Vienna Prelude

by Bodie Thoene

  The entire incident had taken only moments. Shouting sentries fell silent once again. They would let the body lie where it had fallen as a warning for other inmates.

  Inside the long unheated buildings, Jews and Social Democrats, Catholics and Protestants huddled in close-packed rows, trying to sleep, trying to keep warm, trying to forget the sound of the gunshots. Thousands of them were crammed into barracks that had been built for only a few hundred at best. In the morning there would be numbers missing from the roll call. They would die tonight and be cremated, along with the one who had committed suicide by crossing the forbidden line. Then they would be shipped home in little boxes like Christmas packages. A slip of paper would offer the explanation: Died of natural causes.

  These were Hitler’s gifts to the German people and the Greater German Reich. He had swept the cities clean of beggars. He had pulled dissenters from their pulpits and public offices. Day by day more Jews were defrauded of their property; their belongings were scooped into the coffers of the public building funds or the armament industry. The humans themselves had been swept into grim black closets like Dachau. The Aryan cities of the Reich were becoming pure for German culture once again. Those who were missing were those who had somehow disturbed the conscience and peace of mind of the German people. What difference did it make if a few thousand, more or less, came back in ashes? A handful of dust to spread in the rose garden? What difference would it make if eventually a few million died, more or less—as long as there were no beggars, no gypsies, no Christian dissenters, no Bolsheviks, no Jews? The Aryan race of the great thousand-year Reich must be pure! Society must be pure! Sweep the dust into Dachau and forty other camps in Germany. Had not the Führer proclaimed his purpose in the Christmas broadcast? “I am doing the work of the Lord!”

  After four months in solitary confinement, Theo Lindheim had come into Dachau. Like Pastor Niemöller and Pastor Jacobi, he had been given a false name and a new identity with the prison identification number. He was too well known among the people of Germany for the SS to risk some news of his fate being leaked. Those men who had been prominent or popular before Hitler came to power were all called by other names within the walls of the camps.

  But somehow, it made no difference. Theo was listed on the records as Jacob Stern, but still prisoners quietly saluted this unnamed war hero when he passed by in the exercise yard. To speak his name and be heard would mean a beating with a rubber truncheon or worse. And so faceless men, cold and ragged, saluted Theo with their eyes when he passed. They spoke without speaking, and between them was a covenant to remember what Germany had been before all this—a covenant to remember that although they were imprisoned, those who lived outside the walls were also captives of Hitler’s brutal rule.

  No one was free in Germany now. No one! The streets were clean. Great buildings of white stone were being erected everywhere to the glory of the Reich. There were no disagreements and no freedom. Germany was a nation of prisoners, ruled by a government of jailers. Göring himself had said, “I would like to see all of Germany in uniform, marching in column.”

  Tonight, outside the walls of Dachau, neat rows of field-gray uniforms marched through the streets of Berlin and Munich and Hamburg in eerie torchlight procession. Perhaps they were warmer than those inside the walls of Dachau; perhaps they had more to eat; but they too had lost their names. They had no faces. Their breath sucked color and life from the very air as they raised their arms as one mob to shout, “Sieg Heil! Heil!”

  Like Faust, the mob had sold its soul to the devil for the sake of . . . what? Clean streets? New buildings? Jobs and possessions stolen from another human being in the name of “Aryan racial purity”? In the name of this purity, Hitler had robbed even the Christ child in the manger of His identity, declaring, “Jesus was not Jewish; it could not be! His young mother was not Jewish! We must eliminate these slanders from the German Christian religion! We must expunge all traces of Judaism from our churches! The very thought that Christ was Jewish is unthinkable!”

