In Another Time

by Jillian Cantor

  “Yes, of course I practiced,” I told Lev and Moritz now. But it was a lie. I hadn’t practiced at all. I usually overpracticed until my music was like breathing, until I could play it without even thinking. And it wasn’t that I hadn’t wanted to or hadn’t tried to practice. It was that I hadn’t been able to. I had stood there in the rehearsal room last week, my fingers freezing on the fingerboard, refusing to move. I’d chalked it up to exhaustion. The piece was easy enough. It would work out fine. I didn’t need to practice. Really, I didn’t. “My violin,” I told the boys, “should be the least of your mother’s worries.”

  But I realized how much of a lie it was as I stood with my violin the next afternoon, behind a small cadre of folding chairs, and in front of a trellis of pink roses. I was so nervous, my hands shaking in a way they usually did not, even in front of a large crowd at the hall in Vienna. It was silly; this would be a crowd of only thirty, family and friends, and a simple song, too. But I had tried to rehearse it quietly before I walked out, and my fingers would not budge.

  I should’ve suggested something else, “Ave Maria” or Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March.” But Julia had been so insistent: no one had played “Here Comes the Bride” for her in Germany. She wanted it this time around. What would she do if I played something else? Knowing her, she’d probably stop and yell at me; her entire wedding would be ruined. I had to play what she wanted. I would. It was only one song. One simple silly song.

  “They’re coming,” Henry’s mother whispered to me. She was a tall woman with a kind face, her hair a red tinged with silver, and seeing her made me think I was glimpsing Henry in the future. I raised my violin to my chin, set my fingers on the fingerboard, took a deep breath. I can do this. It was one song. But my hands were shaking so very badly, I could barely hold my violin in place. What is wrong with me? “Go ahead, darling,” Henry’s mother said.

  Julia turned the corner, Moritz on one arm, Lev on the other. Both of them were dressed in cream-colored suits, looking startlingly grown. Julia, too, wore cream, which she had said was more fitting for a second wedding, though I wasn’t sure anyone cared but her. All three of them stopped walking, looked at me expectantly. Julia smiled.

  I raised my bow, and for a moment I still could not play. Julia nodded at me, as if to say, Go on, I’m ready. And when I still didn’t play, she glanced up the aisle expectantly at Henry who stood up front, waiting for her with both the rabbi and the minister.

  “Go on.” Henry’s mother nudged my elbow. “They’re waiting on you, darling.”

  I was shaking still. But I could do this. I could. I had to. The first note came out wobbly, but it came out. And everyone sighed collectively and began to move again. Julia floated toward Henry. I moved the bow, but with so much effort, it felt as if I were dragging my arm through a thick trough of mud. I played with my eyes open, forcing the song out, note by note. I was shaking, sweating, crying.

  Play something German. Play for your life.

  And suddenly it was no longer a dream, but a flash, a memory: an SA held a gun to my head, and he told me to play, to play something German, to play for my life.

  Hanna, 1936

  It was a crime to love Max in Germany now, and yet, I did not care. Every kiss, every touch between us was illicit, forbidden. I wanted him even more. I only loved him more.

  Johann said we had to be careful, that if anyone knew we were still together they might turn us in, and we could both be arrested. But I could not stay away from my Max just because Hitler wanted me to. Hitler had already taken my symphony. And Herr Fruchtenwalder had been fired after the passing of the Nuremberg Laws, so now I didn’t even have my lessons with him. All I had was Max. And this: a letter I’d received in the mail from a symphony in Holland. They had heard about my audition in Berlin, and they were still accepting Jews. I was waiting for my visa to come through, and I clung to that hope. Johann had a contact at the embassy that he knew through his law firm, and he was working on getting the visa for me, and for Max, too.

  In the meantime, Max and I could not be seen together in public. I would sneak into his shop at suppertime when the streets were mostly empty, as if I were a common criminal, trying to thieve from him. And then I would hide out in Max’s apartment, waiting to come and go again only when the shops and the streets were empty very early in the morning.

  Time moved slowly then. I could barely even practice in the shop, except at night, when the Christian baker next door was sleeping, and not too loudly, either—we didn’t want him to hear me, to ask too many questions. It was silly because of course he had heard me before the Nuremberg Laws were passed, but now it seemed everyone asked more questions, noticed more. You could not be a Jew and slip quietly through Gutenstat, shopping or minding your own business anymore. In fact, you could not be a Jew and be much of anything in Germany now.

  In the summer, the Olympics were coming to Berlin, and things seemed to get better for a bit that spring, an odd flicker of hope in an otherwise very dark year. Hitler did not want to risk losing the Olympics and so he relaxed the rules for a little while. Arrests eased up. People were not blatantly hating Jews as much. Some of the jews not welcome signs came down around the city. People stopped saluting each other all the time. And I felt like I could breathe again.

  Elsa and Johann secured tickets to the track events through Johann’s firm but Elsa did not want to go and leave the girls, so Johann invited Max instead. “Why don’t we watch the girls?” I suggested. “Let Elsa and Johann have a date.” Everyone thought that was a grand suggestion, and Max and I became child minders for an entire weekend while Elsa and Johann were in Berlin at the games.

