Vienna Prelude

by Bodie Thoene

  “Heil Hitler!” The voice rang out again like a gunshot—a proud and insolent voice, haughty, without wisdom or compassion.

  Theo lay panting on the cold, wet cement. He reached out to grasp the stones of a building front to pull himself up. The wind resisted his effort, howling that he should give up, that he should lie still and quietly freeze to death. But Theo was a free man for now, and he would not be told where he should die!

  “Elisa!” he shouted as loudly as he could, but his voice was a thin, bleating cry against the wind and the shouts of the Nazi thugs up the street.

  His strength was gone. He struggled again and again to raise himself, but his legs were numb from the cold and feeble from the weeks of his illness.

  From somewhere he thought he heard the sweet high melody of a violin. He whispered the name of his daughter. “Elisa.” He could do no more. The melody of Mozart played for him as it had that last night in Berlin. He had still been young then, and strong. “Elisa. My little girl.” He smiled as a new blast of wind wailed around the corner. God could hear his voice, he knew. He prayed that somewhere Elisa might hear the whisper of her father. That Anna might hear him, and his sons with her. He tried once more in vain to stand, but his strength had disappeared. In one final heroic effort, he managed to pull himself to a sitting position. He looked up into the stars. Fire and ice in the heavens. Crystal windows. Doors through which a soul might soar. He coughed and chastised himself for thinking of death. There were doorways everywhere along the lane. He had only to rest a moment longer . . . just a moment. Then he could drag himself into the warmth and shelter of some building.

  He leaned his head back against the stones and tried to catch his breath, tried to find some scrap of energy in his wasted body. Again the music faded in and out of the wind. It was no phantom, no dream—he could hear it! “Elisa,” he tried to say again, but her name was a moan. “Ahhhhh . . . ” If he could only break free of his weakness, make his body obey him once again! The the bitter cold, cloudless and cruel, was sapping his life from him. Like Austria, he was dying, and he knew it. He was dying, like all the dreams of the young, handsome officer who had waited for his love at the stage door.

  Unless some hand reached to help him out of the wind, Theo knew that his soul, vital and strong again, would rise and soar to the stars. The shell of an old man would remain below to be taken away in the morning.

  He did not try to speak their names any longer. But he sang them with the music of the violin. Anna. Elisa. Wilhelm. Dieter. They had been, and were even now at the last, his life. Play for me, Elisa. I am here, just outside your window. Play for me . . .

  ***

  When the music stopped, Murphy pressed his fingers against his eyelids and breathed in what remained of the lingering melody. He did not speak for fear of breaking the spell of her prayer. Only when she moved to put away the violin did he say in a hushed voice, “There are no words left. But God heard. Somewhere, Elisa, He weeps with us.”

  Elisa turned to stare at Murphy. Here is a side of this man that I haven’t seen before, she thought. But she did not reply. There was nothing left to say. Time was finished. The hour had passed, and then some. She closed the lid of the case as though she had finished a book. She did not set the case down. She would carry it to the car.

  Murphy went to the window one last time and looked down onto the deserted street. Below, just outside the circle of a streetlamp, an old man sat looking up toward the window. He had no hat, no jacket. The clothes on his frail body seemed as though they would be torn away by the violence of the winds. The man raised his hand in the gesture of a drowning man reaching up from a stormy sea. He had seen the man before; he was sure of it. Frail and ragged a skeleton as he was, this was no beggar. He almost looked like—

  “Stay here!” Murphy barked. “We can’t go yet.”

  “Leah? Shimon?” Elisa asked hopefully.

  “No.” Murphy was out the door and down the stairs before she could ask another question. He saw her silhouette in the window above as he bent low over the old man.

  There was something in the eyes that Murphy recognized instantly, however emaciated the body might be. He scooped up the frail figure, who could not have weighed much more than one hundred pounds. The old man was trying to speak, trying to form words on his lips as Murphy carried him up the stairs to where Elisa waited anxiously.

  “What?” Murphy climbed the steps two at a time. The man was as cold as the stones he had been sitting on. Murphy kicked the apartment door open and stepped into the warmth of the room.