  Tonight the Nazi Storm Troopers and Hitler Youth marched row on row. “Gott mit uns—God with us” was inscribed on every belt buckle. The sound of their boots on the pavement was like the echo of the Roman legions on the stones of Jerusalem’s streets when a young Jewish woman gave birth to a son in a cave above Bethlehem. That son had grown to manhood with the sound of marching legions in His ears. The crash of soldiers’ boots had followed Him to His execution; the ring of their hammers had crashed against the spikes in His hands and feet, and a soldier in field gray with a swastika on His arm had driven the lance into His side. Soldiers had killed the Jewish child called by the Hebrew name Emmanuel . . . God with us. Like the SS, they had come by torchlight to arrest Him in the night. They had thrown Him into prison, pulled out His beard by the roots, and beaten Him. “Hail, King of the Jews!” they had jeered.

  Yes, there were echoes of that time and place tonight in Dachau. In the endless rows of skeletons dressed in rags lived the poor and the homeless, the shepherds and wise men alike who looked for a Messiah to deliver them. In the arrogant cruelty of Hitler’s army, once again the generals of Rome sought to crush even the barest ember of hope from men’s lives. But even here there was forbidden light—even in the hell of Dachau.

  In the corner of Barrack 8 men huddled together for warmth tonight. They jokingly called their corner the “Herrgottseck—the corner of the Lord.” As Theo Lindheim crouched on a wooden pallet between a Catholic priest and a Jewish cantor from the synagogue in Strassburg, he thought that perhaps the only free men left in Germany shivered within these thin walls. Here, with all else stripped from them, these men could be only what they were, for good or for evil. It was almost Christmas. It was just past Hanukkah. Tonight a priest without vestments, a cantor without tallith remembered the Festival of Lights and the One who was proclaimed to be The Light.

  For the holiday, the prisoners had been given an extra ration beside their five ounces of bread to eat. Guards had distributed a raw potato for each man in the barracks. The eight in the Herrgottseck had carefully hoarded their treasures for the feast tonight. Now, eight potato halves were placed in a circle. They had been hollowed out, and a wick made from an oil-soaked rag had been placed in each one to form a candle. At great risk, the priest had stolen a match from the kitchen.

  A cold draft sifted up through the boards of the barrack’s floor. Theo shivered and pulled his thin blanket around his chin. He prayed that the draft would not snuff out their match. Somehow the lighting of these candles tonight had become the focus of his existence, the reason he continued to breathe and think and hope when so many had given up.

  Outside their circle of eight, someone mocked them in a hoarse, bitter whisper. “So, Priest, here is Christmas. Peace on earth. Of course, this is not earth, ja? But purgatory. Almost hell, only not warm enough. Hell would be better. Warmer.”

  “Shut up!” another voice hissed from the darkness. “Let them alone.”

  “You think your little candles will warm you?” mocked the voice again.

  Yes! Theo wanted to shout. Yes! This one defiant act of worship will warm me. Please, dear Lord, do not let the flame die. Please let our candles burn!

  “Come closer,” said the cantor, and the eight pressed in shoulder to bony shoulder, ribs and spines and skulls forming a wall against the threat of a hostile wisp of air. The potato candles were moved forward into a tight circle, their wicks placed together at the center. The cantor held a small bundle of straw and the priest held the match. The only match.

  “Tonight,” the priest said quietly, “God has provided only one match. And so we who are both Jews and Christians worship as one in this place.”

  Theo could not see the priest’s face. They all looked the same in the darkness, but there was a smile in the voice of the priest. So it had taken Dachau to bring priest and cantor together. Dachau, 1937. Christmas. Hanukkah. A moment of covenant among men who suffered together.

&nbs
p; The cantor’s voice was like a song as he spoke. “Tonight we remember the great miracle that happened in the temple. After the enemy had desecrated our place of worship and we drove him out from Jerusalem, there was oil enough to light the lamps for only one day. And God caused the flames to burn for eight days until more oil was sanctified. On this darkest night of our souls, when we find no light within ourselves, we ask God for a miracle—”

  “What miracle can you expect here?” taunted the voice outside the circle.

  “Only that the light will burn. That we will remember God is with us,” replied the cantor.

  “Gott mit uns! God is with the Nazis! Can’t you read it on their buckles? I was beaten by one of those buckles,” he scoffed.

