by John Lawton
One of the soldiers turned the body over with his boot, then gestured with a thumbs-down to the other two.
She turned her head away. Every head in the tram was facing forward, every head practicing what she had not, and what every Viennese had learned since the fickle day they had cheered Hitler into the Heldenplatz—see no evil. This was how Vienna survived.
Only one face looked back at her. The SS Hauptsturmführer. He picked up the brown paper parcel next to her.
“Yours?” he said simply.
Hear no evil.
“No. N . . . n . . . no.”
Speak no evil.
“It was . . .”
“His? The boy’s? Fine, you come along with me, young lady.”
With one hand he hefted the parcel, with the other he took her by the arm—firmly enough to let her know that if she squirmed or tried to break his grip he would hurt her.
They took her in an open car with a flapping canvas roof to a police station in Marokkanergasse, south of the city centre near the Belvedere gardens.
Sitting alone in a cell she thought it could not be long before her father came to collect her—explanations, apologies, bribes, although one had to be very careful how one bribed a German. But her father never came. In the morning a guard awoke her at first light and, feeling stiff, cold, and sleepless, she was hustled into a police van and driven off again.
Through the grille that separated her from the driver she could see that they were crossing the entire city centre to reach the northern side. For a while she thought that they might simply be taking her home. A good ticking off and returned to the bosom of her family. But the van turned right towards the Danube Canal and pulled up at the Rossauer Lände Prison, a monstrosity in red and dirty cream brick not half a kilometre from her parents’ apartment.
She knew Rossauer Lände. It was where the Jews had been held in the early days of the war, prior to being relocated in the east. There had been much talk of the new towns in the eastern Reich, there had been endless radio broadcasts at school—lectures by Hitler himself—on the matter of Lebensraum. Plenty of people had told her that the Jews would be better off in the east. There was talk of a new town just for Jews, Osswichim, or Auswiczin, or some such Polish word. But mostly there was little talk of the Jews and no one ever seemed to hear from them. Another motto the Viennese had learnt in the eagerness of their lazy embrace of national socialism was “out of sight, out of mind”—and among the new tasks the Führer had set them that day in the Heldenplatz, the most daunting, and the least mentioned, was “what to do with the Jews?”: “The Jewish Problem,” as it was so neatly called, as though it were no more than a matter of faulty plumbing or a blocked drain.
Alone in a cell once more she could hear nothing but the sound of doors banging down distant corridors and of water dripping. There were no human noises, no voices, no footsteps. And then it dawned on her. The prison was empty, and it was empty because Vienna had no more Jews. Once, at the end of the decade, there had been close to a quarter of a million. Now there were none.
§37
The following morning she awoke, stiffer than the day before, and feeling decidedly grubby. An almost irresistible urge to scratch.
Still her father did not come.
Around ten in the morning a guard came and led her into an office overlooking the Danube Canal.
One desk, two chairs. Rows of empty shelving. It was as though they’d opened up and ripped off the dust covers just for her.
Leaning against the desk was the Hauptsturmführer who had arrested her. Roberto’s brown paper parcel was on the desk, one corner torn open.
The Hauptsturmführer swung the shutters to cut the glare of the eastern light and motioned to her to sit.
“You’re a mystery, aren’t you?”
“I’m sorry, sir?”
He sat down behind the desk. He was almost relaxed, the top two buttons of his tunic undone. Oak leaves and flashes of lightning.
“Yesterday and the day before we smashed a resistance cell.”
“I had nothing to do with that.”
“But you knew the boy we shot. The boy on the tram. You were sitting with him.”
“Yes. I knew him. Roberto—”
“—Cacciato. Clarinet player with the Vienna Youth Orchestra. And you are?”
“I’m the principal cellist.”
“I meant your name.”
“Voytek, sir. Méret Voytek.”
“Voytek? That’s not an Austrian name. You aren’t Jewish?”