  Elisa reached out toward the old man, as she had so often reached out to the children she had helped escape. She touched the icy, gnarled hand, and the old man turned his face toward her with a look that caused her heart to race.

  He licked his cracked lips, smiled slightly, and breathed a single word: “Elisa . . .”

  Elisa stared at him. “Papa?” She gasped. Then the room went black.

  ***

  Theo had no strength for explanation. After reviving Elisa, Murphy undressed him, and they bathed his ravaged body first in cool water, gradually increasing the warmth of the water and raising his body temperature slowly.

  Two hours had passed. Now Theo lay in bed, wrapped in warm blankets as Elisa sat beside him, quietly holding his hand and brushing away tears. He could only smile up at her and say her name in a hoarse whisper. Murphy stood like an impatient shadow framed in the doorway of the bedroom.

  “We’ll have to take him,” Murphy said as Elisa helped Theo sip a cup of heavily sugared tea. “Tonight.”

  Elisa was frantic with worry and uncertainty. “Can’t you see? He can’t travel, Murphy. He is sick. Starved. Almost frozen to death. Not tonight.”

  “Then it won’t be tomorrow, either.” Murphy sounded resigned. “They’ll be here tomorrow. I just talked to Timmons at INS. Skies called ahead for me at the Czech border. They will let us through if we pay enough. Nothing has changed.”

  “Everything has changed!” Elisa turned on him. “He can’t travel like this.”

  Theo could barely remember much of the story: how he came to Vienna, how long he had been in the hospital. But in the warmth of the bed, his mind had cleared enough to know that the boys who had pushed him to the street were only the forerunners of evil. He swallowed hard and groaned once in his effort to speak.

  Elisa turned to him. She was afraid for him. Afraid of losing him again forever. By some miracle he was here, and she could not bear the thought of anything happening to him.

  He must find a way to tell her: Murphy was right! They must leave tonight. “Elisa,” he said her name again. He had been unable to say anything else. “Home . . .”

  She stroked his head. “Yes, Papa.” Her voice was near to tears. “You’re home.”

  He furrowed his brow and shook his head. He opened his mouth. “Anna.”

  “Mama is fine! Oh, Papa, we will all be fine now!”

  Murphy interrupted caustically. “Not if we don’t leave now.”

  Elisa ignored him and stroked her father’s hands. Murphy turned to leave, and Theo raised his voice to stop him.

  “No!” he rasped as loudly as he could. “He . . . is . . . right!”

  48

  Hope for a Million Reasons

  Murphy turned the heater of the car on full blast as Elisa made a bed like a nest in the luggage compartment of the Packard. If they were stopped along the way, their own passports might get them through. But Theo had no papers at all, and try as they might, they had not been able to get the prisoner’s band off Theo’s wrist.

  Elisa was sick with worry, but the two-hour delay had convinced her of one thing, at least. Leah and Shimon were not coming at all. She had left her key in a hidden place beneath the worn carpet outside her door. Leah knew where it was. There was food enough for a week and a half, if they were careful. It was something—a small thing. A note was propped on the table, with a message that spoke only of hope and love and pr
ayers, and told them they were taking Elisa’s father home. Elisa had no explanation yet, either. How could she say more in a note?

  Theo was dressed in layers of warm clothes and wool socks, then wrapped in every warm blanket in the apartment. He was asleep, and Murphy carried him easily down the stairs and put him into the luggage compartment, which opened into the backseat. Elisa whispered something to him, and he smiled as they put the backseat into place. Then they put her suitcase and two violin cases over the secret opening, and left without a word. It was well after midnight. The streets of Vienna were still wet from the rain of the afternoon, and lights reflected in puddles. It seemed that they were alone in all the city. Shades were drawn. The wind had died down after the last of the Schuschnigg pamphlets had been blown away.

  As they passed the great Burgtheatre, Elisa tried not to think of what would take place there in the morning. For now, they were a solitary automobile, passing vacant sidewalks and darkened windows. Were the people sleeping or only lying sleepless in their rooms?

