Exile Music

by Jennifer Steil

  When Juan Lechín Oquendo, leader of the federation of tin miners’ unions and Hernán Siles Suazo, vice-presidential running mate of Paz Estenssoro, led the revolutionaries to victory, Miguel stayed home. Even he was amazed by reports of the strength of the crowds, swollen by miners, campesinos, and government soldiers who changed sides, indicating their change of heart by reversing the hats on their heads.

  When it was all over and thousands had died, the man the revolutionaries chose to install as president was Paz Estenssoro, who had won the vote the year before. A few months later, Bolivia had universal suffrage. Workers gained the right to organize. A few years after that, amazingly, nearly half of rural families owned the land they worked. The mines were nationalized, a significant step in Bolivia’s quest to free itself from foreign marauders, although this triumph was complicated by the fact that much of the technical expertise needed in the mines left with the foreign engineers. Still, Bolivians were at least free to make their own mistakes.

  Things would change again, I knew. Political tides in the Andes turned with the moon. But this was significant; this was a start. Nayra would be able to wander her city freely. She could cast a vote. Her government might even someday treat her like a human being.

  Sixty-two

  My mother and I walked to the movies one Sunday morning in April 1953. It was a long walk for my mother, but she didn’t complain. We went once or twice a month now, often with Miguel and my father. Miguel had a new teaching job at the university and I continued to work at Arbres Morts. We could afford the movies.

  My mother was cross because a new law had been passed banning hats in the theaters, so that no one had to struggle to see over them. Having been regularly stuck behind extravagant millinery confections, I thought this was a marvelous law, but my mother hated to be bareheaded.

  This particular Sunday we were watching Othello. “Demand me nothing,” spat Iago. “What you know, you know. / From this time forth I never will speak word.” As Orson Welles gathered himself to respond, my mother happened to glance back toward the door. I heard her inhale, felt her hand on my forearm, her nails in my skin. She looked back again, causing her hat to slide from her knees to the floor. “Orly,” she whispered. “Get up.” I knew better than to argue. Dismayed at having to miss the rest of the film, I reluctantly followed her up the aisle.

  Outside she turned to me in the blaze of light. “Did you see who that was behind us? Did you see that man?”

  “What man?” I put my hands up to shield my eyes. My eyeballs burned if I stayed out too long or forgot my hat. Outside, hats were useful.

  “Behind us. He was behind us. The short man, with the scar on his right cheek.” My mother’s hand trembled on my arm.

  I shook my head. I hadn’t noticed anyone. We had arrived after the theater had darkened and slid into the only free seats on an aisle.

  “Do you know who that man was?”

  I shook my head again.

  “That was Klaus Barbie, Orly. Klaus Barbie.”

  Fear crept up my spine. We all knew who Klaus Barbie was. We knew all the facts and infinite rumors. We knew that although France had sentenced him to death, he remained free, living under an assumed name in Bolivia. We had heard he was working with the Americans. We had heard he was assisting the Bolivian military with interrogations. We heard constant claims of sightings. Someone had seen him buying a carpet at the market, someone had seen him entering the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

  “Isn’t he in Coroico?”

  “That’s what I heard. He could just be visiting.”

  How was it possible that the man said to have tortured French Resistance leader Jean Moulin and ordered the murder of the children of Izieu could be sitting behind us in a movie theater in La Paz?

  Yet I believed my mother. So many Nazis had already been made welcome in Bolivia. Why not one of the worst?

  My mother pulled me down the street with her, my shoes catching on the stones. I would have fallen were she not holding me so tightly.

  “Are you sure?” My skin prickled with sweat in the midday sun.

  “His photo has been in the papers. I think I would recognize someone who murdered so many thousands of us.”

  “Why is he allowed to walk around?” Always we had the same questions. I wanted to go back into the movie theater and strangle him with my bare hands and I wanted to run as fast and as far as I could, all at the same time.

  “I don’t know.” My mother slowed her pace. “Because Bolivia leaves everyone alone, I guess. Like it did with us. Like it has done with the others here.” Her voice was bitter. “How can more still be coming? How many more will they take?”

  A shot of alarm ran through me. “Don’t even think about it, Mutti. You promised.”

  She didn’t look at me, her lips pressed tightly together.

  “You can’t.”

  “Barbie, Orlita. Who was running the Gestapo in Lyon, near Izieu. Where your brother—”

  “I know.” I did want him gone. I wanted all of them gone. And no matter how I might resist her methods, I could not wish my mother’s victims back to life.

  I looked over at her, her face disfigured by rage. “I’m not changing my mind.”

  We learned more about what he was doing in Bolivia only decades later, in bits and pieces. Using the name Klaus Altmann, Barbie ran shipping and lumber businesses with a Jewish partner and was made a lieutenant colonel. In the service of more than one Bolivian regime, he tortured and interrogated alleged Communists, traded arms, and mingled with drug lords. He had friends in high places. Which is another piece of information I can never absorb. Why, how, could anyone befriend such a man? Bolivia had been at war with him, with his country. How little regard must a person have for his soul—let alone anyone else’s—to take this demon into his employ.