  I watched Max play on the floor with Emilia, his long body stretched out as Emilia fed him pretend cookies and pretend tea in a doll-size teacup. He drank her tea, proclaiming it delicious, and I held on to Grace’s hand as she toddled around the sitting room, wobbling to and fro. Max caught my eye, and we smiled at each other. I wanted this, with him. For the first time in my life I understood I needed more than my violin. I wanted more, with Max.

  It was a breezy summer afternoon, and after Grace napped, Max and I decided to take the girls for a stroll to the park where they could run around and play. We might not have considered such a thing only a few months ago even, but the whole world was watching Berlin and the Olympics, and nothing bad was going to happen to us. Everyone was on their best behavior, even Hitler.

  Who was going to notice a Jewish woman and the man she loved, holding hands, walking down the street with two little girls? Who was going to care?

  But a week later, the games had ended, and I was in Max’s shop late one night, practicing softly. I didn’t have lessons anymore, and I wasn’t sure when I’d get a visa for Holland. All I knew was that I had to keep playing. Playing was breathing. My violin was life.

  Then suddenly there was a knock on the door. I stopped midnote, my bow suspended in midair for a second before I put my violin down softly in its case.

  More knocking. This time banging, louder, harder, and on the glass, too. “Öffne die Tür!” They were shouting for us to open the door.

  My entire body began to shake and I looked at Max, who had been sitting behind the counter, but now had run to the back of the shop. He was pushing on a bookcase, moving it out of the way.

  “What are you doing?” I hissed as I ran back toward him.

  “We need to go,” he said. “Now.” He was breathing hard, pushing the bookcase still, until a closet was exposed; a sign saying achtung! hung crooked just above the handle. This was where he’d hidden the banned books?

  “We can’t hide in the closet with the books,” I said. “They’ll find us, and the books, and you’ll be in even more trouble.”

  He took out a key, unlocked the door. “We have to go,” he said.

  The banging was getting harder, the yelling louder. It sounded like they were kicking the door now, and I felt the walls shake as the door moved, inching forward. They were
going to kick it down. “Hanna,” Max said, “we’re going to go in the closet and run as fast as we can.” He was so scared, he wasn’t even making any sense. “We’ll be safe in the closet.”

  The door bulged and sunk. They kicked and yelled and it bulged again.

  We were both about to be arrested, maybe killed, and I understood that so completely that it overtook my body in the same way a sonata did, when my fingers hugged the fingerboard without me even thinking about their motion. It was Chopin’s “Marche Funèbre,” its minor key resonating in my brain. I was shaking, paralyzed. I could not move.

  Max grabbed my hand and pulled me into the closet with him. But as he went to shut the door, I remembered: my violin, sitting in its case. I couldn’t leave it there for the SA to steal. “Wait!” I ripped away from his grasp. “I have to get my violin.”

  “Hanna, no!” Max cried out. But I ran away from him, toward my violin.

  Just as I grabbed my violin case, the front door broke, the men flooded in. There were only four of them—how had it sounded like so many more? But I only had a second to think before they were grabbing me and Max.

  “You are under arrest,” they said. “For violating the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour.”

  Hanna, 1953

  By the time Julia and Henry exchange their vows, so many of my memories have come back to me. Not all of them, not ten whole years in ten whole minutes. But the flashes are bits and pieces, like one of Moritz’s old jigsaw puzzles, enough of them arranged so I can see the full picture almost clearly.

  Max and I were both arrested that night in 1936, and I had been clutching my violin. They asked me to play it for them at the police station, and then they had separated me from the others, put me on a train. I became a prisoner and I was taken to one camp, then a second one. But even the Nazis loved my violin. And as my playing was always considered valuable, I was never forced to work, forced to starve. My violin saved my life.

  Adelle had been right; I had played in an orchestra. Forced to play my violin in a group, held against my will, and yet I was spared from death and hunger. I played and I played and I played. My violin was breath and life and light, even in a terrible darkness.

  I sit down on the ground, squeeze my eyes tightly shut, not wanting to remember all the horrible things: the hideous sounds, screaming and the smell of burning flesh, the ash that fell from the crematorium not too far from the barracks where the orchestra slept, ensconced in an odd and tenuous safety.

  But now I cannot forget them. As much as I try, I cannot make my mind forget again. The images come, rolling through my head like a film reel that will not stop, that will not turn off.

  The guilt twists in my stomach now, foreign and familiar all at once: I had despised being a prisoner, but a part of me could not help myself from enjoying the music, even as we were forced to play when and what the Nazis wanted us to. I think about what Adelle said, that she hated the women in the orchestra: my beautiful curls while she was shaven, me having enough food to eat while she had none. And now I hate myself too. I had played and played, and I had closed my eyes and felt the same passion I always feel playing my violin, even as other Jews, no different from me, were starving to death, being murdered, all around me. And that is the truth that my mind had buried most: Am I not so different from the Nazis after all?

  Until the very end, the very last day, when I almost died, too. It comes to me in another flash, right when Julia and Henry say I do, and everyone around me begins to clap.

