Other People’s Houses Read online

  In the weeks that followed, Erwin’s apartment, with the five families milling around, looked like a slum. Onkel Eugen’s bed was kept open, and he jumped into it whenever the doorbell rang. Erwin and I were told that if anyone asked us, Onkel Eugen had influenza and a high fever, but we saw him walking around all day in his striped silk pajamas. In the evening he sat and played chess with Erwin. He said Erwin was going to be a great champion.

  One day Erwin’s parents began to pack. They were going to France. My mother came and packed my bags. Erwin and I promised we would never play the house game with anybody else. Erwin said he was going to build an airplane and come to see me.

  (In 1946, when I was in London and Erwin was in Paris, we did correspond briefly, but lost touch again after he and Tante Gusti left for Brazil. A year ago, I met Tante Gusti, who was visiting a sister in New York. She told me a strange story. She said they had lived well in Paris, not at all like refugees, because of Eugen’s business connections. Then the French interned all German-speaking men. She got permission for herself and Erwin to visit Onkel Eugen in camp. They found him in shirt sleeves, sitting at a long table with hundreds of prisoners. He looked healthy, but thin, and he was unshaven. Erwin held his mother’s hands. Tante Gusti said his hands were icy cold and he never mentioned the visit afterward. There grew up such a tabu on this subject between mother and son that Tante Gusti never knew if Erwin understood when the French handed the camps over to the advancing Germans and the Jewish inmates were sent to Auschwitz. The boy’s callousness grieved and estranged her. After the end of the war, she discovered in his wallet a newsprint photograph of one of those skeleton survivors of concentration camps—two huge eyes in a hairless, toothy skull—that might, with a stretch of the imagination, be thought to have resembled Onkel Eugen. Erwin was carrying it from one to another of the agencies, looking for his dead father among the first confused lists of survivors.)

  After the departure of Erwin and his parents, I remember two rooms in a back street where I lived with my parents, and there Paul and my grandparents came to see us.

  “Now Paul wants to go to Palestine. Paul as a fanner—can you imagine?” my grandmother said. “He can’t even walk into a room without all the lamps falling over. If you had attended to your studies, you would be a doctor now. Or if you had taken languages, like that Professor Glazer always said …”

  “A Nazi even in those days,” Paul said.

  “He used to say, ‘Frau Steiner, your Paul has a real talent for languages.…’”

  “I didn’t think the world needed another linguist,” Paul said. “What it needs, of course, is more aging medical students.”

  My grandmother laid back her head and laughed beautifully.

  “Maybe I’ll become a famous farmer,” Paul said. He put his hand out and drew me to his chair. “I went to the Jüdische Kultus Gemeinde [Jewish Congregation] this morning to put my name down to go to one of their new training farms. By the way, did you know they had an incendiary bomb in the temple during the night. It was still smoking. They paid twelve of us to stay behind and clear out the debris.”

  “Congratulations,” my grandmother said. “At the age of twenty-seven, Paul earns his first money on a wrecking team. What did they give you?”

  Paul hesitated. “Three schillings.”

  “What? What?” cried my grandmother. “And I suppose you lost it?”

  “There was a kid there,” Paul said, “a red-nosed, sniveling sort of kid, very young, and he said even if he got a visa to Palestine he didn’t have a suitcase.”

  My grandmother looked at Paul with her handsome black eyes that were always on the verge of anger. “And you gave him your three schillings?”

  “Mutti, one can’t make money off the destruction of the temple by the Nazis.”

  “You can’t make money off the Nazis? Why can’t you? They can take away your parents’ shop and your brother-in-law’s job.…”

  “But Muttilein, that’s what I mean.”

  “Marry,” said my grandmother. “Find yourself a wife to look after you. I can’t any more,” and my grandmother started to cry.

  Paul went and sat on the arm of her chair and stroked her hair. “Mutti, I would start looking tomorrow, but just figure the odds against my happening to want to marry the very woman who happens to want to marry me.”

  But this time my grandmother would not laugh. She turned her face from him and dismissed him with a flick of her hand.

  Early in December there was a rumor about an experimental children’s transport being sent to England. My father took me to the Jewish Congregation, which had moved its headquarters to the empty temple. What looked like thousands of children and parents were moving around the floor of the burned-out shell of the hall and standing in a queue around the gallery where, on the high holidays, the women had sat in their hats and black dresses. But my father took me around by the offices and asked to see Great-Aunt Ibolya’s youngest son’s fiancée, who worked for the organization, and that was how my name got put down one hundred and fifty-second on the list.

  In the streetcar going home, my father held my hand. He said, “So you will be going to England.”

  I said, “All by myself?” and I remember clearly the sensation, as if my insides had been suddenly scooped away. At the same time I felt that this “going to England” had a brave sound.

  “Not all by yourself!” my father said. “There will be six hundred other children.”

  “When am I going?” I asked.

  “Thursday,” said my father. “The day after tomorrow.”

  Then I felt the icy chill just below my chest where my insides had been.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Children’s Transport

  The children were due to assemble at nine in the evening on Thursday, December 10, 1938.