  It wasn’t only Bolivia, of course. The U.S. intelligence services had also recruited him.

  These governments knew about the children of Izieu. They knew of his relentless hunt for Jean Moulin, hero of the French Resistance. They knew of his torture and murder of more than twenty-five thousand of us. They knew. And they let him live.

  Sixth Movement

  NEW LIFE

  Sixty-three

  JANUARY 1963

  Isidora and I were in the front garden watering the roses when she came. It was just before sunset, the air already cool. Carefully, Isidora had tipped the wine bottle we kept on the front steps for just this purpose, drenching the roots of each plant. She was five then, obsessed with saving the lives of plants and small animals everywhere. It was a never-ending job. The shelves of her room were lined with glass jars of insects, potted herbs, piles of odd-shaped stones, and a few fish darting around a glass bowl. These two roses were hers, a gift for her last birthday. I had never been very good at growing things, but Miguel made flowers stand upright and bloom just by looking at them.

  A small Bolivian girl stopped in the street to watch her, clutching the hand of an older boy. She looked curiously at Isidora, at the bottle in her chubby fist. “Do you always feed them wine?”

  “Yes,” said Isidora solemnly. “They are very fancy roses.” I wondered for a moment if she thought this was true, if I had neglected to explain to her that I refilled the wine bottle with water each morning. But then she turned to me and grinned, mischief darting in her eyes.

  The girl’s brother tugged her hand, but she resisted, wanting to know more about our fancy flowers. As he pulled her along, she began to cry. “Las flores, las flores!”

  That’s when an older girl paused in front of our house. She wore jeans and a thick green sweater, her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her skin was very pale, her thick brows drawn together in the middle of her forehead, her eyes somehow familiar. She looked like a tourist, but this wasn’t that kind of neighborhood. Miguel and I had moved farther downhill, to the bucolic neighb
orhood of Obrajes. There was more air here, more space for Isidora to stretch her legs. Travelers usually stayed up in the city, where all of the cheap hotels were. Our neighborhood was almost exclusively residential. After unbuckling a waist strap, she shrugged off an oversized backpack and set it on the street in front of her. “Frau Zingel?”

  The German word, even spoken with an odd French accent, sent a bolt of electric surprise humming through me. And something like fear. But surely there was nothing to fear from this small girl? I shook my head to clear it of suspicion. “Sí?”

  “I’m sorry,” she began in English. “I don’t know too much Spanish. Do you speak French?”

  “Only a little. Do you speak German?”

  “A little. Maybe English is best?”

  “Sí, English.” We had all wanted to learn English in secondary school, just in case someday we won a coveted visa to North America. In university, I had studied it to read Anglophone poets.

  “I am sorry to come without warning. But what I have to tell you I need to tell you from my mouth.”

  I nodded, my pulse accelerating. Isidora had finished with the roses and stood staring, the wine bottle still clutched in her hand. I hoped our visitor wouldn’t think she had just polished off a crisp sauvignon blanc before naptime. “Won’t you come in?”

  With relief, she nodded and leaned toward her pack. I stepped toward her. “I will carry that for you. When did you arrive?” If she had just arrived at this altitude, she should not be carrying anything this size. I hefted the pack onto my shoulders.

  “Now? This morning?” She sounded unsure, reminding me of the haze of my own first days. She followed me up the stone path and into our home, where she stood blinking in the darkness of the hallway.

  “You are not sick?”

  “From the height? No. Just I have a pain in my head, that is all.”

  “Come in.” I left her pack in the hallway and settled her on the white sofa in our living room. She closed her eyes for a moment, clearly relieved to be sitting.

  “Izzy, bring the lady a glass of water.” I hovered at her side, waiting. When Isidora returned with the ceramic mug, she set it on the table in front of the girl and stood staring at her.

  “Señorita, ¿de dónde es?” she asked.

  “France.” That much I had guessed. And she had understood Isidora; her Spanish must not be too bad.

  “Paris?” It was the only city Isidora had heard of in France.

  The girl shook her head. “Farther south. Chambéry. It is very near the mountains, the Alps.” She sighed, carefully taking a deep breath before continuing. I understood the difficulty. I too struggled to weave together breath and speech whenever we returned from somewhere closer to sea level—from a weekend in Cochabamba or Tarija, a week’s swimming in Santa Cruz.

  Her curiosity temporarily sated, Isidora started upstairs to her room, no doubt to check on her collections.

  I lowered myself to the armchair across from the girl, trying to think of any connection I might have with Chambéry, but I was not familiar with the city.

  “My father, he died this year. In February.”

  “I am very sorry.” This wasn’t what I had expected to hear.

  “But now, now I find out that he is not my father.”

  “Not your father?”

  “Not biologically. He is the only father I have ever known. But a month after he died, my mother told me that there was another man she had loved, many years ago. Twenty, to be precise.”

