Other People’s Houses Read online

  One day, the first German regiment moved in. By noon, the square outside our windows was black with tanks, armored cars, radio trucks. Our yard was requisitioned for the paymaster’s headquarters. The soldiers borrowed one of our kitchen chairs and the card table on which Paul and Liesel had written the story of Vaselina.

  Two helmeted guards stood on either side of the table while the German soldiers in their gray-green uniforms filed past to collect their money. I sat in the passageway that led from the storeroom into the yard, watching. I had the cat on my lap. My father leaned out and told me to wash my hands. My mother said for me to go and play upstairs or the soldiers might see me. What bothered me was not that they might see me, but that in fact they did not, and I got hold of the cat and turned its ears inside out and tied my skipping rope around its neck until it yowled.

  The paymaster looked around. “Well now,” he said. “Now, you don’t want to do that to the poor pussy.”

  “Pardon?” I said politely. Though I had heard very well what he said, I wanted to hear him say “Kätzchen” again—the unfamiliar harsh-sounding diminutive of “cat,” so different from the tenderly comic sound of the Austrian “Katzerl.” The animal meanwhile was choking. The paymaster rose and came over, saying, “Armes kleines Kätzchen” (“Poor little kitten”), and untied it. He asked me if I knew how to skip rope, and I said yes. He ordered one of the helmeted guards to hold the other end of the rope. The line of soldiers stood at ease against the vine-covered walls. I skipped and recited:

  “Auf der blauen Donau

  Schwimmt ein Krokodil …”

  This was about the time that Neville Chamberlain paid his visit to Hitler in Munich.

  I opened my eyes in the night because a voice below my window was saying, “SQ calling XW, SQ calling XW, move east twenty kilometers on Route 46, over,” or some such gibberish. Startled out of sleep, I sat straight up in my bed in the darkness. The words seemed so pregnant with meaning that I tried to hold them against the forgetfulness already overtaking them as an engine started up and raced away down the street. There was a great cranking up of heavy engines, and a rolling of truck after truck, and an earth-cracking, wall-wrenching rumble of tons of iron tank on iron caterpillar chain through the narrow streets. It worried me that the vehicles moving away from the square threw the light of their headlamps across my ceiling not in the direction in which they were going but in an opposite direction, and before I tucked myself back to sleep I promised myself to try to remember to mention it to Paul.

  It was autumn, which brought with it a new school term and an apparently insoluble problem.

  After the Annexation, the Austrian schools had been ordered to segregate Jewish children. The city of Vienna had made the switch in simple stages. On the morning following Annexation, immediately after prayers, the teacher had announced that instead of poetry we would have an hour of handicrafts and would take down the pro-Austrian, anti-German posters that, in the enthusiasm and heated blood of the past month, we had been made to paste and pin around the schoolroom walls. “Teacher,” said a little girl called Greterl, “can I have this one I cut the paper leaves for to take home? It says ‘Red-White-Red to the death.’” “No, you cannot, you stupid idiot!” said our teacher, who had always been a mild, good-natured woman, and she tore the pretty poster in two and stuffed it into the rubbish sack with which each classroom had been provided that very morning. Filled with paper sentiments, it was bound, with all possible haste, for the incinerators. By the end of the week, the desks in our room had been rearranged so that the half-dozen Jewish children in the class could sit together in the rear, with two empty rows between us and the Aryans in front. A question of some worriment soon developed among the six of us in the back, and I was chosen to carry it to the teacher: What were we to do about the “Heil Hitler!” which was from now on to greet the entrance of the teacher and begin class prayers? After some discussion, it was settled between us that just as in the past the Jewish children had remained silent during the “Our Father,” so now we would not need to articulate the words of the salute or raise our right arms, though we should stand up as a matter of respect. I think both the teacher and I had a sense of satisfaction at having, in the general confusion, dealt neatly with a pretty problem. Within a week, all the Jewish children in our school were assigned to a separate classroom. We knew very well that no teacher wanted to teach Jewish classes. We heard them arguing passionately. I remember the teacher who came into our classroom the first morning of the new system. She was a soft-faced, stout young woman, and her eyes were red. We stood up to greet her with the awe of children in the presence of a grownup who has been crying. She told us to get out our readers and to read to ourselves. We scrabbled for our books in our desks. We opened them. We watched the new teacher walk over to the closed window and lean her elbows on the sill. Her shoulders were visibly shaking. Soon her weeping turned from a suppressed whisper into loud, tearing sobs, while thirty children sat in petrified silence. The following week, the school had been cleared of Aryans, and Jewish children and teachers had been brought in to make ours the Jewish school for the district.

