I don’t know what the others were dreaming. Many in our community were already planning their departures. Among them were those who had never adjusted to the altitude. Those who never learned the language. Those whose expectations of the world remained European. Those who could afford to leave—the entrepreneurs who had built import-export businesses or made money in textiles.
The Andes had not captured them; Bolivia had only been a place to weather the storms of war. And life here wasn’t easy or free of conflict. Peace may have fallen on the rest of the world, but Bolivia had its own unresolved domestic tumult. In the summer of 1946, the country rose up against General Gualberto Villarroel. After a seething crowd tossed him from the balcony of the Presidential Palace, he and two other men were hanged in the plaza by their necks, their bodies left suspended there. I did not go to look. I already knew the message they sent. Peace or not, there was no safe place in the world.
* * *
• • •
WE DIDN’T ACTUALLY have a choice. While my father’s teaching income, along with the small amount my mother earned selling her food, was enough for us to live on, it wasn’t anything close to the amount we would need to journey back to Austria. To restart our interrupted lives. It seemed impossible that there were any jobs in Bolivia my parents could do that would pay enough to buy passage back.
My mother’s fingernails left deep grooves in the edges of dough she was shaping. She had stopped talking about Vienna, about what she had lost. During the war she had occasionally dreamed aloud of returning to Vienna. But now she spoke only in the present tense.
“To what?” she said. “Go back to what?”
I watched her for a while. Her face was closed to me. Why was her face so closed? “Mutti?” I finally ventured. “If you don’t want to go back, could you try to be here?”
She didn’t look up.
* * *
• • •
THAT NIGHT WHEN my father came home, my mother and I were listening to the news of Rudolf Hess’s forthcoming trial crackling through the radio. A reporter described his earlier suicide attempts as well as his recent efforts to convince the courts that he suffered from amnesia. I thought I could hear the skepticism in the reporter’s voice.
“I don’t know why they don’t let him kill himself.” My mother opened the oven to slide in a tray of rolls. “Is he such a great loss?”
My father set down his viola in the hallway and hung his hat on a hook by the door. With his coat still on, he walked over to the radio on the table and spun the dial. It took him a few minutes to find something that came in clearly, but he settled on Brazilian guitar music. “Ah, Panqueca,” he said.
I looked at him, curious.
“Heitor Villa-Lobos. 1900.”
“Since when are you such an expert on Brazilian musicians?” My mother set her oven mitts down on the table and reached for the radio.
“Ah, see, even you knew he was Brazilian! Julia, no—” He put a hand on her wrist.
“We were listening to the news.”
“We’ve had enough news.”
“It’s important! Hess is—”
“This enriches our lives how?”
“You think we shouldn’t pay attention to what’s going on?”
“Julia, I am tired of paying attention.”
She reached for the knob again.
“Julia!” I startled in my chair, unaccustomed to my father raising his voice. “Basta!”
My father never spoke to my mother in Spanish but it was clear she understood the word.
Enough.
Forty-nine
My aunt Thekla, the only member of our family we knew to be alive, was among the first wave of survivors to come to Bolivia, arriving just a couple months after the war ended. It was October 31, 1945, and the Bolivians were getting ready to celebrate día de Todos Santos, cleaning and repairing their family tombs. Before the Spanish came, the Bolivians often removed the moldering corpses from their graves to dance with them before tucking them back into the ground. When something at all unusual happened during this time—a flash of lightning or even an ant crawling over a favorite food—it was taken as a sign that the dead person had arrived for her twelve-hour visit. When I caught sight of my aunt getting off the train, my first thought was that she was among the visiting dead. Her once-lively face was gaunt, her eyes flat and vacant as they scanned the crowds at the station.
I wondered whether she would recognize me. It had been seven years. I had grown tall, bony, and graceless. While my breasts had filled out, my hips remained narrow like a boy’s. Almost half of my life was Bolivian, the half I remembered best. Spanish words came to me before German, despite the language of my schooling and my home. I was anxious to see my aunt. We had lived without any relatives for so long. It seemed a miracle there was one left alive. I was curious but also scared. I wanted to know what had happened in Europe, what had happened to her, but at the same time I didn’t want to know. I wanted to fill my ears with Andean sounds to drown out unbearable news.
We were waiting on the platform where we had disembarked nearly seven years earlier. Strange to think we had missed seven years of Austria. Looking at Thekla’s face, at the faces of the other survivors who arrived with her, I began to understand what we had escaped.
When she saw us, she didn’t smile. She lifted one frail hand to her hat, as if to tip it to us, then let it fall by her side. Limp and weary with travel, she wore a navy-blue skirt and jacket and a dirty white hat. As she stepped down from the train, she didn’t look around. She didn’t look up at the new sky, at our Illimani, at the red earth. As if it took the full force of her concentration, she set one foot on the ground in front of the other, walking on an invisible tightrope toward us.
“Thekla,” my mother said, pulling her sister into her arms. She held her like that for several minutes. It frightened me to see how my aunt’s formerly lively body sagged against my mother. Silently, my father embraced her next. At last, Thekla held out a thin hand to me. “Orlanthe.”
