tsp. The children were not ill. Suddenly it became clear to Elisa why they slept so deeply. They had been given the medicine to make them sleep. For their own safety as well as Elisa’s, the possibility of fearful tears within the grim borders of the Reich had been eliminated.

  Elisa closed the case and pulled out the passports. Thank you. She sighed, uncertain that she could have handled screaming children and Gestapo agents too.

  Her relief was so great that she found herself actually able to chat pleasantly when the Gestapo prowled through the cars checking papers at the border.

  The train slid into Czechoslovakia without one question. And the children d
id not awaken until the whistle blew for Prague.

  ***

  For three days, Elisa stayed in Prague with her mother. She did not tell her about the two children who had gone from Germany to safety without ever once seeing who had delivered them. She did not tell her mother that she had watched from a hill above Dachau or that Theo might be alive inside the living hell of that place. She waited to hear how her mother was bearing up.

  Anna shared her hopes with Elisa as they washed the dishes one night in the little house Theo had bought for their safety. “Every night your father comes to me in my dreams,” Anna told her wistfully.

  Elisa could see that the strain of the last year had taken its toll on her mother. For the first time, Anna looked older. Her eyes were hauntingly sad, as though they had seen a thousand years of suffering in only one.

  “Then you are together sometimes,” Elisa said gently.

  “It is a strange and wonderful thing to dream.” Anna passed her a plate. “Every night God restores what I have lost during the day. Such sweet dreams! Every night we are at home in Berlin—your father in his library, and I at the piano. Just like it used to be. Or we are together in Paris. Or once again you are all small, and we walk through St. Stephan’s while your father shops for the store. And sometimes we sit together and talk.”

  “What does he say?” The thought of the machine-gun fire at Dachau clouded Elisa’s face.

  Anna gazed into Elisa’s eyes. “He tells me I should not worry. That we will be together again one day.” Tears brimmed, and Anna quickly focused on the dishwater. “And I believe that. Yes. In heaven we will see one another again, if not in this life.”

  Elisa put down the dish towel and hugged her mother. How she wanted to tell her about the file! About Thomas! But she did not dare. Wasn’t there enough for Anna to worry about? Theo had saved his wife from knowing what he was doing in Germany. Elisa would not tell her mother that she had been back to Germany for any reason.

  “Oh, Mother! I do hope it is in this lifetime that we are all together again! The house in Berlin, all the things that were our life then—none of that matters if only we can be together!”