  Elisa let her eyes linger on the Musikverein and then on the spires of the great St. Stephan’s. In the shadow of those spires, she sensed that Leah and Shimon were watching and waiting for the first terrible dawn of Nazi rule. Her heart grieved for them, even as she rejoiced that her father had come home to her in the eleventh hour, when all the marginal minutes and seconds had ticked away. If he had not come, would she have really gone with Murphy? Would she have left the key and the food, and the note on the table and deserted them all?

  Ahead a great bonfire burned in the center of the road that led out of Vienna. A hundred young men stood around it blocking the way as they celebrated the coming of the conquerors and the fall of Austria.

  Elisa drew her breath in sharply. She looked toward Murphy. His face was lined with strain. He tried to smile as the car slid up to the human barricade. Faces leered in every window. Bottles of vodka and schnapps were passed hand to hand, swilled until they were empty, then smashed on the road.

  “Look pleasant,” Murphy muttered under his breath. He unrolled the window slightly. Two inches. The fire illuminated everything and made the night an unholy backdrop to the long shadows of the young Nazis.

  “No one gets through!” a brown-shirted young man said gruffly. He sported a stubby Hitler-style mustache, grown in the last few days in anticipation of Nazi victory.

  Murphy looked at the bonfire, then back at the youth commander. “Heil Hitler,” Murphy said coolly.

  The young man had forgotten to say the words. He looked embarrassed, then clicked his heels and repeated the words. “Heil Hitler.” He shrugged as if to explain that this was all new to him as well. “But still nobody gets through. You see.” He pointed to the blazing heap.

  “Looks like you’re right. Here, at any rate. Where is there an open road?” Murphy spoke with authority, impatiently, and too loudly for the content of the question. Then he frowned at a schnapps bottle being upended by a boy next to the leader. “And is this the kind of discipline the Führer can expect from his followers in the eastern Reich?”

  The young man’s eyes widened. “No! I mean, most of these are just boys who—”

  Murphy interrupted with a wave of his hand. “Where might we find a road open to the east, so that we might prepare for the arrival of the Führer when he tours the Czech border?”

  The audacity of his words startled even Elisa. Murphy’s accent was decent, but still it was easy to tell that he was not German.

  The young man seemed confused. “Well, I”—he frowned—“who are you?”

  “Count von Frank. Of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. And my wife.” Murphy turned to Elisa. She was pale, frightened by the gang of drunken young Nazis. “She is, of course, the stepsister of Field Marshal Göring, who has arranged this entire event.”

  Elisa tried not to look confused. In the perfect accent of a Berliner, she said loudly, “My brother will not appreciate the roads being blocked by aimless hoodlums with nothing better to do.”

  The accent worked. The youth snapped to attention and said “Heil Hitler!” once again, then turned to his second-in-command, an apple-cheeked boy of about seventeen. “Can you take Herr Field Marshal Göring’s sister around this ridiculous bonfire, Hans? Take them through your farm, ja?”

  Hans nodded fearfully, then turned around without offering the salute.

  “You’ll have to teach them better if you’re ever going to amount to anything,” Murphy said. He backed away from the glaring light and followed the farmboy as he pumped on his bicycle toward the dirt road of his farm. No one had even asked to see their papers.

  “And what if they had?” Elisa asked in a trembling voice.

  “We are traveling incognito.” Murphy smiled and winked, and then his smile faded.

  A hundred yards from where they bumped over the rutted road on their way around the blockade, a caravan of vehicles topped a rise behind them and descended toward the bonfire.

  “Murphy!” Elisa cried out. “It’s them! Oh, Murphy!”

  The main road ran parallel to them. The convoy was almost even with them, and in the glare of headlights and the huge bonfire, it was easy to see the outlines of the soldiers.

  The lad on the bicycle struggled along in front of them, glancing nervously over his shoulder, first at Murphy and then at the German convoy on his right. Murphy gunned his vehicle and passed the boy just as the first of the troop lorries reached the flaming heap. The huge Nazi vehicle stopped twenty-five yards from the fire; then as the driver shouted out his window and the peasant boys scattered, the truck also gunned its engine and slammed through the blockade as though it were nothing.