I couldn’t remember the last time someone had spoken my whole German name. “Auntie.” I kissed her awkwardly and then hung back, suddenly shy. I had never seen my aunt Thekla without my cousins, Klara and Felix. Without her husband, my uncle Tobias. She had always been a whirl of activity, fixing Klara’s hair, fretting over the state of Felix’s trousers. I hadn’t truly realized that my cousins were gone, actually gone, until that moment.
My mother took her hand and pulled her close again, twined their arms together. “Thekla.”
I followed my mother and her sister like a dog all the way home. Not once did my aunt turn to look at me. I tried to remember what we used to talk about.
Once we reached our apartment, my aunt went into her room and shut the door. She didn’t come out for dinner, despite my father’s tentative knock on her door. Nor did she emerge before I left for work the next morning. Now that I had finished school I was clerking at a small bookstore near the Plaza Murillo called Arbres Morts.
Thekla stirred her food around but ate only the things she didn’t need to chew. Soup. Tea. Soft fruits. My mother sneaked spoonful after spoonful of sugar into her tea, something to keep her upright. She arrived with just a few tufts of soft hair left on her skull under her hat and skin hanging loose from her thin arms, flapping when she moved them. “Don’t have survived for nothing,” my mother said. “You didn’t come this far to starve.”
My aunt stared at her. “For what did I come this far?”
Fifty
My mother had prepared Willi’s room for my aunt but Thekla insisted that I take it. “What do I need with so much space? Orly would surely find better use for it. If she wouldn’t mind, I would much prefer her room.”
I sat now in Willi’s room, on the sheets my mother had spent years washing once a week in preparation for his arrival. I ran my palm across the
cold pillow that never cradled my brother’s head. An alpaca blanket lay folded at the foot of the bed. My books were stacked on top of the dresser. My mother’s cookie tins filled a corner next to a music stand because we had run out of space everywhere else. I had always come here, to this room that contained no trace of Willi, when I most missed him. It had become my shul. This bed that should have been his was where I practiced the charango, where I wrote my letters, and where I sat staring out at the blank windows of the neighboring building and imagining my brother in the Alps.
On my lap, I held a stack of letters to Anneliese. “I don’t know whether to send them,” I said aloud to my ghost brother. “I don’t know if she could still be my Anneliese.” The survivors’ stories pouring from Europe were rife with tales of both self-sacrifice and betrayal, in near-equal measures. Just when we thought we could not bear to hear of one more death, one more shred of inhumanity, another would come. Our capacity to absorb trauma stretched like an overfilled balloon. Some days I thought it would all explode through my skin and shower a chemical rain on everyone around me.
I spread the seven years of letters out before me on the bed. There were stories of our adjustment, my illnesses, my school. There were stories of the city beneath the lake and the Andean animals. There was the story of Rachel. Would Anneliese remember who I was? Even as I asked that, I could hear my brother scoff. Anneliese? Forget you? It sounds like it is you who have forgotten Anneliese. It shamed me that my absent and now imaginary brother had more faith than I did. Shouldn’t I trust her, our connection, our history? Yet my capacity for trust was irrevocably shattered.
In autumn of 1945 the war was over, but nothing else was. Not the loss that would resonate through generations, not the inhumanity of those who had fled justice, and not our displacement. Our family had a black hole in it, a bottomless magnetic absence that sometimes threatened to absorb us all. What remained was my longing for my brother, for my joking, teasing, singing brother. If only I had known how much I would miss being called Peanut.
I had stopped seeking connections between this home and that old world, the one now hollowed out of our people. I had begun to seek out difference, to welcome anything that separated us from the people who had destroyed so much.
I wouldn’t send the letters yet, I thought, and risk them disappearing into the void. I would send instead a brief note to make sure that she had stayed, that she was where we had left her. I first had to know there was a safe house for these scrapings of my psyche. My heart stuttered when I thought of it, my new freedom to write to her. There was no way to sum up anything, so my note was as brief as possible. “My Dearest Anneliese—are you still my Anneliese? Tell me you haven’t left for Friedenglückhasenland without me. Love, your Orly.” My father gave me a stamp and his blessing and we walked to the post office together. At the last moment, when my father turned away to speak to the clerk, I quickly kissed the envelope before letting it fall through the slot, where it slipped into the stacks of paper-thin hope.
* * *
• • •
MY AUNT THEKLA had arrived with one outfit, one pair of shoes, and a copy of the Torah. Unrecognizable as the aunt who had once taught me how to polka and told me gay bedtime stories about the scandalous Alma Mahler, she unnerved me. She never smiled, never asked questions. She sat at the table and stared at us. She was like a child, needing to be led from room to room and told what to do. Any sort of volition had vanished. Or rather, had been erased.
Aunt Thekla had lost her two children, her husband, and her parents. She had survived only because she had been given a job to do in Auschwitz, my mother said. I was afraid of learning more.