“If I were Jewish, sir, I would be obliged to wear a yellow star.”
“Indeed. So what are you?”
“My grandfather was Hungarian. He came here in the days of the empire.”
He was shaking his head now—unbelieving.
“It’s not a Hungarian name, either. You aren’t Jewish?”
“No, sir. The name is Polish. My grandfather used to tell me that his grandfather was Polish in the time of Napoleon. One emperor came west, another emperor came east, and Poles fled south. My grandfather said Hungary could make nothing of the surname, so his grandfather’s Christian name became our surname. I have always been a Voytek. I have never been Jewish. It is a Christian name.”
“It seems you have half Europe flowing in your veins. A true child of the ancien régime. So, Fraulein Voytek. How did you know Roberto Cacciato?”
“From the orchestra, and he was the year above me at the Konservatorium.”
“Why were you on the tram together?”
“I was on my way home after rehearsal. Two or three stops after I got on Roberto just appeared next to me.”
“You were not travelling together?”
“No, sir.”
“You weren’t a member of his cell?”
“No, sir, ask them. They will surely tell you.”
“No can do. We smashed them to pieces I’m afraid. You’re the sole survivor.”
It was shocking and strange. He was almost sighing at the stupidity of his own men and she was the sole survivor of something to which she’d never belonged. She wanted to ask how many young men and women had been killed but didn’t dare.
“And I suppose you know nothing about this?”
He tore more of the wrapping away from the parcel and spread a couple of dozen flyers out in front of her in a fan.
There was a red hammer and sickle, a black mailed fist, and in blue the slogan “Resist or Die.”
“Crude and colourful,” he said. “And remarkably accurate.”
“Please, sir, I have never seen them before. They were left on the seat next to me. Was not the parcel unopened when you found it?”
He said nothing to this, walked over to the window, peeked through the shutters, rummaged in his pockets for his cigarette case, and lit up. Precisely the kind of time-wasting gesture Viktor Rosen used to indulge in.
She twisted in the chair to address him directly.
“Please, sir, you know I am innocent.”
He walked back behind the desk, puffing on his cigarette. Footsteps echoing in the empty room. Ruminative, weighing up her life over a few flakes of tobacco.
“Yes. I know that,” he said at last. “But it doesn’t make a scrap of difference.”
“It must.”
He shook his head, chin up, exhaling a plume of smoke.
“No, no, no, young lady. You are forgetting the rule of possession.”
“Possession?”
“We have you. That is all that matters. We have you.”
“You could let me go. Think of it as . . . as throwing back a sprat.”
He smiled at the image she had presented him.
“The Third Reich doesn’t throw back a sprat. If we did we might one day face an army of sprats.”
§38
It was late afternoon before he sent for her again.
His uniform was buttoned now. He was wearing a field-grey greatcoat. His cap with its death’s head crest sat on the desk where
Roberto’s parcel had been. He was reading from a brown cardboard file—a spread eagle clutching a swastika in its claws stamped on the cover in red—but the sense of imminent departure was all around him.
They were in transit.
The two of them.
“This will interest you.”
He looked up at her. His voice soft and friendly as though sharing a confidence with her.
“To know what informants say about them would surely fascinate anyone? A bit like reading your sister’s diary. For example . . . overheard in your local baker’s . . . ‘Herr Voytek is nothing more than a dreamer . . . a woolly headed man of woolly headed politics’ . . . and in the butcher’s . . . ‘Eva Voytek is a hard-faced bitch . . . a cryptofascist without the guts to come out of her closet.’ Does this sound accurate to you?”
Was this what the Nazis had done? Turned every marketplace gossip into an informant? Every street-corner layabout into a secret agent? A world in which everyone spied on everyone else?
“None of it . . . none of it mentions me.”
“Fair enough . . .”
He flipped over a page.