  The priest began to sing softly:

  “O come, O come, Emmanuel,

  And ransom captive Israel,

  That mourns in lonely exile here

  Until the Son of God appear—”

  Other voices joined him softly in the song.

  “O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free

  Thine own from Satan’s tyranny;

  From depths of hell Thy people save

  And give them victory o’er the grave.”

  From the far corners of the barracks, weak voices added their strength to the song. Theo closed his eyes and sang loudly. Never mind that the Kapos would come and beat them—never mind! And if they were shot for singing, what did it matter?

  “O come, Thou Dayspring, come and cheer

  Our spirits by Thine advent here;

  And drive away the shades of night,

  And pierce the clouds and bring us light!”

  Theo opened his eyes as the one match sputtered into flame. The tiny, fragile flame touched the bundle of straw, and the cantor, his voice clear and bell-like as he sang, touched the fire to the wicks of the eight Hanukkah candles.

  “Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel

  Shall come to thee, O Israel!”

  For an hour the candles burned as the cantor and the priest led the men in songs of hope and deliverance. And indeed a great miracle happened there that night; no guards came near the barracks; no clubs smashed the heads of the thousand who joined the songs. For one hour that barrack in Dachau became synagogue and cathedral, where men lifted their hearts with one voice to the One God.

  ***

  Leah and the three children stayed with Elisa, while Shimon waited out the storm of the Judenplatz with another orchestra player on the other side of the city. The Austrian police arrested fifty-four Nazi demonstrators as Hitler began enraged broadcasts against the government of Chancellor Schuschnigg. The Austrian Secret Police, armed with new information about Nazi activities in Vienna, raided the Austrian Nazi headquarters.

  How the government had gotten access to secret orders issued from Germany to Captain Leopold’s thugs was a matter for discussion in every café in the city. Obviously the Austrian Nazis had a very bad leak. Orders issued by Himmler in Germany had been discovered: An incident was to be provided as the excuse for Hitler’s armies to march into Austria. The planned incident was the murder of Germany’s ambassador to Austria, Herr Franz von Papen. The instructions from Germany indicated that the assassination of von Papen must be blamed on a Jew—a Bolshevik, if at all possible. When Germany’s ambassador was cooling in the city morgue, it would be expected that the Austrian Nazis would riot, at which time the German army would march in and restore order.

  The secret agenda of Adolf Hitler was no longer a secret. Of course, no word of the plan was printed in Germany, where Hitler raved about the Nazis of Austria being denied their rights. But everywhere else, the documents were passed from hand to hand, and a shudder coursed down the spine of every professional diplomat from every nation: “You mean Hitler was actually going to have his own ambassador bumped off for the sake of the cause? I dare say!”

  Mention of a scurrilous forgery was made in Hitler’s tirades. Such broadcasts were listened to without amusement in Austria. His demand that the Nazi Party members be set free at once was also no laughing matter. Perhaps the man doing the hardest thinking in the entire situation was von Papen himself. He was not ready to become the sacrificial lamb on the altar of Hitler’s plans to take over Austria. Needless to say, the German Embassy in Vienna was a quiet and unhappy place.

  No one argued that Vienna was no place for German-Jewish children without proper papers. “Grüss Gott,” Leah said quietly as Elisa left the apartment. “God bless.” It was a prayer, as much as a way of saying good-bye these days.

  ***

  Elisa made her way quickly to the telegraph office. She paid and passed the simple message across the counter.

  To: Herr Karl Wattenbarger Kitzbühel. Tyrol Stop Wish lodging for spinster aunt and three small children on holiday December 27 Stop Please Reply to Elsa Fambich Main Telegraph Office Kärtnerstrasse Vienna Immediately Stop

  She instructed the telegrapher that she would return tomorrow afternoon to see if a reply had arrived; then she left and returned home by way of the bakery for a load of cream puffs and strudel for the restless children. Elisa bought a newspaper from a shivering boy outside the Konditorei. She stood staring silently at the front page for a moment, astonished at the photograph of the man Otto had called Sporer.

  “He’s a very bad man, Fraülein,” offered the newsboy. “Albert Sporer is his name. A German Nazi.”