  “She can take my best crocodile belt,” said my father, wanting to give me something.

  “Igo! She can’t use your belt! And we’ve been asked to pack as little as possible. The children have to carry their own luggage. Pick up the suitcase,” she said to me. “Can you lift it?”

  I lifted the suitcase against my leg and leaned my weight against it. “I can carry it,” I said.

  “I have to pack her enough food to last till they get to England,” my mother said. “How can I pack enough food to keep two days?” Her face was red. All that day my mother’s face looked dark and hot, as if she had a fever, but she moved about as on any ordinary day and her voice sounded ordinary; she even joked. She said we were going to pretend it was the first day of the month. Before my father had lost his job, the first of the month had been payday and the day I was allowed to choose my own fanciful supper, against a promise that there would be no fussing about food during the rest of the month. But today my appetite had no imagination. I said I didn’t want anything. “I don’t mean for now. I mean to take with you,” said my mother. She was wanting me to need something that she could give me. I searched around in my mind, wanting to oblige her. “Knackwurst?” I said, though I could not at the moment remember exactly what kind of sausage that was.

  “Not without bread,” said my father.

  “Knackwurst,” said my mother. “You like that? I’ll go down this minute and get you one.” But at that moment the doorbell rang.

  All day the room was full of people coming to say good-by, friends of the family, and aunts and uncles and cousins. Everyone brought me bonbons, candied fruit, dates, sour sweets, and chocolates we called cat’s tongues, and homemade cookies, and Sacher Torte. Even my Tante Grete came, though she was angry with my parents because I had been sneaked onto the transport and her twins were to be left behind.

  My father tried to explain. “This is just an experimental transport, don’t you see. They don’t even know if they can get across the German border, and Lore only got on because Karl’s fiancée happens to work on the Committee and did us a favor. I could hardly ask her for more.”

  “Naturally. How co
uld you be expected to ask for help to save someone else’s children?” Tante Grete said. She had a long and bitter face. “But maybe Lore can ask people once she gets to England. She can tell about her cousins Use and Erica, who had to stay behind in Vienna while she got away. Maybe she can find a sponsor for them.”

  My father said, “I’ve given her a list of names to write to when she gets to England. There are some cousins of Franzi’s who’ve lived in America for years who might sponsor us. She’s going to write to them, aren’t you? And there are Eugen and Gusti in Paris, who have business connections, and in London Hans and Trade …”

  “Whom I called a cow,” my mother said.

  “There’s a family in London who might be related to us, though they spell their name G-R-O-S-S-M-A-N-N and ours is G-R-O-S-Z-M-A-N-N. And there is the Jewish Refugee Committee there. You’ll write to them, won’t you?”

  I stood in the center of my circle of relatives, nodding solemnly. I said I would write letters to everybody and I would tell the Engländer about everything that was happening and would get sponsors for my parents and my grandparents and for everybody.

  “Well, well,” my aunt said. “She can certainly talk, can’t she!” and she got up. She embraced me and kissed me and, despite being mad at me, she wept bitterly.

  (I met Erica in 1946 in London, where she had a job as a nursemaid to an English family. She told me that Ilse had got to Palestine illegally and was in a kibbutz. They had both tried to get a sponsor for their mother, but Tante Grete had been arrested in her hallway early in 1940 and sent to Poland.)

  When Tante Grete left the apartment, it was after seven and my nervous father said we should be going, but my mother cried out; she had forgotten to get the Knackwurst. “I’m going to run down,” she said, and already she had flung her coat about her, but my father blocked her way.

  “Are you an idiot? Do you want her to miss her train?”

  “She wants a Knackwurst!” my mother cried.

  “Do you know what time it is? Suppose you get arrested while you’re out!”

  I had never before seen my parents standing shouting into each other’s faces. I kept saying, “I don’t really want any Knackwurst,” but they took no notice of me.

  “She likes Knackwurst.” My mother wept. She skipped around my large, slow-moving father, and she ran out through the door.

  My father still ignored me. He stood by the window. He went to the bathroom. He opened the hall door and looked out. He checked his watch.

  My mother came back with her triumphant, beaming, sad red face. Nothing had happened—no one had even seen her. She had got a whole sausage and had made the man give her an extra paper bag. She called me to come and look where she was putting it in my rucksack, between my sandwiches and the cake.

  “Let’s go, for God’s sake,” said my father.

  We went over the Stefanie Bridge on foot. I walked between my parents. Each held a hand. My father talked to my mother about going to the Chinese Consulate in the morning.

  “Daddy,” I said. “Daddy, look!”

  My mother was saying to my father, “Grete mentioned something about getting into Holland.”

  I tugged at my mother’s hand. “Look at the moon,” I insisted. There was a white moon shivering in the black water of the Danube underneath us, along with a thousand pretty lights from the bridge.

  My father said, “Holland is too close, but I’ll go and see, if there’s time. I’ll do the Chinese Consulate first thing.”

  They kept talking to each other over my head. I was hurt. They were making plans for a tomorrow in which I would have no part. Already they seemed to be getting on very well without me and I was angry. I withdrew my hands and walked by myself.

