Vienna Prelude

by Bodie Thoene

  ***

  Nazi propaganda pamphlets, a copy of Mein Kampf, and a typed memorandum signed by Captain Leopold, the head of Austria’s illegal Nazi Party, were all laid out in a neat line on the table in the Herrgottseck of the Wattenbarger farmhouse. All the family was there.

  Franz looked at his mother. Marta’s lips were tight, her eyes downcast as Karl paced back and forth before a sullen and defiant Otto.

  “What right do you have to go through my things?” Otto demanded. He flashed an angry look at Marta, who did not answer.

  Karl stopped before him and raised a hand as though he would strike his son. His hand trembled with anger and the disappointment of discovering the truth about Otto. “You will not speak with such disrespect to your mother!” he said in a voice so quiet, yet so full of rage that they all held their breath with the expectation of something terrible.

  Otto did not acknowledge his own disrespect, any more than he would acknowledge that what he had done, and was doing, was wrong. “Those papers are mine. Soon such words will be for all Austrians!” His jaw was set in a firm, hard line. “Chancellor Schuschnigg is not the savior of Austria. An independent Austria is nothing! They carved us up after the war. Made us a fragment. Cut us off from Hungary and destroyed the empire of the Hapsburgs. They have made us nothing!”

  “And you . . . you and your Nazi friends think we will be something if we are joined to Germany?” Scorn rang in Karl’s voice. “Your grandfather fought the Prussians of Germany to keep Austria free! And now you wish to join these—” Karl picked up the well-read copy of Mein Kampf and in one motion threw open the door to the stove. He scanned a page and the color on his cheeks deepened. “Yes. Herr Hitler would give the German people more living space by taking that which belongs to others. And what will happen to the people who live in these lands after Hitler sends his troops in?” He did not need an answer. Hitler had written the answer in his book.

  “We are Germans,” Otto said in a voice that asserted his sense of racial superiority. “What does it matter what happens to the vanquished?”

  “We are Austrians,” Karl said through clenched teeth. He began to tear pages from Mein Kampf and toss them onto the flames of the stove. “And we are Christians!” His eyes seemed to blaze as the flames devoured the evil words of the madman across the border.

  “First we must be Germans!” Otto shouted back. “You cannot destroy his words! He is the heart of Germany! Of the Greater Reich!”

  “Then the heart of Germany is black and vile,” Marta replied quietly, in a trembling voice. “It has no place at the Herrgottseck of this home.” Her eyes were filled with tears, but she was even more resolute in her declaration than Karl had been. It was plain what she was saying. Otto could not stay there. His beliefs were a betrayal of everything she had raised her sons to be. Gretchen burst into tears at the words of her mother. Young Friedrich stared at her and then back to his brother as they faced each other. This was no simple discussion of politics or the Anschluss of Austria with Germany. No, it was much, much, more.

  “Before Hitler came to power, there were many of us,” Marta said calmly, “who believed it might be better if Austria became a part of Germany. Yes. Maybe better for our farms and families to be part of a greater state.” She paused and watched as Karl tossed the last of Mein Kampf into the flames. It hissed, and the corners blackened and shriveled. “But now”—she shook her head—“they mock God. They mock our Lord Jesus, the Christ, and they mock the nation to which He was born.”

  “The Jews!” Otto scoffed. “They killed Christ!”

  “No!” Karl whirled to face his son. “You killed Christ! And I killed Him! And the words of your madman crucify Him daily!” His voice boomed. “When law and justice are distorted and the innocent are condemned, the crucifixion begins anew! Listen, Otto! Listen, my son!” Karl threw open the door and the cold winds of March blew into the Stube. “Listen to the voice of your Jesus as you help destroy His children!” He cupped his hands around his mouth and called the words of Jesus on the cross: “Father . . . ”

  The mountains echoed back, “Father . . . Father . . . Father . . . ”

  “Forgive them . . . ”

  “Forgive . . . Forgive . . . Forgive them . . . ”

  “They don’t know . . . ”

  “Don’t know . . . don’t know . . . know . . . know . . . ”

  “What they do!”

