You make your city sound so appealing. I would love to see Prague. Things in Vienna are not easy these days. There are a lot of new ideas in the air—ideas that seem to be dangerous to people like us. We have those same flags flying too. Mama tries to protect me, and I let her think that I see nothing, but sometimes at night I hear her weeping. She cries, asking, “Why do they hate us?”
Well, where to continue? I guess, at least my friends say, that I’m a daring and curious girl. I’m learning Hebrew, and it’s not the easiest language to learn. It has a lot of symbols, and you must read backward. Someday, I hope to go to Palestine.
I’ve never written to anyone with so many of the secrets that I carry, and I’m not sure why I’m writing and telling you so much, Max, but there must be a reason, mustn’t there?
Sometimes I go to Sacher’s. The hotel has the best bakery in the world. Someday I’d like to treat you to a torte. They are arranged in perfect rows protected by a polished glass case, and they are as colorful and as beautiful as the flowers in the market. Yellow, red, pink, white, and of course, chocolate.
You wrote to me about your father and mentioned your mother. Can you tell me more about her? I will tell you about mine. Mama works every night, and when she was not here, my father was always nearby. He was a professor of history by day, and in the evening, wrote beautiful poetry. He read all kinds of poetry to me—not just Austrian poets but anything that has been translated into German. But things have changed and he’s not around to read to me anymore. He was taken away by the soldiers who have invaded our country. He sold our silver settings and our paintings so Mama and I would have money to leave for a better place. He promised to join us.
Suddenly, in the middle of the night, he was taken away by men in black. They smashed up the house and just dragged him off in their car. I don’t know why, except maybe because he knew too much history, and maybe because he is Jewish. It’s an awful feeling when someone knocks at your door and tells you that you don’t live there anymore. I hope it’s a feeling that you will never know.
“Don’t worry,” he said to us. “I’ll be all right. You and Mama must go. For my sake.” Those were the last words he said to me.
Every day, I play my piano more than ever and I play for her. Music has its own language and I strive every moment to learn its meaning. I want to find the music to soothe her. I think we might be leaving Vienna soon, and I shall miss it. After all, it’s a city built with music.
I’d love to see you. I hope that this may be soon.
Yours affectionately,
Sophie
I finished the letter and then read it again slowly. I was moved and a little stunned by her honesty. It struck a chord with me. I had never spoken about my mother to anyone, and it was hard to express my feelings, but I took a chance. I’d never really tried to say these things, but as soon as I began, I knew what to write without even thinking, as if my pen were moving on its own, and I started to express words and feelings that I didn’t know I had. The words started to flow, they seemed to be writing themselves onto the page.
I remember one time I asked Hans, my father’s best friend, how it felt to compose music, and he told me that sometimes, most times, it was hard work, but other times something seemed to take over, almost like magic, and he wouldn’t even be thinking, he would be existing in some space removed from the world and afterward he would look at the sheet and the notes would be there as if they had always been there, or had been waiting to appear. That’s how it felt writing to Sophie that day.
June 14, 1938
Dear Sophie,
It’s strange, isn’t it, but I think we get along, looking for ways to make our lives better when things are bad. I don’t talk about my mother really and remember only a little about her, but I do know she was an actress. From her clippings, I can imagine why she was admired by many, and I can see why my father adored her. I remember her like a fading photograph but one that sometimes becomes sharp again just for a moment and then she goes away again. Sometimes I can’t believe she ever really existed, but a lot of the time I feel as though she’s still here. To me she was always a summertime lady, because she always wore a large sweeping hat with a huge bow, and underneath its brim was a smile that was brighter than any footlight onstage. But then I think she can’t always have been like that—not in the snow, not in the rain. But that’s how I see her. No matter whether she was onstage, at home, or by my side, my father tells me that she was as gentle as a whisper, and it is that whisper that I can still hear, can still feel sometimes, when I need it most.
My father and mother met here in Prague. He was on tour and once he met her, he never wanted to leave. I was born soon after they married. Then she became ill. Nobody could do anything for her. I didn’t know how to save her. I didn’t even know how to manage, how to get through the day. But Poppy, my father, said that he would help me, and I would help him, and we’d do that every day from then on. We’d be there for each other. They met here, and Poppy said that, in many ways, Prague was her city and we both feel closer to her here. It seems she’s just out of reach, just around the corner, just out of sight, looking down on us, checking that we’re doing all right.
I think you’d like Poppy. He has a low, steady voice, and I can see, when he doesn’t know that I am looking at him, a hint of sadness in his soft brown eyes. I know he doesn’t want me to know it, to see it, so I never let on.
After my mother died, my father threw himself into his work. I think maybe he was hoping to dim her memory, to keep the sadness away, but it doesn’t work. I always know he is thinking of her from the way he looks after me, the way he does everything. He lives his life with a lot of courage. I know that, and I try to be like him. And he tells me often that life’s like a seesaw. Up and down, back and forth. Hurt and happiness. And I want to be on the side of happiness. Do you think we can choose which side we get to be on?