  In Fischamend, the problem was not so easily handled. There was a single village school, and a single Jewish pupil, and that was I. The school was the one to which my mother and Paul had gone as children, when my grandparents first moved from Vienna to the country. They had been the only Jewish pupils and had met the problem head on; when Willi Weber called Paul a dirty Jew and hit him, my mother, who is seven years Paul’s senior, hit Willi Weber, and so a working balance had been achieved. My mother says that she always got on pleasantly after that, except when they played a game called the old bird-seller game in the schoolyard and she had to be the Jew merchant. It made her cry. Who wanted to be an old Jew all the time, when everybody else might be a bird of his own choosing?

  Now segregation had become the law. We were at an impasse out of which came a most delightful solution. My uncle went to see his embarrassed old schoolfellows, who were now the local party leaders, and suggested that he had the academic background to act as my official tutor. My father would teach me mathematics, my mother the piano. Paul would be responsible for the rest.

  This arrangement, I suspect, killed any tendency I might have had toward disciplined scholarship, for it left me with the impression that knowledge comes in ravishments of the mind. The history of Luther gave me a poke in the ribs. I suddenly understood that events happened one after another, stretching away behind me from where I stood, and forward from when I would be no longer standing there. I remember the stunning brilliance of this revelation; if the content seems a little thin now, that is sometimes the way with visions. We looked at pictures and Paul kept a step ahead of me, asking my mind to perform more than it could. He made me look at Michelangelo’s Adam lying on a hill in the beginning of the world, and asked me what I saw. I said Adam had no clothes on. Paul said that’s right, and what else did I see. I said God was dressed in a cloth and carried by angels. Paul said yes, but why was God’s arm stretched down to Adam and how was Adam’s arm lifted up? He said for me to look at the picture some more, and again tomorrow if I could not tell today, and to look very quietly—but instead my mind screamed with frustration and rage. It is eerie to see nothing where another person sees something, and even eerier trying to remember how it was to see nothing after one has seen it. I came across the picture years later and saw the Adam, the weight of the earth still in him, raising his immense shoulders at the crooking of the single finger of the life-giver, and I wondered and could not properly recall what it was I had not seen that autumn in Fischamend. And we read poems. One day it was Heine, who, Paul said, was a Jew, and the next day it was Christian Morgenstern, who, he said, was not, and here was a poem about a worm, called “The Worm’s Confession.” Listen:

  Inside a shell

  A worm does dwell,

  A worm of rarest sort,

  Who, whisperingly,

  Only to me,


  Opened his little heart.…

  That was the day they held the Hitler rally outside the open window. The squadrons of White Shirts and Brown Shirts, with their drums and music, approached through the arch at the base of the Fischamend tower and drew up in very straight lines across the square. Flags flew. Presently a loud-speaker blared out a Hitler speech reporting on his latest visit to the Duce, in Rome. When Hitler started on the Jews, my mother drew the curtains close, though it was midmorning and the day was stifling hot. But I had caught sight of my own friend Mitzi, and I cried excitedly, “Mummy, look, there’s Mitzi! She’s carrying a flag!” I was leaning out between the curtains to wave when Paul grabbed my arm so harshly I roared—and there, for a minute, Hitler and I yelled contrapuntally across the peopled, listening summer square until I was rushed into the back part of the house.

  That evening, Mitzi came to the upstairs, living portion of the house, on the pretext of bringing a message to my grandfather, and found us gathered around the radio. Within the hour, Willi Weber knocked at the door.

  “Hello, Willi,” said my Uncle Paul.

  “Hello, Paul,” said Willi.