  “What they do . . . they do . . . they do . . . ”

  When the last of a thousand voices died away, only the sound of the wind was left. Karl kicked the door shut. He stared at Otto as if he had never seen him before. The young man before him was not the beloved son, but a total stranger who had come to dwell in a familiar body. “You do know what you are doing! You will lay the innocent out on the cross. You will take up the hammer and press the spike into His loving hand, and you will strike! And strike! And strike again!”

  “The Jews are the Christ killers!” Otto defended. “And they would exploit every good German worker!” His eyes became transfixed as he repeated the words he had come to believe. “We will not be free until—”

  “Take the hammer, Otto!” Karl shouted. “Crucify Him! Crucify the innocent children and the women who bore them. Murder their husbands and take their homes and shops for the Greater Reich! You know what you are doing! You know! Sell your nation and your soul and crucify them as your evil master orders. But you will find you crucify me as well, and your mother, and your brothers, and your sister!”

  Gretchen wept loudly at her father’s words. “Oh, Otto!” she moaned. “Please don’t! Mama, tell him to stay! Tell him to still be our Otto!”

  Helmut and Friedrich lowered their heads then, and Franz saw tears also in the eyes of his younger brothers. But there was no softening on the face of Otto. His eyes narrowed in determination. He had chosen his way as the way of Nazi Germany, and the time for discussion was past.

  Marta fought against emotion, but she could not speak. The family sat in heavy silence for what seemed like a long time.

  At last, Karl stepped forward and reached his large calloused hand to touch Otto. Otto moved slightly, avoiding his father’s touch. “You are my son,” Karl said with a sadness that betrayed the depth of his pain.

  Otto smiled in disdain. “I have no father but the Fatherland,” he said cruelly.

  Karl flinched as though he had been struck. He stepped back as Gretchen wailed and ran to embrace her mother. Marta held her and stroked her head, not ever taking her eyes from Otto. “If that is so, Otto,” she cried, “then you have no mother!”

  Only then did Otto show some twinge of regret. He winced and said to Marta, “Someday you will see that I am right, Mother. Then I will come home.”

  She shook her head in solemn disagreement. “No, Otto. Do not come home until you see that you are wrong. Then we will be waiting for you. Your loving family . . . waiting . . . ” She broke down and buried her face in Gretchen’s shoulder. “Don’t cry,” she tried to comfort the young girl. “Don’t cry, Gretchen.” But her own tears flowed freely.

  Otto stared at them all as sobs filled the house. He glanced briefly at the crucifix above the table, and then he pushed past Franz and went quickly up the stairs to pack his belongings.

  ***

  It was to be a year before Murphy returned to Vienna. In all that time he hardly thought about Elisa Linder at all—at least not more than once an hour. The groaning world had turned its attention to the bloody civil war in Spain where the Spanish rebels of the Fascist General Franco fought against the coalition of leftist Republican and Loyalist government groups for control of the nation.

  As Britain and the powers of the League of Nations declared their policy of nonintervention, the union of Hitler and Mussolini supplied men and equipment to Franco’s Fascist forces. For ten months, Murphy shuttled back and forth between the Italian and German troops of Franco’s army, then back again to the Republican forces who fought them. A million Spania
rds died that year, and Murphy wondered if he hadn’t seen each one.

  Men with hands tied behind their backs fell riddled with bullets in the streets of Madrid and Toledo. Women and children perished on the open roads, strafed by German fighter planes.