My world revolves around music almost as much as yours does. I think we need all kinds of music—from when we are born to the moment we die. After all, we all live with the rhythm of our own heartbeats, and Poppy says: “Music reminds us of the mysterious beauty that is in each of us and connects everyone to everyone else.” But he reminds me so often that it’s not easy, “You must work to master it, and you may never master it, but you will improve, you will learn to understand it, and to express yourself, but you must practice,” and I’m getting more comfortable with the piano every day. I take lessons with Hans Krása, who also writes operas.
We will meet one day. I know this.
Yours,
Max
We exchanged letters more and more regularly, sharing our memories and experiences, in every letter revealing more about ourselves, more of our lives, and every word made a difference. I was learning about her and sharing feelings and memories I scarcely knew I had. The letters from Sophie were the things I looked forward to most in my life. In one of her letters Sophie enclosed a photograph. I thought you’d enjoy one of me at the piano. I must follow who I am, after all.
The snapshot brought my movie to life. She was smiling, wearing a jacket with ruffles. I looked carefully at the photograph and my heart skipped a beat. The photo was shaded in sepia. It appeared like a picture out of an old photo book, as though Sophie were stepping through time to smile at me. Her hair was a light brown, I imagined, and her eyes were blue. It didn’t make any difference. It was Sophie, sitting at her favorite place in the world, at her piano, her fingers about to touch the keys. I knew that feeling, that the music was about to begin. That moment before you create the first note, when it seems that anything is possible. It is a special kind of silence, that moment before. A magical silence. Sophie knew that magic as well as I did.
I knew I wouldn’t show the photo to anyone except David. I slipped it into a secret place in my pocket to have it with me always. Close to my heart. I felt it belonged there more than anywhe
re else.
I had to return her sentiment. I sent Sophie a picture of myself in my father’s study, surrounded by his musical scores, showing I was a musician too. The local photographer who took it told me that I looked tall and handsome. I guessed he was just being polite, but tall and handsome was an ambition of mine. When I stared in the mirror, all I saw was that I had brown eyes and brown hair. I hoped Sophie would like how I looked. Every day I raced to the mailbox, hoping for a letter. The world seemed to be getting darker, but these letters cast light into my life, Sophie’s words on the page electric and thrilling. Her words were the closest I could get to hearing her play music. And music was how I made sense of the world.
Soon I received another letter, in which she talked about a group she belonged to called Aliyah. She didn’t tell me much beyond that, and when I asked my father about it that night, he just shrugged and looked puzzled. I asked her in my next letter and waited anxiously for an answer.
July 2, 1938
Dear Max,
Aliyah means that we will make a return to our homeland, Palestine, after being away for two thousand years. It’s a faith that we will be restored to who we are and what we want to be, that we will fulfill the wish of every Jewish person, this never-ending dream of my people.
And after all, Max, we all dream, don’t we?
People in our country don’t want us here, but there’s a village near Prague where we can live in the meantime. We hope to build a new community there. Since Mama is a nurse, she’ll be needed.
But all of this means that we will be coming to visit Prague for the day, in a few weeks.
Love,
Sophie
My heart skipped a beat as I read these words and I wrote back at once saying I’d be pleased to come to the station and show her around my city. She’s coming my way!
Saturday couldn’t arrive fast enough.
ANNA
Oxford 1938
Anna Kingsley had the markings of privilege and success, and the virtues bestowed upon her came from the confidence gained mostly from her family and her education at Oxford’s Lady Margaret Hall. Founded in 1879, it was one of the newer and more progressive colleges, a neo-Georgian, white-trimmed, redbrick building standing alone along the River Cherwell. A spot on the river’s edge was a favorite hiding place, where she often picnicked. She took a first in politics, philosophy, and economics.
Fiercely independent, she grew up respecting her mother but never intending to follow her into fashionable society. If the truth be told, Anna’s mother was more concerned with the way things looked than the way they were. Her grandmother, by contrast, was Danish and far less concerned with appearances. A noted novelist, Madeline Kingsley’s historical romances had a loyal following of devotees. She was a fringe member of the Bloomsbury Group, a pack of nonconformists whose novels and essays were widely considered controversial in tone and thought. When these artists and poets met, often in the salon of Virginia Woolf, they discussed everything of the moment in literature and politics, with E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey taking the lead. Occasionally, Madeline’s group welcomed a guest who had started his career as a journalist and was deeply interested in history. His name was Winston Churchill. The group promoted sexual equality and sexual liberation, among other things, attempting to establish a new order liberated from established norms. Liberalism, pacifism, and socialism united them. Her husband, Sir William Kingsley, had been a respected member of Parliament, awarded a knighthood for his service to the nation.
Most English fathers looked to their sons, rather than their daughters, in a bond that carried more admiration than emotional currency. There were few outward displays of affection, but, taking in to account their wealth, whatever affection had accumulated over the years was secure in the family bank vault. Anna’s father never showed any disappointment as she reached for what were uncommon goals, leading the way for young women of her generation, and his distance was never taken for a lack of love or loyalty.
At Oxford, she began attracting notice with editorials published in the Oxford Mail warning of the rising political tide in Europe; upon graduation, she received an enthusiastic invitation from The Observer, whose editor asked her to join their ranks at the European desk. Anna seized this opportunity.