“Listen to this. ‘That child of theirs . . . a po-faced girl who’ll grow up to be a po-faced woman. Talk about a stick up the arse.’ Not a phrase I’ve ever heard before, but I think its meaning is obvious. Do you have a stick up your arse?”
Méret said nothing.
He slapped the file down.
“No, I wouldn’t answer that one, either. These people are pathetic. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. They’d all rat you out for a threepenny bit. Let’s go.”
§39
It was almost dusk. He drove her to the Nordbahnhof himself, without escort. The only sign that she was under arrest was the unbuttoned flap on the holster that held his Luger.
Inside the station an engine was backing a line of boxcars, all with Italian markings, down the track to be coupled to an ancient Imperial Austrian State Railways third-class corridor passenger carriage. A broken boxcar with a shattered axle lay on its side where the Germans had tipped it. She could only think that they’d raided a museum to find its replacement.
Down the platform a hundred odd people cowered behind a cordon of soldiers with fixed bayonets—in the dimness of the blacked-out railway station at dusk the yellow stars on their coats seemed almost luminous.
“Get on before the Italians. They’ve been thirty-two hours in cattle wagons from Florence, Lucca, Pisa . . . God knows where . . . they’re tired, hungry, and frightened and they’ll still fight you for an arseworth of space on a bench with no cushions and no upholstery.”
Half a dozen carpenters appeared with planks and nails and began to board up the windows. She got on to the train, stood in the corridor, looking back at the Hauptsturmführer as he was looking back at her. He looked to his left at the crowd of Jews, casually pressed the stud shut on the flap of his holster.
As he turned to leave she said loudly, “Where am I going?”
He turned back, took half a dozen paces closer to her.
Not raising his voice to the level of hers, but audible in the noise of the station, still the friendly tone, still sharing a confidence, “Auschwitz.”
Was this the Osswichim, or Auswiczin she’d heard about?
“The town of the Jews? But I am not Jewish!”
“Then you might well survive.”
“My father,” she said. “My father . . .”
But the carpenters had reached her window. He could not hear her for the banging of hammers, and a few seconds later all she could see through the gap in the boards was his back in the field-grey greatcoat moving away from her.
§40
The Italians crammed in, four and five to a side, children sitting in the aisle between, and the corridors packed.
Next to her a wizened old woman wept continuously. Opposite her a well-dressed man in a black overcoat with a beaver collar, a homburg hat, and pince-nez that perched upon his nose as though glued there. A shiny leather briefcase between his knees—a yellow star sewn to his chest—but then they all wore yellow stars. Within ten minutes of the train pulling away, east towards Czechoslovakia, the rapid Italian chatter slowed and then stopped as though they had exhausted their capacity for talk.
Only the sound of weeping and groaning. The children sat hunched, arms around their knees, silent as if baffled.
She was amazed at how much they carried. One woman appeared to have stripped her bed and bundled it up with a knot. Another had her worldly possessions in a long-handled copper jam pan that sat on her lap. A man in the corner seemed to have lifted the portraits of everyone in his family off the sitting room wall and sat with them bound up in string and clutched to his chest. Somewhere out of sight someone else had carried on a concertina and every so often would play for ten or fifteen minutes—the gaiety of his tunes at odds with their dirgelike progress east.
The man opposite eventually introduced himself in slow, emphatic Italian she assumed he reserved for talking to foreigners.
“Eli Cresca. Bibliotecario di Lucca.”
Méret’s Italian was good. She replied with name and occupation, and asked why he had a knife, fork, and spoon sticking out of the breast pocket of his overcoat.
“Lest I forget,” he said. “I am told there are shortages of such things in the new cities of the east. They may have no knives and forks. And if they do, well, mine are silver and saleable. Portable property as such. And they may have librarians already. It might be a while before I could start to earn my living. Who knows, I might be lucky.”
The word was startling. Lucky. What could any of this have to do with luck?
“Things could improve,” Cresca added. “I mean. Last night we were in a cattle truck. A bucket of water to drink from and a barrel to pee in.”
