Exile Music

by Jennifer Steil

  “Stefi!” I ran to her, squishing the bread between us. Her warm arms wrapped around me, brief reassurance that some good remained in Austria. I pressed my face into the rough cloth of her dress, breathed in the faint scent of perspiration and dishwashing soap. What would happen to her once we were gone? “Orlanthe,” she said in a strangled voice. “The Meiers?”

  “Not Ana!” I pulled back, anxious to defend her.

  “Of course not Ana.” Stefi set the bread on the counter, took a breath, then picked it up and handed it to me. “What else do you need?” With renewed purpose she pulled me into my room and yanked my dirndl off a hanger and pulled it over my head, on top of the plain green dress I had on. “Wear this, it’s your favorite.” She tied my apron and stuffed my pockets with clean underpants. “Wash them out every night. Comb your hair. Help your parents. Where is Lebkuchen?”

  I had time only to tuck Lebkuchen into the waistband of my apron, wrap a coat around me, and extend my hand and for the briefest caress of the worn posts of my bed. The only bed I had ever known, the bed that had seemed the stable foundation of my life. Never again would I lie beside Anneliese as we fought off sleep with our stories. Never again would we jump up to touch the carved lion heads on either side of our front door, telling them hello and good-bye. Never again would I run through the halls to her apartment, taking the stairs two at a time in a hurry to be with her. Never again would my mother or Stefi pull our breakfast rolls from that oven. All of the loss happened so quickly it was impossible to absorb. Loss must be assimilated in increments.

  As the men and the Meiers urged us over the threshold of our front door for the last time, Stefi watched from the kitchen. When the Meiers passed her, the last to go, I heard her unmistakable whisper. “You should be ashamed.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I HATED THE APARTMENT on Czerinplatz. There was always someone climbing over me, always parents or uncles or grandparents or cousins or strangers quarreling. My grandmother, my powerful socialist grandmother who had been evicted shortly after we had, fell mute. My grandfather, who couldn’t stand to stay inside, paced the streets despite the dangers. My father stared out the one window, absently patting his pocket for the pipe that he could no longer afford to smoke. The pipe he had sold months ago. No one was in the mood to entertain me, not even Aunt Thekla. No one was optimistic enough to offer me comfort. I could never go to the toilet without someone hammering on the door the entire time. Chronic embarrassment constipated me. I shared the bedroom with five other children and four adults. We put the littlest ones in the middle of the two beds, so they wouldn’t fall out, and at least once a week one of them wet the bed. Those who couldn’t claim a spot on the edge of a bed slept on the floor on mattresses or in nests made from blankets. I preferred to sleep with my parents on the floor. The other nine adults who couldn’t fit in the bedroom slept on the floors and sofas of the living room and the kitchen. Every other day I washed out my underwear in the sink, as Stefi had instructed.

  I tried not to complain to my parents. They were miserable enough. They were powerless enough. They didn’t need to be reminded of my discomfort. What could they have done?

  Because Willi was so much older and had often been out with his friends and activities, I had been accustomed to a tranquil home, with only Anneliese, Stefi, or my parents for company. I liked quiet, in which I could lie on my bed dreaming up new adventures from my old life in Friedenglückhasenland. I liked hearing nothing but the scratching of my school pencil on paper. Or when my parents were home, a stream of sonatas and fugues. But Leopoldstadt was full of people, and all their sounds. Perhaps because it was so loud, everyone shouted to be heard.

  Now there was not even music.

  At first the only place I dreamed of going was back home. Back to the scratched wooden surface of the kitchen table where I did my sums and read my schoolbooks while listening to the controlled tremor of my mother’s voice. To those soaring notes that were the background of my life. I dreamed myself back into Stefi’s comforting arms, to picking out songs on the piano with Anneliese, to racing with Willi through the paths in the Vienna Woods.

  Yet eventually I was forced to dream forward instead of back. No longer could I dream of Friedenglückhasenland. I could not remember its contours or believe in its magic. I dreamed of escape to somewhere my mother could sing. A place where my mother would smile. It took too long for me to believe it, but it was becoming clear that this place was not in Austria.

  * * *

  • • •

  ONCE WE MOVED to Leopoldstadt, we spent much of our time standing in lines. My parents had to get official certificates from the Polizeikommissariat in order to apply for exit papers. They used their meager savings to pay the Reichsfluchtsteuer, the Reich Flight Tax assessed at 25 percent of our assets, to get permission to leave the country. Every single transaction required waiting for hours, sometimes an entire day, in a queue of equally frantic people. My mother pawned her jewelry for a sixteenth of its worth. She sold her gold wedding band, studded with small diamonds. “At this point I don’t think I question your father’s commitment,” she said in response to my cry of dismay. It was the last piece of jewelry she owned. But it didn’t bring in much. Not even enough for a single passage on a ship.

  Seventeen

  On August 8, 1938, Nazis open the Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz.