  The entire war seemed to be a showcase for Mussolini’s Blackshirts and the mighty mechanized forces of Hitler’s Reich. The Spanish themselves died unadorned by medals or protected by armor plate and tank tracks. Dark-eyed children cried hungry in the streets of besieged Madrid, and Murphy wrote what he saw:

  Insurgent airplanes dumped more than 100 bombs into the suburbs of Bilbao today but did not fulfill General Emilio Mola’s threat to blast the Basque capital to bits. Terror-stricken inhabitants, mindful of the insurgent commander’s warning he would bombard the city without mercy if it did not surrender by today, ducked for cover as nine bombers and seven pursuit planes roared over Bilbao.

  Murphy had counted the planes himself, and noted without amusement that the aircraft were German-made. On two of the planes he could distinctly make out the swastika beneath a fresh coat of paint. He mentioned this in the New York dispatch, but for some reason that information had been cut. Later he heard that his story had gone page four in the New York Times, lost amid the hoopla of the British coronation of King George VI. There it was again. The world cared more about what Princess Elizabeth and Margaret Rose did during the ceremony than about the real world:

  No-man’s-land was covered with dead and wounded after a terrific battle yesterday. Squads from both armies roamed the area in the night looking for wounded. ”

  Two weeks later, Murphy read the article that had beat him out for the front page:

  Princess Margaret Rose, 6 ½, tried her best to act as a princess should at a coronation, but once she yawned right at the venerable Archbishop of Canterbury.

  With a sigh of resignation, Murphy had left the newspaper beside the open ditch that served as a latrine for Loyalist troops. He was certain they would know how best to put it to use.

  It was five long, hot summer months before London and Paris found the courage to present an ultimatum to Italy and Germany to withdraw their “volunteer” forces from Franco’s Fascist troops. By then, Murphy had seen the inside of every stinking prison and field hospital on both sides of the line. The hospitals, he noted grimly, smelled as foul as the prisons. Both overflowed with rotting men, women, and children. Blood had fertilized the hard, rocky soil of Spain. A million dead. For what? For the proving of Fascist strength; for the forging of Germany and Italy in a deadly war game that was staged to show what they were capable of. The ultimatum given to Germany and Italy by France and Britain was answered with yet another insurgent attack. This time 270 German-made planes took to the skies above Toledo, Brunete, and Teruel. France and Britain had been slapped in the face, and they did nothing to respond.

  In his last dispatch, Murphy shouted the words over a shortwave radio just before he boarded a small plane back to England. “The Republican government troops were unable to resist the attacks!” he shouted.

  “Repeat that, Murphy!” a faraway voice crackled in reply.

  For the third time, Murphy repeated the information, ending with the terrible news of resounding defeat. “An insurgent communique announced that government lines had collapsed under the offensive that hit like a bolt of lightning!”

  “Like what?”

  “A bolt of lightning! Put that in quotes, will you? I heard it from a German ‘volunteer’ Luftwaffe pilot! So much for ultimatums!” Now Murphy was simply yelling into the radio without the slightest concern whether he was being heard or not. None of this stuff could go into his story, even though every word of it was the truth. “What makes that screwball British prime minister think Hitler is going to give a hoot about these ridiculous British-French ultimatums now? Huh? They’re nuts!”

  “What?”

  “I said they’re nuts! And you can print that too!”

  “We can’t . . . print that, Murphy!”

  Angry at everyone, Murphy shouted louder. “Right! Yeah! Not enough human interest, right? A million dead women and kids . . . not enough. Well, how about this for the front page?” Bitterly he began to recite a lead to the copyman on the other end of the shortwave. “Try this:

  Many dinners were spoiled in Madrid tonight when the rebels chose from 7:40 to 8:50 to bombard the city with considerable intensity. We had a perfectly good dish of succotash ruined in our hotel by one of three shells that hit nearby.

  How’s that?” Murphy said sarcastically.

  “Great!” the copyman replied enthusiastically. “Really good human interest. People understand having supper interrupted.”

  For a minute Murphy simply stood staring at the radio. Then, in one last gesture of disgust, he flicked the switch to the “off” position and stalked out onto the airfield to board his plane.

