Alice's Piano

by Melissa Müller

  A few weeks after the end of the war Assor was traveling in civilian clothes on a train from Pilsen to Prague. There were two Czechs in his compartment who evidently saw him as one of their own and were generous enough to offer him some of their food. Assor spoke little as he did not want to be questioned. He was increasingly shocked by the conversation between the two: “So many Jews have come back to us,” one of them said with a tone of regret.

  “There were probably too many holes in the gas chambers,” his companion replied.1

  The anti-Semitic propaganda of the past six years had had its effect. The survivors were a thorn in the side of everyone who had collaborated with the Germans and who had profited from their dispossession; and there were a good many of them.

  * * *

  CIRCUMSTANCE NOW forced Alice to abandon one of the most important principles in her life: honesty. The cause was the “discussion” over her resumption of citizenship in the “interrogation room” of the appropriate committee. The civil servant had all the time in the world to talk to Alice about things that seemed, superficially at least, irrelevant. Alice bravely clung to Paul’s instructions: her piano teacher was Czech, and the music she played at her concerts had always had a strong element of Czech music in it. So far, what she said was true. Then came the lie: at home they had chiefly spoken Czech and their circle of friends was overwhelmingly Czech-speaking.

  “What newspaper did you read?” droned the official. So far he had not looked up once from his notebook.

  “Bohemia—above all for its concert reviews.”

  “And how did you vote in the 1935 general elections?”

  “I voted for the Jewish Party.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they best represented the interests of the Jewish population, or that was what I believed.”

  Alice passed the test. From now on she was classified as “Czech-speaking” and felt miserable about it. She was incensed that, just after being released from a concentration camp, she was forced to fight for her life all over again. Unhappy at having to compromise herself in this way and missing Stephan desperately, she decided to visit her son in the holiday home. She went with another mother, who was suffering as much from being separated from her son as she was, and together the two women traveled to the castle.

  The two boys were overjoyed and their mothers then spent the whole day with them. At the end Stephan had tears in his eyes—he wanted to go home with his maminka. Alice sadly took her leave, without him. What happened next she only heard about days later.

  After their mothers’ visit Stephan and the other boy failed to turn up for dinner. A search was organized in the castle but they were nowhere to be found. The park was searched, as was the area around the castle pond and the playground, but to no avail. In the end Irma Lauscherová informed the police who sent out a formal search party. Hours later, in the middle of the night, a policeman found the two children walking down an unlit street. They were on their way to Prague, they told the man, going home to their mothers. Even years later Alice reproached herself for being irresponsible.

  * * *

  ALICE’S ONE surviving friend in Prague was Edith Kraus and she often went to see her. She was also Edith’s most vital support. At first, they went to the Jewish Community office almost every morning, and then later once a week. More and more reports of deaths were coming in, and mourning for lost relatives, friends and acquaintances brought the two women even closer. With every piece of bad news their hopes of seeing their husbands alive again faded: they were now officially “missing.”

  The monstrous extent of the crimes committed against the Jews in the Protectorate beggared belief: in the spring of 1939 the German authorities had counted 118,000 “racial” Jews. Between 33,000 and 35,000 managed to emigrate. In 1946 there were around 22,000 Jews in Czechoslovakia: a few who had managed to remain in hiding, survivors from the camps and others who had returned from exile. Around 2,000 of them had fought in Czech brigades in foreign armies and a further 7,000 had survived in Carpato-Russia.2 Only a few hundred of the so-called “German Jews” ever returned. They particularly felt the chill wind from the Czechs.

  Václav Kopecký, the Communist minister of information in the postwar Czech government, indicated what little future there was there for Alice and her kind. In exile in Moscow in July 1944 Kopecký had already announced “that the German-speaking Jews would be seen in the same light as the Germans.”3 It was a question of not weakening the Slavic national character, not anti-Semitism, Kopecký argued.