  I did the math. She was born in early 1943. I suddenly wished Miguel were with me, but he was high above Sopocachi, at work in the San Calixto Observatory.

  “This other man, he was your father?”

  “My mother says it could not be anyone else.”

  “But she stayed with your father?”

  She nodded. “This other man, he was a Jew.” She took another breath and looked into my eyes. “His name was Willi.”

  * * *

  • • •

  IT TOOK A LONG TIME for her to get the entire story out. She was exhausted, and I knew I should let her rest, but I couldn’t offer her a bed until I found out everything. I made her coca tea and kept her prisoner on my sofa.

  Willi had left Switzerland not long after we had left Austria, walking through the forests across the border to France. This was before the war, when it was easier. When we didn’t yet have reason to fear France. He had acquired a Bolivian visa in Switzerland and hoped to book passage on a French ship to South America.

  In Chambéry, he had met the girl’s mother through a Swiss contact from the OSE. She had been working for the organization, finding homes for Jewish children who had escaped Germany or Austria. “Your brother, he helped to move some of the children to safe houses. My mother said he was very good with the children.”

  I nodded, my voice gone. Yes, Willi had been very good with children.

  “When he realized that the OSE needed help, that there was something he could do to help Jewish children, to resist Germany, he didn’t feel that he could leave. He felt an obligation to do something. It was a way for him to fight the war without fighting the war. At least, this is how my mother said it.

  “There was a passage through the Risoux forest between France and Switzerland. Willi collected the children from homes in France and guided them through this forest to Switzerland. Some stayed there while others were sent abroad. No one trusted him at first, because of his German accent. His French was not the most perfect, my mother says. But because of his passport, which proved he was a Jew, people believed him. And because the Resistance needed people.

  “After a few years, once my mother knew him, he also helped escort children to homes in France. There were group homes operated by OSE as well as Christian homes that took in a child or two.

  “Maybe it didn’t feel so dangerous then, in Chambéry. He and my mother, working together, they became close. They fell in love. But she was married. To my father.” The girl stopped, her eyes filling.

  “Your mother was Jewish?”

  She shook her head. “She was a good person. She loved children, all children. She had never been able to have her own child. Maybe that is why things went wrong with my father.”

  “But—” I stopped, confused.

  “She never got pregnant. After seven years, she stopped trying.”

  “Until Willi?”

  “Until Willi. Though I don’t think she was trying. When she realized she was pregnant, it was a disaster. It could not have been my father’s child, do you see? My mother had moved into a separate bedroom. Worse, the child—me—had a Jewish father. What if someone discovered this?

  “The only thing my mother could do to save me, to save herself, was to fall back in love with her husband. At first she says it was a charade, something she had to do to save us. But things changed with them. Pregnancy made her happy, and happiness made her generous. With her body, with her heart. My father never even suspected that I was not his.”

  “And Willi?” My head spun with a dizziness I had not felt since 1939.

  “She couldn’t see him anymore. It was too dangerous. He continued to work for OSE, and then he stopped that day in Izieu, to take some toys, some stuffed animals to the children.”

  “That’s why he was in Izieu?”

  “We think so. That’s what my mother said. She said he had done it several times before, so that must have been why he was there.”

  “That’s why he died.”

  “He was deported with the rest of them and killed.”

  We sat for a moment in silence.

  “Do you want to know more? My mother, she investigated for a long time. Or is it too—?”

  “I want to know every detail you have.”

  The home in Izieu, the girl continued, was run by Sabine Zlatin, a Jewish nurse.
On April 3, 1944, Sabine traveled alone to Montpellier to seek a new hiding place for the children. She had heard of recent raids on other children’s refuges and worried her charges would be discovered.

  While she was away, four trucks arrived in Izieu on the morning of April 6, 1944. Soldiers seized the children and their minders—Willi must have been among them, though no one knew his real name—slinging them like sacks of flour into the backs of these trucks.

  “The first person to run to the house after hearing of the raid found half-finished bowls of hot chocolate on the breakfast table.” She stopped for a moment to take a breath.

  That detail, those abandoned bowls of cooling chocolate, diverted my attention from Willi to the dozens of small, gaily breakfasting children. My hands began to tremble in my lap. Those bowls, still sticky from their lips.

  “The villagers said that when the trucks drove away, the children in the back started singing, so loud the villagers could hear. ‘Vous n’aurez pas l’Alsace et la Lorraine!’” You will not have Alsace and Lorraine!

  I wanted to tell her to stop. That I couldn’t absorb more details like that.

  Then I thought of all the details I had the luxury of not knowing.

  All the children and adults were interrogated in jail in Lyon before they were taken to Drancy to be loaded onto trains to Auschwitz.

  The first train, with thirty-four children and three adults, arrived in Auschwitz on April 15. The remaining ten children and three adults arrived in later convoys.

  Léa Feldblum, who had looked after and loved the children, was taken from their arms just before they were gassed to death. She was the sole survivor. She told the children’s story.