“A barrel?”
“Yes. In the middle of the truck for all to use.”
“For all to see? Men as well as women?”
“Yes. It was unavoidable. Today, I have a seat and the use of a lavatory that, whilst it may be just a hole onto the tracks below, is behind a door.”
This was unbelievable. They had done that—in public—in front of one another?
“Who knows,” he said, “what tomorrow may bring.”
§41
They had sat all night and most of the next day in a siding in marshland, mist swirling off in the pale sunlight, settling again as dusk approached. Through a gap in the boards she could see that they were on the edge of a town or perhaps a factory complex—whatever it was, the Germans were guarding it with barbed wire, floodlights, and machine-gun posts. The night sky had glowed red and three tall chimneys blew flames into darkness some twenty feet high as though releasing an explosion. And when day had broken a grey haze covered everything and blotted out the sky.
Late in the afternoon the train lurched into motion, through gates, past barbed wire, into the factory.
Somewhere, a band was playing. A ludicrous accompaniment to the confusion into which they had been plunged. A strident, vigorous Hungarian march, Liszt’s Rákóczi—it was the sort of thing you played to a youth group as they marched off to summer camp.
The clash of steel on steel as the train stopped.
A babble of voices. Screams from somewhere up the line.
“Raus! Raus!”
“Funf zu funf!”
And still no one moved.
Then the boards on the windows were ripped off as though a hurricane had struck, and rifles smashed the glass.
“Raus! Raus!”
“Funf zu funf!”
They leapt to the ground, one by one, not five by five.
Up the line, the boxcar doors had opened and the living and the dead fell to the ground in dozens, ghostly creatures in blue-and-white striped pyjamas swarming over them like flies upon a corpse.
An SS Sturmmann turned his attention to the group she had travelled with.
“Drop everything. Line up in fives.
In fives! Five by five!”
The woman with the bedding dropped her parcel. The woman with the cooking pan clung on and had it knocked from her hands by a rifle butt.
“You’ll get it all back later. Line up. Jews to the left, everyone else to the right.”
This caused more confusion. Some went left, some went right, some stayed rooted to the spot, some dropped their possessions, some held on. They were like skittles struck by a wooden ball. Méret, thinking she was in all probability the only non-Jew there, wondered, To the right of what?
After the static night and a day in the siding everything was suddenly in motion. Right and left meant too little. Space and direction were inadequate. What counted was that that which had been still was now in motion, shifting like sand beneath her feet.
She followed Cresca. He had been a lifeline for almost two days in a cold, dark, smelly railway carriage. A kindly old man who had shared his food with her and tried to share his optimism. Now, in the reduced world, in the shifting world into which they had just descended, he was all she knew.
The pyjama creatures moved among them, crouched and cowed, whispering, as though they might walk through walls with the merest effort.
“Leave it all. Do as they say. Leave it all. It cannot help you now. It shall not help you now.”
An SS Sturmbannführer picked his way among the personal possessions of the Italians, kicking them aside—an elephant in the sitting room, the hooligan at the dining table.
He directed Cresca to the left with a flick of his thumb. Cresca was still clutching his briefcase, his knife, fork, and spoon still stuck out of the top pocket of his overcoat. Telling him to drop the case only made him clutch it more tightly until a rifle butt knocked it from his hand and another knocked him to the ground. The cutlery shot from his pocket onto the trampled slush that covered the earth. With blood streaming into his eyes Signor Cresca at last had vision and seemed to know that where he was going he would have no need of cutlery. He picked up the three pieces of silverware and held them out to Méret. She bent to take them from him but as two soldiers hoisted him up at the armpits to drag him away he dropped them all. She put her fingers into the black snow to retrieve this last gift, and as she did so, a shining black boot placed itself upon her knuckles. She looked up to see the Sturmbannführer smiling at her and as he smiled the pressure from his foot increased.