  Willi was already gone. He had left a couple months after we moved to Czerinplatz. Young men his age were supposed to be in the military; it was risky for him to be seen on the streets. It was something of a miracle that Willi, Felix, Uncle Tobias, and my father had escaped the initial roundups. My mother said maybe they were only taking Jews who had previous criminal convictions. Before we left home, the adults had gathered in our kitchen to figure out where Willi and Felix could hide. A former school friend of Willi’s who was now an officer in the army urged him to flee. “If you present yourself to the army you will go straight to the camp. I’ve seen it. You must try to get away before they start looking for you.”

  He and my father sat up late with maps of river and borders. Swimming had been a wise choice of sport, my father said. Swimming is going to be useful. Yet the plan they concocted meant Felix, a much weaker swimmer, would have to find another way.

  Once we were evicted, it was clear Willi couldn’t wait any longer. He said good-bye to us all, to the city, his friends, his life. My mother wrote down the address of her friend Violaine, a French singer in Paris, someone to whom he could send letters letting us know where he was. Someone my mother could contact with our whereabouts, should we be forced to move again. Once we found a way out for the rest of us, we would leave word with Violaine. Willi could join us wherever we landed.

  I wanted to give him something he could take with him to remind him of me, but I had so little left. He refused my offer of Lebkuchen, much to my relief. So I sat down on the floor with my father’s last pen and a scrap of carton I had found in the trash, and I drew Willi standing among forested mountains next to a lake, surrounded by rabbits. Over the top I wrote: Valid from today until infinity. It was a visa to Friedenglückhasenland.

  When I gave it to him he turned his head away and when I pulled his face back to mine I could see he was crying. “Meet me there,” he said. “Okay, little one? Promise you will meet me there.”

  And then I had no brother.

  * * *

  • • •

  EVERYTHING HAPPENED ABRUPTLY. One minute you were forking noodles onto someone’s dinner plate and the next second he was taken away. Children came home excitedly clutching a high mark on a school paper to find their parents gone, their homes echoing and empty.

  So much worse happened after we left, so much that we didn’t learn until after the war. So much that was unfathomable, incomprehensible. We were the fortunate ones.

  We had no idea how fortunate.

&nb
sp; * * *

  • • •

  WE KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO Willi because he wrote to us, a letter that was left crumpled on the floor inside our front door. Delivered by someone whose face we would never know, who had brought it from Paris.

  Willi’s schoolfriend Jost, who was now in the SS (as was everyone who wasn’t Jewish, it seemed), had bought him railroad tickets to a village near the Swiss border, just north of Lichtenstein. Willi waited on the banks of the Inn River until dark and then he swam to Switzerland. I was thankful that he crossed over in a warm month.

  After the Anschluss, as thousands of us flooded the border, Switzerland began to insist we acquire consular visas before crossing over. But there had been no time for Willi to acquire a visa, there was no time for him to do anything but to run and to swim.

  * * *

  • • •

  AFTER AUGUST 19, 1938, Switzerland closed its borders to Jews, batting us back into the monsters’ jaws. Only Denmark, alone in Europe, made any effort to rescue its Jews. Just that one cold island.

  * * *

  • • •

  BUT IN JULY 1938, Switzerland couldn’t send Willi back—or so we thought. There was a rumor at the time that if you managed to get twenty kilometers inside Switzerland they had to let you stay. We heard stories of German Jewish families sent back over the border and promptly arrested. What happened to them after that we still didn’t know, or refused to know.

  When Willi had swum across the river he walked until morning. When he reached a village he stopped to ask a woman selling vegetables how far he was from the border. “More than twenty kilometers,” she said, smiling. “You are safe.” As if there were such a thing. As if there is.

  But Willi could not rest. Switzerland had no intention of keeping refugees. It had declared itself to be a “transit-only” country for Jewish exiles. We could not settle in, set up professional lives, contribute to the economy, or contaminate their landscape with our offspring. Unemployment was high enough at the time, and its immigrant population already swelling. So they said.

  Willi took shelter in a refugee camp financed by the Jews of Switzerland, and began his search for a country that would grant him sanctuary while he waited for us. My parents had had time to help him craft a way out of Austria, but neither the time nor the resources to help him find a path beyond the border. The next step he had to take alone.

  Eighteen

  On August 17, 1938, all Jews are forced to adopt a Jewish middle name—either Israel or Sarah—to make them easier to identify.

  Back in Leopoldstadt that July, we conducted our own, parallel search. There must be some country that would want us. There must be opera houses full of people clamoring to hear my mother sing. There must be orchestras in need of one Austrian violist. Surely somewhere no one would mind what god our ancestors worshipped.

  Our choices were rapidly diminishing. The United States had established visa quotas for each country, including ours. While we had each registered for a number on the quota waiting list, we were unable to come up with the necessary affidavits of support. We had no relatives in the United States. We didn’t know any U.S. citizens who might fill out the extensive paperwork on our behalf. We also needed proof that we had booked tickets on ships to the West. But how could we spend money on tickets when we were not sure of admission? The United States required recent tax returns and proof that there was money in our bank accounts. This made my mother laugh. “Have the Americans not heard what has become of our bank accounts? Don’t they know that we are not allowed to leave the country with more than ten Reichsmarks in our pockets?”