  The guards had lined us up, all the women in the orchestra. There were eight of us: three violins, three violas, a cello, and a bass. They had told us to take our instruments, stand against the wall, turn away from them. It was a firing squad; they were going to shoot us.

  I held my violin in one hand, the cellist’s hand with the other. I was going to die. All these years I had played and played and thought, well, at least I was practicing, keeping up my skills for after when the war would end. I had found hope while everyone else had been suffering. Maybe I deserved to die.

  And then somewhere a bell began to chime. People were screaming? Or crying? Or were they cheering? I couldn’t remember the difference between happy and sad any longer.

  The guards lowered their guns. The gates opened. The camp was being liberated.

  What happened next is still something of a blur. But I eventually made it back to Gutenstat, I remember that much now. I saw that it was all gone. I walked and I walked and I stumbled into the field. And eventually I lay down, cradled my violin, and closed my eyes, wanting to die, wishing I had died. And then while I slept, my mind grew a cocoon around all that had happened.

  When I awoke again, the sky was black. A million stars glittered above me. And the night was diamonds and Beethoven’s Concerto in D Major.

  “Are you all right?” Henry comes up to me an hour into the reception. They’d hired a band for this part, and everyone is dancing and laughing in the garden, while I have been on the ground, clutching my violin, my back against the trellis. I’ve been sitting here, ever since I’d made it through the march. Henry sits down on the ground next to me, loosens his tie. “What are you doing on the ground all by yourself? I bet Moritz wants a dance with you.”

  “It is all true,” I whisper. “I remembered it. The ‘Bridal Chorus’ . . . Wagner. I played it for them when they told me to play something German. It saved my life . . .” But I cannot tell him the rest of it. I don’t want to say any of it out loud, and I especially don’t want to ruin Henry and Julia’s wedding with all these awful memories.

  “You finally remembered?” Henry’s voice rises. He’s surprised, or delighted. I nod. I know where I have been, what happened to me. I hadn’t missed or escaped the war; I’d just blocked it out as my mind was trying to recover. “So Adelle was right?” He sounds surprised. He hadn’t really believed it. “You were actually with her in the camp?”

  “I think so,” I say. I wish it were not true. I don’t want to be a victim, like Adelle. I want to be the first chair violinist, fearless and passionate and brave. But now what does it say about me that I played violin for the SA at their command, while they murdered and tortured other Jews all around me and I did nothing to stop them? That I blocked it all out afterward for so many years, convinced myself even that the war had never happened, that I had never even existed during it? “People were being murdered. And I was just . . . playing violin. And then I forgot,” I finally say. “All those people. I should have done something to help them.”

  Henry pats my hand kindly and looks over at Julia who’s dancing with Lev. “And what would you have done? You were a prisoner, too. Your violin saved you. Thank goodness you have such a gift, or you might not be sitting here now.” He squeezes my hand.

  But Henry’s words feel empty. “They murdered so many people,” I say. “And I played music for them. I gave them a gift. Maybe I should quit violin.” It seems only right, a penance. A punishment. I can stay here in the UK with Julia and Henry and the boys. Forget Stuart and America. Forget Vienna, too.

  “And why on earth would you do that?” Henry asks. “You are enormously talented. You have accomplished great things since the war. And Julia told me you have a new opportunity in America.”

  “But I don’t deserve it,” I say.

  “You’re exactly right,” Henry says. “You didn’t deserve any of what happened to you. But it happened and you did what you had to do to save and protect yourself. And tell me, what good will it do for you to give it up now?”

  “I feel like a monster,” I tell Henry.

  “No,” he says. “You are a survivor.”

  Max, 1937–1938

  Max blamed himself for everything, for all of it. If only he had taken Hanna into the closet earlier, days or weeks or months earlier. He could’ve talked her out of the symphony or for trying for the visas. He could’ve convinced Johann of the truth if he’d really wanted to. He had been so stupid to believe that h
e would just take her into the closet when the time came. Now Hanna was gone. He hadn’t saved her, and he blamed himself for all of it.

  The SA let him go after a few weeks in jail, having no use for a Christian shopkeeper, even one who had broken the law by loving a Jewish woman. (Thankfully, they had no idea about the Feinsteins or Marta and David.) Max was bruised a little, but worse, his soul felt broken. It was a crushing pain to know he hadn’t kept Hanna safe. It overwhelmed him so that he couldn’t breathe properly. And as he stumbled out into the street and caught the train back to Hauptstrasse, he gasped for air and began to cry.

  That was how he showed up on Elsa and Johann’s doorstep, crying, barely breathing, his eye encircled in a purple bruise, his nose crusted with blood from having been punched by an SA who had called him a traitor to his country. Elsa opened the door, and when she saw him, she put her hand to her mouth and let out a sob. “Hanna’s gone,” Max said. “She’s gone.”

  Johann brought him in the house, and Elsa got a warm wet rag to clean his face, some meat to put on his eye. He felt guilty taking it from her; meat was scarcer and scarcer these days, but Elsa insisted, and it felt so good that he couldn’t refuse.