  Alice wanted to give concerts again but given the climate this might prove not only unwise but possibly life-threatening, and she even wondered whether it was possible for a Jew to lead a “normal” life in Prague. Alice discussed her concerns with Edith but not with her brother. She was close to Paul, but she had the impression that he and his wife lived by a different set of rules, rules they had laid down for themselves.

  Alice was more and more astonished by Mary’s extravagance. Paul had no work and Mary herself earned only a modest wage as caretaker of the building they lived in; yet neither of them seemed concerned about money. Nor was Alice happy that the drawing room was transformed into a pub every Friday night, with Mary chain-smoking and pouring out endless glasses of wine and pilsner. Her guests smoked as well, and shouted, which prevented Alice from getting to sleep. Against her better judgment, and keeping her distance, Alice went to the party the following Friday and discovered exactly what was going on. Once a week Paul and Mary were running an illegal gambling den.

  Alice knew that Paul played poker with a passion, but Mary’s enthusiasm seemed to exceed even his and they also appeared to have luck on their side: they were taking big risks and winning. Alice was horrified to see the way in which Mary behaved with her principally male guests, and how she flirted with them. Paul noticed Alice’s irritation and came to his wife’s defense: “You should not take that seriously, it is her Hungarian temperament. That’s what she is like.”

  Despite the deep gratitude she owed her sister-in-law for taking them in, and Mary’s remarkable generosity, Alice withdrew further and further into herself and longed for a home of her own.

  One evening there was a gentle knocking at the front door. At first Paul took no notice as visitors generally rang the bell. But the knocking grew louder until at last Paul finally paid attention and opened the door. Standing before him was Alice’s former caretaker from the Sternberggasse—he recognized her immediately—and the tall haggard man standing next to her she introduced as her husband. She had something urgent to say to Frau Sommer.

  Alice had told Paul how shamelessly this woman had behaved on the night before their deportation, when she had plundered their flat. What could have brought her here now? Paul hesitated, before calling out to Alice: “You have a visitor.”

  Alice was astonished how much the woman’s manner had changed. She had been so offhand toward Alice that night, and now she seemed so uncertain and willing to please. Had she come to apologize, Alice asked herself, or come to offer me back the things she stole?

  “Frau Sommer, they were difficult times, not just for you but for all of us,” the woman blurted out. “You will recall that I always found food for you.” Alice did indeed remember, but she also remembered that she had had to pay many times the market price for it. She looked at the husband, who nodded mechanically at everything his wife said; Alice almost felt sorry for him. On the night their flat was plundered he had not been there.

  “You see”—the caretaker had started up again—“if you were to put in writing that at the time of the German occupation I had always been helpful and had behaved decently, that could be helpful.” She was under pressure because people in the neighborhood had denounced her for systematically enriching herself with Jewish possessions from 1940 to 1945.

  The audacity of the woman took Alice’s breath away. Her generally talkative brother was also lost for words. It took him a while before he could respond. �
�What are you after? You are quite aware how shabbily you behaved toward my sister. Please, there is the door.” As he said this he pushed the woman out of the flat while Alice looked on angrily. The caretaker’s husband just trotted along silently behind her.

  Alice had another sleepless night. The meeting with the caretaker was the last straw. While Stephan slept happily at her side she went over and over what she had been through in the past few weeks: the humiliating interrogation over her citizenship; the discouraging reports from the Jewish Community; worry about Leopold; Stephan’s nagging questions about when his father would come home.

  Alice no longer felt capable of dealing with her worries all alone. She desperately needed to confide in someone. The obvious person was Edith, her best friend, but there could be no question of troubling her now: she had recently received the news of her husband’s death.

  As dawn broke, Alice remembered Leo Baeck. “Our great artist!” he had called her. Alice was certain that he would be willing to help and she resolved to go to Theresienstadt that day, where she knew Baeck was still living. Paul gave her the money for the ticket and Stephan stayed with his aunt and uncle. Happily, his best friend from Theresienstadt, Pavel Fuchs, was living in the house next door.