  “Well, Willi,” said Paul, “what do you want from us?”

  Willi said he had come to borrow our radio for use at party headquarters.

  “Help yourself, Willi,” said Paul. “I know you will.”

  Downstairs, some men were calling for my grandfather. A large truck had been backed up to the shop door, and when they had emptied the shop, my grandfather signed a form that said he was happy to contribute his share to the support of the Winter Help Fund of the parish of Fischamend.

  “So what?” said my grandmother when he came upstairs and told us what had happened. “You’ve been supporting the place for twenty years, giving everything away on credit!”

  “Pst!” said my father, who happened to be facing the south windows and saw the heads appearing above the sill. We looked around. There were heads in the two west windows, also. Beneath the second-story windows, a narrow corrugated-iron ledge jutted out over the lower floor like a little roof. Ladders had been put against the ledge, and boys and girls from the village, still in their uniforms, had climbed up and were sitting in our windows. They stayed all night. Now and then, one of the boys would swing his legs over the sill and step into the room with us. There were some books they didn’t approve of, and possessions they did, and they carried everything portable away.

  The next day, the shop remained closed. The family sat around the dining-room table. I remember sitting under the table, playing with their shoelaces and listening: It was clear that we must leave Fischamend, but we had nowhere to go. The villagers stood in the street, throwing stones against the upstairs windows until they were all smashed, and, around dusk, the S.S. boys came and took the three men to the police station next door. My mother and grandmother waited in the room where I slept, leaning out of the empty window frame. My bed was pushed against the inside wall and barricaded with a mattress. All night, even while I slept, it seems to me that I heard the two women’s voices speaking softly in the darkness.

  At some point, I was awake, and knew that the men were back. I don’t know how I know that my father had been slapped and that his glasses had been knocked off and broken. I have a vivid and quite false memory of this brutality, as if I had been a witness.

  The lights were on in all the house, and there was much walking and opening and shutting of doors and drawers. I was still half asleep, in the chilly predawn, when my mother dressed me.

  She said we were catching the early train to Vienna and I was going to stay with my cousin Erwin until they could find some place for all of us to live together again.

  We left the house through the yard door. I touched the stones of the walls with my hands, thinking, This is the last time I shall see you! I tested for the appropriate emotion: It seemed wrong of me to be feeling nothing so much as excitement at going to stay with Erwin.

  (It was, in fact, the last time any of us saw Fischamend. Twenty years later, in New York, Paul was to receive a letter from a Vienna lawyer who said he represented Mrs. Mitzi K., the former Mitzi——. Mrs. K. was interested in buying the Fischamend house, which had been restored to our ownership after the end of the war. Mrs. K. wanted to reopen the shop. If my uncle would agree to have the accumulated taxes due on the property since September, 1938, as well as the cost of essential repairs such as the removal of the east wing, which had been wrecked by Allied bombardment, deducted from the price offered by Mrs. K., less the lawyer’s own fee, the 4,690.77 Austrian schillings that remained would be transmitted to the United States. This letter threw Paul into such a passion, I was astonished at him. A general helpless exasperation and the desire to be quit of the past made him finally close with the offer. A year later, he received the equivalent of eight hundred dollars, which he divided with my mother; Mitzi is mistress of her house and shop.)

  By nightfall, we had all been stowed away with friends and relatives—Jewish apartments, in those days, were infinitely expandable, to take in the newly homeless. Paul stayed with Dolf, who lived with his mother and his sister Suse; my grandparents moved in with my grandmother’s oldest sister, Ibolya. The maid’s room at the Golds’, where my father had stayed, was now to accommodate both him and my mother, but first my parents took me along to Erwin’s.