  She glanced at the boy. “Yes. Very bad. An evil man.” She wished now that she had not burned the memory of Sporer’s face into her memory.

  “You can see” —the boy stepped forward to share her paper with her even though he had dozens of his own—“they say he is wanted even in Czechoslovakia for murder. The Czechs want him back to hang him, but Chancellor Schuschnigg will throw him into the darkest prison in Austria.” He seemed satisfied with the pronouncement.

  Elisa scanned the page, reading with alarm that the Nazi Party in Germany had already protested the arrest of Sporer as “interference with the right of Austrians to self-determination.”

  “I hope there is a hole deep enough for him,” Elisa muttered, and the newsboy laughed in agreement. She looked at the child then. He was dressed in rags and wore a yarmulke on his head. His eyes were bright at the thought of such a wicked man as the Nazi Sporer being tossed into a dungeon. “Where do you live?” she asked gently.

  “On Judengasse,” he replied.

  “Then you saw them?” He was no more than nine years old—too young, she thought, to see such things as the riot in the Judenplatz.

  His bright smile left as easily as it had come. “Yes.” His deep brown eyes seemed old beyond their years. “We saw them. But Mother says they will not be back. You see in the newspaper, Chancellor Schuschnigg will not let the Nazis come to Austria. We will be safe in Vienna.”

  Elisa recognized her own hope in his words. Only a few days before, she had said what the Jewish boy said now. She had believed the hope then.

  She looked again at the face of Sporer. Thin lips and high cheekbones. Wire-rimmed glasses on a sensitive face. He could have been an artist or a poet, but the words of the Führer had become an evil cancer that had twisted this man into a form so frightening—she shuddered at the thought and tried to see the image of Sporer as though she had not felt his grip on her in the street, as though his breath had not been hot and violent against her cheek. Do men and women looking at his face in the newspaper see what I have seen? she wondered. Has he always been this, a contagion of hatred, capable of infecting other men with his disease?

  She thought of Otto then. It could just as easily have been his photograph on the front page. Perhaps one day it would be his face that would be condemned. Yet his mother had told her that Otto had once thought of becoming a priest.

  From far away, the distant memory of her father’s voice came to her. In the soft glow of his library he had read aloud to his children and a shudder had coursed through her as she heard the words of Faust’s evil spirit:

  “Wrat
h grips you. The great trumpet sounds. The graves are quaking. And your heart, resurrected from ashen calm to flaming tortures, flares up.”

  Without another word, she tipped the boy a shilling and walked slowly home. There was nothing more to explain. Sporer, Otto, the men in the Judenplatz, the mobs of Germany—all had given their hearts to wrath and fire. There was no room for goodness in such a bargain with the devil. All else was crowded out and forgotten. In a sickening flood of realization, Elisa knew they were capable of anything. Of everything! Even the unthinkable. Had she not seen it in Rudy’s hands, and then again when she lay beneath Sporer in the Judenplatz? Yes. She had seen the look of disappointment on his face when Otto had shouted that she was Aryan. He had wanted to hurt her! He had hoped that she was the enemy! Her cries had given him pleasure!

  Like the newsboy, she prayed that there was a hope deep enough to contain such all-consuming evil. But the dull ache in the pit of her stomach warned that the evil growth had already spread far and sent a taproot deep into the heart of Austria.

  ***

  In Paris, banner headlines screamed the plot of Austrian Nazis against von Papen. There was no mistaking the intention of Hitler in spite of his enraged denials.

  Thomas scanned the newspaper and leaned back in his chair, propping his feet up on the desk. He had done the right thing, going to Churchill and Eden. Admiral Canaris and the others had done the right thing to send him. The British had gotten the word to Schuschnigg in time; surely, the world would put a collective foot down to stop the madman at the helm of Germany. Perhaps there would be no need for the generals to revolt. Now, certainly Britain would demand a halt! Prime Minister Chamberlain would hold up the military might of Britain. The French would trumpet their denunciation of such tactics as Hitler’s diabolical scheme.