  * * *

  THE TRAIN journey to Theresienstadt lasted just two hours. Alice had sworn to herself that she would never set foot in the ghetto again. Now she was standing in the room where Leo Baeck’s Friday evening discussions had taken place and for the first time became aware of how gloomy and unfriendly the room actually was. There were a few bits of furniture confiscated, like everything in Theresienstadt, from somewhere else, but when Baeck walked in it was as if the sun had come out. As ever, he exuded strength and security.

  He took Alice’s hands to greet her, which immediately put her at ease. She was aware how rarely he showed any emotion. Breaking her usual custom she opened her heart and spoke of her suspicion that neither Leopold nor her mother would return; of the hateful comments made by so many of her clearly hostile Czech fellow citizens; of the cruel coldness of the Czech bureaucrats; and her worries about the future.

  The rabbi was visibly moved and Alice waited for him to give her some words of consolation and encouragement. He was silent, however, and he remained so; and then, as if speaking more to himself than to Alice, he murmured: “Maybe there are too many Jews in this world…”

  This unexpected and baffling response pierced Alice like an arrow. She did not feel able to ask him what he could possibly mean, and did not understand it either then or years later. Seized by panic, she leaped to her feet and got ready to leave. Leo Baeck tried to stop her from going so that he might explain, but it was no use. She was too distraught to listen to another word. In her despair she ran from the room and along the chillingly familiar streets toward the station.

  The encounter had really upset her but—for Stephan’s sake—Alice now forced herself to take heart and accept life for what it was. In fact, there would soon be a glimmer of hope. By good fortune, Alice was given a new flat more quickly than she had ever dared to hope. An added attraction was that it was in the house next door to Paul’s flat, and right next to the Fuchses. Now Stephan could knock on his friend Pavel’s door whenever he chose and that suited both of them.

  The house had belonged to the Fuchs family before the war but it had been appropriated by the authorities. Their legal case was clear-cut and the restitution a mere formality, which nobody doubted, but it took a long time to resolve because of interminable Czech bureaucracy.The house had been inhabited by five German officers and their families, so now five of a total of fifteen flats were empty. The Fuchses occupied one immediately after they returned from Theresienstadt. The others were waiting for new tenants. Armed with this information, Frau Fuchs sent Alice to the Jewish Community office and she was granted a small flat. Because Alice had no income, they also agreed to pay the rent for the time being.

  There was a room for Stephan and another for Alice; a tiny kitchen and a little lavatory with a window. The house had only been constructed in the 1930s and it was astonishingly modern. There was even a lift in which Stephan loved to go up and down. Here, Alice and Stephan found a substitute family. Apart from their landlords the Fuchses, they had Leopold’s brother Hans two floors down, as well as Trude Hutter’s mother, who had survived Theresienstadt.

  The Jewish Community helped to decorate the flat. In a furniture store Alice and Stephan found a sofa, two chairs, a small table and a folding bed for Stephan. By 1943 the SS had fifty-four stores in Prague filled with confiscated Jewish property set up in the community’s synagogues, prayer-rooms and community halls. The documents pertaining to the stolen goods displayed the legendary German sense of order, as evidenced by statistics drawn up on 16 March 1943. At this point only half the empty Jewish homes had been cleared of their furniture, but already the following objects of value had been “secured”: 603 upright or grand pianos, 9,973 objets d’art, 13,207 complete kitchen or drawing-room suites, 21,008 carpets, 55,454 pictures, 621,909 glasses and pieces of porcelain, 778,195 books, 1,264,999 textiles and 1,321,741 pieces of household or kitchen equipment.4

  Alice veered between enormous gratitude and deepest mourning as she walked round the depot seeing piano upon piano. Naturally she looked first for her own Förster grand, but she could not find it among the hundreds of instruments. Every one of the pianos had a story to tell. How many of their owners had died?