  Erwin’s father made them come in and sit down, while Erwin and I danced in the foyer. We were both only children; we were going to have a ball, but Tante Gusti, whose corset shop had been confiscated by the Nazis that morning, was nervous and put her hands to her head. Erwin’s father told us to settle down, and Erwin, without that one extra hop I always gave in the face of prohibition, stood still with his eyes on his father. I was impressed. I never quite believed that this Onkel Eugen could really be a cousin of my father’s; he seemed so different—slim, athletically built, elegantly dressed, and full of ideas. He asked my father what he had done about emigrating, and my father said he was going to the American Consulate tomorrow, to put our names on the quota, but Onkel Eugen said the quota for Austrian nationals was filled till 1950. My father said there were Hans and Trude in England, and Kari and Gerti Gold thought they might get into Panama, and if they did, they would see if they could get a visa for us. Onkel Eugen said he was in contact with some business associates in Paris, and he thought something was moving there.

  I have been told that people who are hungry can talk of nothing but food. In 1938, in Vienna, Jews talked endlessly about ways of getting out of the country. Erwin and I got bored. We slipped away into his room and played house. (“I’ll say, ‘Let’s go inside,’ then you have to say, ‘I don’t want to,’ then I have to cry. Then you have to say …”)

  The next day I went to the Jewish school with Erwin. The men went out mornings, as punctually as they had once left for business, to make the rounds of the consulates. One day when I was off from school, I went with my father. He met a friend and stopped to talk. The friend said he had heard something was doing in the Swiss Consulate and he was going over to put his name on the list. I had caught sight of one of those small flat boxes that had recently been attached to houses at street corners, where, behind chicken wire, pages of the newspaper Der Stürmer were fixed open for the public to read. Yesterday, I had heard Tante Gusti say to Onkel Eugen that there was an exposé this week of the private lives of well-known Viennese Jews, and that the grocer’s wife had said to her, “But Frau Löwy, I didn’t know all those famous people were Jews!” The grownups had laughed so hard and so long that I thought it must be one of those loaded jokes. I inched over and looked through the chicken wire. There was a picture of an old man with monstrous lips, and another of a very fat woman standing with her feet planted grossly wide apart, but I had no time to make anything of it before my father came and hustled me away. “Where are we going?” I said, embarrassed to have been caught peeping.

  “To the Swiss Consulate,” he said. “To put our names on a
list.”

  By the time we arrived at the Swiss Consulate, the waiting line reached into the street. A woman in the front said that she had a chance of going to Hong Kong the day after tomorrow, but if there was any chance of Switzerland coming through she might wait the week, and six voices behind her said at once, “What do you want to wait for?” and told stories of So-and-So and what had happened to him because he waited a day too long.

  When not sitting in the waiting rooms of consulates and embassies, everybody was going to the classes that had sprung up all over the city. Jewish professionals were scurrying to learn hand skills, to feed themselves and their families in countries whose languages they would not know. My father, who had originated the accounting system of the bank for which he worked, learned machine knitting and leatherwork. The sad little purses and wallets he made turned up in our luggage for years. My mother learned large-quantity cooking. She took a course in massage, too, with Paul, and when they came to see me at Erwin’s they practiced on me.

  On November 10th, a Jew named Grünspan assassinated a minor Nazi official on a diplomatic mission to Paris. When the news reached Vienna in the afternoon, school was dismissed. We were told to go home by the back roads. Erwin’s parents sat beside the radio all afternoon. Toward evening, the doorbell rang, and outside stood an elderly neighbor from across the hall, and his wife, and an immense mahogany sideboard, which they were being made to move into our flat. A couple of uniformed Nazis stood along the banisters. They said to get on with the sideboard, there was more coming. In the course of that night, they forced the five Jewish families in the apartment house to move themselves and their households into our seven-room, fifth-floor apartment. The rooms soon had the grotesque look of usual objects in unusual positions: chairs stacked high on wardrobes, a table upside down on the bed with china, books, and lamps between its legs. The wife of the elderly neighbor sat on a chair crying, in a thin voice, without intermission. The Nazis became playful. They had discovered the main switch and kept turning the lights off, sometimes for as long as half an hour, then off and on, and off and on. Into the middle of this walked Tante Gusti’s brother, hoping to hide out because his own apartment was being raided, but he was intercepted by the guard at the entrance and taken away. Tante Gusti stood in the doorway and wept. All night, the heavy baroque furniture bumped on the stairs, and squeaked over the tiles of the hall. I sat down and howled for my mother.