She would forever recall the exchange with her father and the sacred promise she’d made to him when her first piece had appeared in the Mail in her second year at Oxford: “Whatever I write, it must mean something. I want, perhaps even need, to make a difference through my writing. I will do just that. I will make a difference.” Her father had looked at her earnestly and said: “But what about when writing alone isn’t enough?”
Her humanity was clearly evident; her interest was clearly history, as was Sandy MacPherson’s, Anna’s forward-looking managing editor, who enlisted writers with a voice of their own and a respect for research. Her first editorial for The Observer soon appeared:
June 27, 1938
THE END OF ILLUSION
Indeed, the destruction of Germany began on May 10, 1933. On that occasion, great bonfires were lit on the Opernplatz, an open square in Berlin next to the opera house where Mendelssohn had conducted. Nazi loyalty rituals scripted for the event called for high Nazi officials, professors, university rectors, and student leaders to address the participants and spectators. The Sturmabteilung (a paramilitary group under the Nazi party), wearing their familiar brown shirts, threw tons of great literature into the flames. Propaganda Minster Goebbels was on hand to address the crowd and the newsreel cameras. The burning of books, he said, was a symbolic action to “show the world that a new Germany will ascend from the flames in our own hearts.” In Berlin alone, more than thirty thousand books were burned, part of a calculated effort to redefine German culture and world history. Like many propaganda events, such as those at Nuremberg, the book burnings were designed as spectacle, and, as in Nuremberg, featured torchlight parades and a show of extravagant German nationalism. The fires burned pages by great German thinkers such as Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud to ash. Books by Thomas Mann were also thrown into the flames, and to add a bit more literary fuel, so were works of American novelists Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, and the Nobel prize–winning Sinclair Lewis. Writings of German philosopher and political theorist Karl Marx and Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin were tossed and torched, and most egregiously, the works of Helen Keller, born deaf and blind, who had triumphed over hardship and documented her inspiring story. “Tyranny cannot defeat the power of ideas,” Heinrich Heine, the great German poet, wrote a century before. “Where one burns books, one will, in the end, burn people.”
Germany appears a country in a film running backward, with two ideologies, both profane, both about political doctrine and performance. One is the war against liberal democracies and communism; the other, at its core, is ruthless and brutal. It is a war against European Jewry, blatantly clear since Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf. In it, the leader of the Nazi party advocates for lebensraum (“living space”) and purification. He wrote, “I believe I am acting in the spirit of the Almighty. By warding off the Jews, I am doing God’s work.”
All through Eastern Europe, police and troops are herding Jews into newly designated ghettos where they wait for a solution not yet clear. The Nazis have a problem: What are they going to do with so many decorated Jewish veterans of the First World War—the wounded, the honored? How will they treat the children? How will the vaunted German army treat its citizens who fought valiantly for their Fatherland? And the writers, composers, conductors, scientists, philosophers, actors, directors, respected throughout the world? How will Hitler avoid international embarrassment and moral outrage?
Now comes Anschluss. That’s what the Germans call it. What does it mean? It means inexorable expansion. It means the fate of Austrian Jews is in peril. Jewish people across the continent are doomed to pl
aces where they are not wanted; for them the world is divided into places where they cannot live and countries they cannot enter. In March the Germans annexed Austria. Its 190,000 Jews came under the control of the Nazis. They are being humiliated and deprived of their citizenship and subjected to the infamous Nuremberg laws. A favorite new sport in Vienna is residents looking on and cheering as Jewish women are forced to scrub sidewalks on their knees and in their lingerie. Isolation and persecution continue with the same torrent of anti-Semitism unleashed in Germany over the last five years. Their property and homes confiscated, those who cannot leave are isolated and rounded up for slave labor and sent to a holding camp called Mauthausen, a small village in upper Austria. It is the end of illusion. The Germans are looking to expand their systematic march of tyranny into Czechoslovakia.
THE CZECH ALL STARS
Prague 1938
Aside from my father, my friends, and Hans, I had three great passions in life. I had music, I had football, and I had my job. I loved each one, and somehow, they defined me. David was my best pal on and off the field, and we’d been friends ever since I’d gotten sick with polio. I was housebound for more than a year, but nearly every day, David was at the door of my house, with a book or a newspaper article to read me, or a chocolate, and true to his endlessly positive personality, he breezily assured me I would get better. I finally did but was left with a limp. I hated the looks I got from strangers. David just ignored all of it and treated me no differently than he had before I got sick. It was a real handicap in its way, though. My right leg was a little shorter than the left, and I wore a special shoe to make up the difference. I did my best to walk straight—I didn’t want a limp—and that special shoe was part of me, the thing that made me instantly recognizable on the streets of Prague.
In the real world, I didn’t walk so well, but I had my imagination, and in my dreams, I danced and danced … I had seen an American movie with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and they seemed to float. All I had to do was close my eyes and the limp was gone. “Take it, kid,” Fred shouted and, defying my disability, I did a turn or two while the orchestra played. Even in my dreams there was a musical score to my life.
While the Music Played Page 2