  We got into a tram. Across the aisle there was another little Jewish girl with a rucksack and a suitcase, sitting between her parents. I tried to catch her eye in order to flirt up a new friend for myself, but she took no notice of me. She was crying. I said to my mother, “I’m not crying like that little girl.”

  My mother said, “No, you are being very good, very brave. I’m proud how good you are being.”

  But I had misgivings; I rather thought I ought to be crying, too.

  The assembly point was a huge empty lot behind the railway station in the outskirts of Vienna. I looked among the hundreds of children milling in the darkness for the girl who had cried in the tram, but I never saw her again, or perhaps did not recognize her. Along a wire fence, members of the Committee stood holding long poles bearing placards; flashlights lit the numbers painted on them. Someone came over to me and checked my papers and made me stand with the group of children collecting around the placard that read “150-199.” He hung a cardboard label with the number 152 strung on a shoelace around my neck, and tied corresponding numbers to my suitcase and rucksack.

  I remember that I clowned and talked a good deal. I remember feeling, This is me going to England. My parents stood with the other parents, on the right, at the edge of the darkness. I have no clear recollection of my father’s being there—perhaps his head was too high and out of the circle of the lights. I do remember his greatcoat standing next to my mother’s black pony fur, but every time I looked toward them it was my mother’s tiny face, crumpled and feverish inside her fox collar, that I saw smiling steadily toward me.

  We were arranged in a long column four deep, according to numbers. The rucksack was strapped on my back. There was a confusion of kissing parents—my father bending down, my mother’s face burning against mine. Before I could get a proper grip on my suitcase, the line set in motion so that the suitcase kept slipping from my hand and bumping against my legs. Panic-stricken, I looked to the right, but my mother was there, walking beside me. She took the suitcase, keeping at my side, and she was smiling so that it seemed a gay thing, like a joke we were having together. Someone from the Committee, checking the line, took the suitcase from my mother, checked it with the number around my neck, and gave it to me to carry. “Go on, move,” the children behind me said. We were passing through great doors. I looked to my right; my mother’s face was nowhere to be seen. I dragged and shoved the heavy suitcase across the station floor and bumped it down a flight of stairs and along a platform where the train stood waiting.

  There was a young woman in charge inside our carriage. She was slight and soft-spoken. She walked the corridors outside the compartments and put her head in and told us to settle down. We asked her when we were going to leave. She said, “Very soon. Why don’t you all try to go to sleep? It’s past eleven.” Still the train stood in the station. I saw Onkel Karl’s fiancée on the platform, looking in the window. I remember standing on my head for her. She smiled upside down and mouthed something. I wiggled my toes.

  It was after midnight when the train left the station. There was only room enough for four of the eight girls in the compartment to stretch out on the seats. I was the smallest one. I remember that I had the place by the window and I kept trying to bend my neck into the corner and at the same time shield my eyes with an arm, a hand, or in the crook of an elbow against the electric bulb in the corridor, which burned through my closed lids. The chattering of the children subsided little by little until there was no sound except the noise of the train. I have no notion that I went to sleep, except that I was awakened by a flashlight shining into my face. In its light, behind it and lit like a negative, was a girl’s face. She said it was time for someone else to lie down in my place. And before I had altogether picked my stiff limbs out of my corner, this other person was creeping into it. The girl who had wakened me was pretty. She said I could sit with her on her suitcase. I liked her awfully. I copied the way she sat with her elbows braced on her knees, her chin cupped in her hands, quite still. I thought, This is me, awake, watching the children sleeping. I watched the black outside the window turn a queer, beautiful blue that faded into gray and presently lightened to a dead white. The bulbs in the corridor still burned a foolish orange. The sleepers humped
shoulders to hide their faces from the light. In the next compartment someone was whispering. Someone let out a laugh and was quickly shushed. A girl in my compartment sat straight up, stared for a moment, and seemed to go back to sleep, except that her eyes stayed open.

  The girl on the suitcase asked me if I wanted to go to the lavatory and wash my face. I wandered down the corridor, peering into every compartment door to see people sleeping. In the lavatory there was a glass sphere over the washbowl. If you turned it upside down, green liquid soap squirted out. If you stepped on the pedal that flushed the toilet, a hole opened and you could look through it at the ground tearing away underneath. I played until the knocking at the door became so violently impatient I had to let the others in.

  By the time I got back to my compartment, everyone was up. Everyone was talking. The children were eating breakfast out of their paper bags. I didn’t feel like Knackwurst for breakfast and it was too much trouble to eat a sandwich, so I had candied pear and three cat’s tongues and a piece of Sacher Torte. A big girl said we had left Austria during the night and were actually in Germany. I looked out, wanting to hate, but there was nothing out the window but cows and fields. I said maybe we were still in Austria. It was important to me, because I was collecting countries. Born in Austria, I had vacationed in Hungary and visited relatives in Czechoslovakia, which was three countries I had been in, and Germany would make four. The big girls said it was so Germany, and it puzzled me.