  21

  The Call of the Homeland

  It was Christmas again in Vienna. The silent night of 1936 had stretched into the long, silent year of 1937 for Elisa. No word had ever come from her father, and after a few months they had even given up hope of hearing anything at all. Broken and aching, Anna had left the little mountain village of Kitzbühel for the anonymity of a little house in Prague that Theo had purchased two years earlier. Elisa had visited twice, but the undisguised loneliness of her mother’s expression made her want to hurry back to Vienna to her work and her life of busy solitude.

  She had not heard from Franz again. John Murphy, she had heard, was somewhere in Spain. Thomas served his masters in Paris. As the months crept by without news of her father, Elisa somehow came to blame Thomas for Theo’s disappearance. The love she carried for him once again turned to hate and a consuming rage against what her friend had come to believe.

  But sometimes in the dark of night the anger dissolved into a heavy ache of longing and desire. When the morning came, as it always did, she would look into the mirror and chide herself for being so foolish. Then she would immerse herself in the frantic schedule of rehearsal and performance and a social life that revolved around the other members of the orchestra.

  An uneasiness had settled gradually over her dear Vienna in the last few months. Signs had begun to appear in the shopwindows along the Ring like those she had seen on Unter den Linden in Berlin in 1933: Juden verboten! Even though her papers said she was a Czech of German heritage, Elisa did not go to those places. Months earlier, when the great airship Hindenburg had crashed in flames in Lakehurst, New Jersey, she and Leah had gone to watch the newsreel at the cinema. Leah had been stopped at the door and refused entry because she was a Jew. Elisa had nearly slapped the arrogant little doorman, but instead she had told him to go back to Germany in no uncertain terms. Then she had taken Leah and Shimon out for a lovely meal at Sacher’s, and they had drowned their sorrows with a bottle of delightful white wine from the Wachau, a place just beyond the Vienna Woods.

  “Remember Johann Strauss.” Elisa had raised her glass to toast the Jewish composer.

  “Right now I am thinking about Theodore Hertzl and his dream of Zionism and a Jewish state, if you don’t mind,” Leah remarked dryly. Then she confided that she and big Shimon had plans to move to Palestine as soon as they had enough money.

  At those words, Elisa felt such a sense of emptiness, such loneliness, that the rest of her conversation had been difficult and forced that night.

  Other members of the orchestra were drifting off—some to America, some to France, and a few to Palestine and the hard life it offered. Leah dreamed that one day she would be there, and now she shared that hope with Shimon Feldstein. They would be married two weeks after the New Year, and had plans to spend their next Passover in Jerusalem as husband and wife.

  Elisa tried not to resent this crazy plan of her friend. She tried not to envy the fact that Leah had fallen helplessly in love with the brawny, stoic tympani player.

  Do they have tympanis in Jerusalem? Or even an orchestra? What will y
ou do to make a living? You are a cellist, Leah, not a farmer! Are you crazy? Is there life anywhere but here in Vienna?

  Elisa wanted to say all these things, but she did not. After all, her own life was such an empty mess—what right did she have to shoot down Leah’s bright dreams in flames, just as the Hindenburg had burned?

  Be silent. Smile and listen politely. Only once did she run trembling with fear to Leah.

  On the front page of the Berliner Zeitung was a photograph of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem standing beside Hitler. The British had demanded he leave Palestine because of his leading role in instigating the riots there. The caption read: “Haj Amin el Husseini vows with Führer’s help to banish Jews from the Holy City forever.” When Elisa insisted Leah and Shimon must not go to such a place, they had simply stared at her as though she spoke in a foreign language.

  “You cannot understand, dear Elisa. We are Jews, and that is our homeland.”

  Elisa, although she was half Jewish, could not understand. Leah was right about that. But she did know what it was to be a target of Hitler. She had seen it destroy her family, the very life of her own father.

  “Austria is safe,” she insisted. “Chancellor Schuschnigg has pacts with Italy and England and France. Hitler cannot come here! It is not possible. The whole world would rise up against the Nazis!”