  The headlights of the Packard illuminated the narrow lane that veered sharply back toward the right, directly onto the main road. Murphy swerved and headed back to the highway, careening onto the asphalt road some three hundred yards ahead of the Nazi vehicles.

  Elisa held tightly to the dashboard. Murphy pressed the accelerator to the floor and roared ahead of them. It was easy to see that the head vehicle had also sped up and was now in pursuit of them.

  “How far?” Elisa cried over the noise of the engine.

  “Twenty-five miles to the Czech border!” Murphy shouted. “If an American Packard can’t outdistance a German troop lorry, something’s wrong.” He tried to sound cheerful, but the fact was that the massive pursuit vehicle was closing in on them. Murphy’s worry reflected in his face, if not in his words.

  There were a dozen ways across the Czech border; naturally, Murphy had chosen to take the shortest one. But what was the shortest for them was also the first one the invading army had closed.

  Probably a thousand cars had passed over this same road since morning. The Packard was the last before the swarm of swastika-marked tanks and trucks descended from the north and the west. Murphy and the precious cargo may have been the last of the civilian vehicles to slip out of Vienna that night without the Nazi order “Halt!” being shouted and a search being conducted. There would be no more after him.

  The lights of the troop lorry loomed up behind them now. As Murphy’s car neared the village, the truck’s headlights flashed into the passenger compartment. A German troop carrier was capable of racing an American Packard!

  For a moment, Elisa was certain that the truck would run over the top of their car and smash Theo where he lay hidden. But then the lorry backed off. As Murphy raced past the first few houses of the village, the lorry pulled off the road and simply let them go on.

  The race was over.

  Murphy was sweating. He switched off the heater and wiped his brow nervously. “That was a game,” he said. “Why? He could have had us.”

  The answer came soon enough. Every road had been blocked on the Austrian side of the border since word of the Anschluss had become official. Still nine miles from safety, a Nazi barricade had been set up. This one was not run by inept young boys, but by men—men with faces that Elisa remembered and feared.


  Piles of baggage and sleeping refugees lined the road. The checkpoint had been set up in a place where there was no way around. Grim, frightened Austrians stared at the passing vehicle, and ahead, in the glare of floodlights, Elisa recognized Sporer, with Otto Wattenbarger at his side. Together they commanded a force of about twenty Brownshirts. Jackboots caught the light. They would not forget the salute, or their purpose in being on the frontier tonight.

  “I’m sorry,” Elisa whispered.

  “Let me handle it.” Murphy said. He did not smile now. He would not play games with these men. The pistols in their holsters were loaded and within reach.

  A low moan issued from the baggage compartment. “Papa, the Nazis,” Elisa warned as Sporer strode toward them. “Hush, Papa.”

  She could barely breathe. Her heart was pounding as she watched the Nazis slam a man onto the hood of a car and brutally search him. Others knelt on the wet earth with their hands on their heads and machine guns trained on them. The nightmare had returned, this time with more force than before. The vengeance would come—it was here, just beginning.

  Murphy and Elisa might get past with their documents, but what about Theo with the prisoner’s bracelet? Had God brought him this far only to be taken again? Was this black night to be as it was when they tried to leave Germany together? Theo Lindheim would not survive a night enduring such cold brutality. God? Elisa managed a smile as Otto leaned down to address Murphy. He had not noticed her yet.

  “Out, bitte,” he ordered. “Everybody out.” His eyes met Elisa’s, and he paused midsentence. “Elisa Linder?” He seemed almost pleased to see her.

  Murphy looked startled. “Murphy,” he corrected. “She’s married now.”

  Otto glanced at Murphy as though he had interrupted. “Married? Franz will be brokenhearted,” he said, still addressing Elisa.

  “Well, Franz is married too, Otto!” Elisa tried to sound as if this was a happy meeting of old friends. Murphy sat quietly as she bubbled on. “So? Are you married yet?”