  My mother had taken over responsibility for all of our paperwork. My father was too slow, too methodical, and too likely to get distracted by the children crying from the corners of the squalid apartment, the adults bickering over food, or even a birdcall outside the window. My mother attacked our visa applications with the zealousness she once applied to a daunting aria. She wielded her fountain pen so fiercely she often punctured the papers upon which she wrote.

  When the U.S. embassy turned us away, one or all three of us waited in lines at the embassies or consulates of France, Ireland, Latvia, Hungary, Brazil, Australia, Yugoslavia, Argentina, New Zealand, and Canada. We still thought we had a choice. My parents still thought we might move somewhere with symphonies and theaters.

  None of these countries wanted Jews, particularly Jews who were guaranteed to arrive penniless. They didn’t want musicians, actors, composers, singers, professors, writers, or intellectuals. They wanted people with practical skills who would earn a steady and taxable income. They wanted plumbers, undertakers, electricians, and carpenters. “Surely there is more to life than the fulfillment of basic needs for shelter and water,” said my mother, flinging a stack of paperwork to the floor. “Surely there are souls in these countries who cry out for music. Why else live?”

  “It is entirely possible, my love, that these countries have their own musicians and philosophers.”

  “Who don’t want competition? Is that it? But I can’t do anything else but sing!”

  “I don’t know.” My father offered her a faint smile. “Your cooking isn’t half bad.”

  * * *

  • • •

  WE KNOW NOW how lucky we were to be denied visas to the countries of Europe, but we did not feel lucky at the time. We were running out of options. It stopped mattering to us where we went—my parents no longer made any mention of their careers—only that we be allowed to go somewhere.

  Finally, there were just three countries left that might take us. We might be allowed into Japanese-occupied Shanghai, which didn’t require visas. Or into the Dominican Republic, which had taken some distant cousins. And then, through the whisper network of those desperate to get out, came word that Bolivia was still taking Jews.

  I had never heard of Bolivia. Bolivien. I rolled the word around in my mouth like a sweet. When my parents talked about going to Bolivia they used words like “primitive,” “wild,” and “tropics.” My father had been on tour in South America (though not in Bolivia) with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1923, but when I pressed him, he would only say it was different from Europe. Later, I would find out that three members of the orchestra had died on that journey. Two contracted malaria and one committed suicide.

  Left to my imagination, I envisioned living on a vast farm of some kind and riding horses across green fields, into lush forests, picking unfamiliar fruits from the trees as I rode along. In my mind Bolivia merged with Friedenglückhasenland until they were no longer distinguishable. They were my Eden, my promised land, my escape from fear. In Bolivia we would have land and raise rabbits. In Bolivia there would always be sun. In Bolivia my parents could work again. In Bolivia when the sun set my mother would sing as she made Käsespätzle.

  At the same time, I could not imagine a land without Anneliese. She had always been there. She was part of the architecture of my life. How could I venture into any world without her?

  Dear Anneliese, I wrote on scraps of paper in the darkness of our room at night as the other children whimpered or slept. Did you know there are sinkholes in Friedenglückhasenland? Sometimes you fall into a hole in the street and fall and fall almost forever. You could stop halfway down, but then you have no way to get back up. It’s best to just let yourself fall until you are on the other side of the world.

  I never sent the letter; my mother told me I might endanger Anneliese if I did. No one’s letters were private anymore. This did not stop me from writing. I needed to speak to her, even if she never heard my words.

  * * *

  • • •

  GETTING VISAS FOR OURSELVES was difficult enough, but my parents also wanted to save their families. My mother had two younger sisters still in Graz, who remained reluctant to leave Austria, unable to imagine a life elsewhere. The younger of those two had a husband, my uncle Marcel, and a dau
ghter, my little cousin Violette. My Graz grandparents’ bakery had been “Aryanized,” meaning it had been stolen by the Nazis. “How will they eat? They cannot survive there,” my mother fretted to Thekla. Yet things were hardly better in Vienna.

  We needed fourteen visas. Not counting Willi, and not counting my uncle Franz, my father’s brother, who lived in Berlin and refused to consider leaving.

  I walked to the Bolivian consulate with my father, grateful to be out of the clamor and stench of the apartment. The consulate occupied the top floor of a cold and narrow house on Waaggasse, just two and a half blocks from the Naschmarkt, where we used to go on the occasional Sunday for lunch. My father liked to buy the Austrian pancakes called Palatschinken, while I helped my mother pick out cherries, Turkish honey, and fresh fish. Knowing we no longer had enough money to stop, I didn’t slow my steps as we passed the market. Maybe they wouldn’t even take our money anymore. Jewish vendors had been driven out, their wares stolen.