At night I sometimes heard her crying in her room. It wasn’t energetic, crisis-related crying, a cathartic crying. It was the low moan of a hopelessness without limits. When I heard that sound I wound my scarf around my head to muffle the noise. That noise peeled the membranes from my nerves, left me vibrating with borrowed pain. Atmospheric pain, weaving the web in which we all were caught.
Sometimes I heard my mother creep down the hall to Thekla’s room, and found them curled together in the sheets in the morning. Sometimes I heard their voices in the night, my mother’s steady and calm, Thekla’s wild. As I lay there, listening, I couldn’t help wondering why my mother had never comforted me like that.
One afternoon I was in my room, tugging the sweater over the head of the doll I had received my first day in Bolivia. Though I had never played with her, she had always lived in a corner of my room, her blue eyes staring vacantly at the walls. I don’t know why I kept her. I could have given her to one of the children I had looked after, I could have thrown her out. But she had been a gift, and for that reason she stayed.
When I moved into Willi’s room I set her on top of my mother’s tins. The colors of the sweater Nayra made her looked faded in the morning sun streaming in through the window.
I dropped the small sweater on the bed. “It’s almost summer,” I told her. “You’ll be too hot.” Underneath she still wore the dusty Austrian dress in which she had arrived. A pink apron, a blue bodice. If I washed the clothes, I could give the doll to one of the younger children.
As I tore the dress from her body, I heard the shuffling footsteps of my aunt approach my door and stop abruptly. One bony hand clutching my doorframe, she swayed as she stared at the doll in my hands. A look of horror had frozen on her face. I dropped the doll on the bed and went to her. “Aunt Thekla? Are you all right?” But she didn’t say a word. Staring at the doll, she stepped backward, one tiny step at a time. “It’s just a doll,” I said. “I’m going to give her to one of the new children.” My aunt didn’t look like she had heard. She turned before I could say anything else, and fled down the hallway to her room.
I picked up the doll and found my mother standing at the kitchen counter, writing out a recipe. “Mutti, something odd just happened.”
As I described my aunt’s behavior, the vertical line between her eyes deepened. “Oh, what’s the use of trying to protect you?” she said finally. “You’ll know anyway. You’ll know more than you ever wanted to know about our inhuman species.”
She sat down on a kitchen chair and looked up at me. Her face was thinner, her eyes darker. Her hair had gone flat and lusterless, though I’m not sure she cared. I was too nervous to move. “You know your aunt was in one of those camps.”
I nodded. Of course I did. Everybody knew. It was obvious.
“Susse. Mein Schatz. At that camp. . . .” My mother swallowed. She looked down at her lap and would not find my eyes. She cleared her throat and began again. “At that camp it was her job to undress the babies and the smallest children before the showers.”
I stared at her uncomprehendingly. “For the showers? What do you mean? What showers?”
Her jaw tightened. “The showers that were not showers. The showers that were death.”
My body didn’t feel like it belonged to me. It had gone rigid where I stood in the middle of the room. My mind had floated out of it. Away from this conversation. But my mouth continued to form words. “How did they die? Did they all die?”
My mother reached out and pulled me into her, so I collapsed into her lap, though I was far too large for it. “They died different ways. In the showers they sent in a gas that killed them.”
“Did it hurt?” I set the doll on the table before us and we looked down at her unblinking eyes.
“I don’t know. No, I feel sure that it didn’t hurt.”
“But they must have been so afraid.”
“Yes.” My mother turned her head to the window.
“Aunt Thekla helped them? To send the babies there?”
“She didn’t have a choice. If she hadn’t done what they told her to do, they would have killed her.”
Grabbing the doll, I stood and moved away from my mother. “She sent children in to die?”
“The children were going to die whether or not she undressed them.”
“What if everyone refused to do it? Everyone?”
“Would you be that brave?”
I was silent.
My mother sighed. “You and I can never understand what happened there, my dove. What Thekla has endured is worse than we can imagine. We cannot know what we would do facing what she faced.”
I tightened my arms around the doll, rocking on the soles of my feet. I wondered if Thekla had thought about choosing death. She must have.
My mother didn’t say any more. I walked back to my room, put all the clothing back on my doll, and tucked her under the covers of my bed.
Fifty-one
Violinist Viktor Robitsek’s expulsion from the Vienna Philharmonic after the Anschluss had begun the exodus. Thirteen Jewish musicians lost their jobs. Five of those men were murdered: Violinist Moriz Glattauer died in Theresienstadt, and his wife, Anna, was gassed in Auschwitz; Robitsek and his wife, Elsa, died in Lodz; violinist/violist Max Starkmann and his wife, Elsa, were killed near Minsk/Maly Trostinec; concertmaster and violinist Julius Stwertka and his wife, Rosa, were deported to the Jewish ghetto in Theresienstadt. Rosa died in Auschwitz but the date of her death and the fate of her body are unknown. Oboist Armin Tyroler and his wife, Rudolfine, were deported to Auschwitz.
Two more, Paul Fischer and Anton Weiss, died as a result of evictions and resulting illnesses. Even today we don’t know their whole stories.
Only their deaths are recorded, little of their lives, their personhood, their disappointments and hopes, the people who depended on them, whose hearts they held, whose hearts they broke.
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