  Without Stephan at her side Alice would not have been able to bear the atmosphere in the storehouse. But, in a delightful way, he distracted her from her sad thoughts. Every piano that Alice tried elicited a comment from Stephan on the quality of the sound. Alice was astonished at how precise his judgments were. They finally opted for a black, middle-sized Steinway grand with a crystal-clear tone. With a piano, Alice could be properly happy for the first time in ages.

  Two days later the delivery lorry was parked outside the door. With great effort men dragged the grand up the three flights to the flat. When it was finally in place, Alice had to laugh. The piano virtually took over the entire room. There was just enough space for the sofa bed, the little table and two chairs plus the narrow bookshelf.

  After what had seemed an eternity, but was in fact just eight weeks since she had left Theresienstadt, she was sitting at a grand piano once again. A piano tuner had been round and she had been able to postpone paying him for the immediate future. Alice sat down and played the Schumann Abegg Variations. Why did she choose them? Was it because they brought back memories of happier days? Or was it because she had played them in the first master class concert? She still remembered Prager Tagblatt writing the next day: “The prize for the evening goes to Alice Herz.” Or was it simply because the work exuded such a light, airy, even gay mood, which meant that, while she played it, at least she could forget her unhappiness?

  FOURTEEN

  Prague

  “A thousand times worse than under the Nazis.”

  LEOPOLD SOMMER had been part of a column of thousands who were driven from Auschwitz in Poland toward the west. Together with other prisoners he was being moved to Dachau. An Auschwitz survivor had brought the news to the Prague Jewish Community office. Alice had been consoled by the fact that Dachau was not an extermination camp like Treblinka or Auschwitz. If Leopold had survived the death march, he must have been liberated in Dachau, and he might come home any moment. Whenever she heard a knock at the door now, her heart began to pound.

  It was already the middle of August 1945, and Alice was seated at the piano one morning when she was distracted from her playing by an unexpected ring on the bell. Irritated, she answered the door. The man there was wearing the kaftan of an Orthodox Jew. His eyes seemed ready to sink into their sockets. Alice noticed his unkempt beard and a hat that had once been respectable; under the shadow cast by the brim his face looked even more emaciated. The man held out his hand. His skin was like blue-gray paper.

  He told her that the Je
wish Community had given her address to him. He spoke Yiddish and his voice was apologetic. All at once Alice recognized him as the father of the eight children who had lived next door to Stephan and her in Theresienstadt. Like Leopold he had visited his family almost every night.

  A few days after Leopold was deported to Auschwitz, the Orthodox Jew and his four sons had also left Theresienstadt. The girls stayed behind with their mother. Alice had been unable to come to terms with the apparent indifference with which the woman had submitted to her destiny: “What God permits must God approve,” she repeatedly told Alice, “and then it will be all right.” Whenever Alice had cause to quarrel with the strange twists of fate that had occurred in her life, she thought of this woman and her unlimited faith in God.

  Alice invited the man in. She wanted to ask him what had become of his family, but she could not find the words. “All four sons fell in Auschwitz,” said the man, as if he could read her thoughts. “The ramp—they did not even allow us enough time to say goodbye to one another.” He was disturbingly calm as he spoke. His wife, too, and their four daughters had not returned either.

  There were a few minutes of silence, which to Alice seemed like hours. She searched in vain for words of condolence, but the one word screaming in her head was “Leopold.” Instinctively she closed her eyes, as if the darkness could protect her from the truth. “L-e-o-p-o-l-d” continued to echo. When she opened her eyes and drew breath, the visitor began to talk slowly again. It had been a good thirty-five years since her grandmother had taught her the language of her forefathers, and Alice had lost interest in it soon afterward. But, although Yiddish was foreign to her, she understood the man. It seemed to her as if no other language expressed sadness and mourning more starkly.