The desk officer returned to his place, but did not speak to David, simply began writing notes in a ledger.
David approached the desk again. “Is Superintendent Müller there?” he asked.
The man looked up, as if surprised to be addressed while he was working. “He is in his office. He will see you when he has time.”
David felt his temper rising at the young man’s impudence. “I’d like to see him now, please,” he said.
“He will see you when he has time,” repeated the man, and returned to making his notes.
David waited another ten minutes, during which several people came into the police station, and were dealt with swiftly, efficiently and politely by the desk officer.
David looked at the door that led into the inner part of the police station. He knew the way to Superintendent Müller’s office, he had been there several times when he had helped the police with some medical matters. Normally he would have been shown straight upstairs, given coffee, asked what he wanted. Today he faced the blank expression of a young desk officer and a closed door.
He was about to walk through the door and run up the stairs before the young man could stop him, when a bell rang and the desk officer looked up.
“The superintendent will see you now. Follow me.”
“It’s all right,” David said mildly, “I know my way.”
The young man stopped in the doorway, and turned to face him. “We do not allow Jews to wander round the police station,” he said. “Follow me.”
David followed him. They reached the superintendent’s office and the young officer knocked on the door. When called to enter, he stepped inside and said, “The Jew is here to see you, sir.”
“Thank you, Lombay.”
Lombay moved out of the way and allowed David to go through the door, then he stood behind him as if to prevent his escape.
“Thank you, Lombay,” repeated the superintendent. “Go back to your duties on the desk.” Lombay looked disappointed, but he closed the door and David heard his feet on the wooden stairs.
Superintendent Helmut Müller was sitting behind his desk. Once the door was closed he got to his feet, but he didn’t extend his hand to David as he would once have done, and David was immediately aware of a difference in his attitude.
“Herr Doktor,” Müller said, politely enough, “what can I do for you?” He did not offer David a seat, though he sat back down himself, leaving David to stand in front of him, making David feel like a schoolboy called up before the headmaster. He fought to quell a rising anger; he needed this man’s help.
“I’ve come for your help,” he replied. “My father has been arrested, and I don’t know where they’ve taken him.”
“And you think this has something to do with me?”
“No, I’m sure it hasn’t,” responded David quickly, “but I thought you might know where he would have been taken.”
“So, who arrested him?” The superintendent sounded a little more relaxed.
“My mother says it was some soldiers. They came to move my parents out of their apartment so that some German officers could live there, and my father argued with them.”
“That was very stupid of him,” remarked the superintendent.
“Superintendent Müller, my father is an old man. He has lived in that apartment for the last twenty-five years. What would you have done?”
“If I were confronted by the SS and I were a Jew, I’d have left without a fuss, and thanked God that I had not been arrested,” replied the superintendent. “Look, Herr Doktor, we have worked together occasionally over the years and I’ve nothing against you… or most Jews actually, but you are going to have to realise our political masters have changed. I cannot afford to be seen as a friend of Jews. I cannot afford to be seen taking a sympathetic line. I am in as much peril from my own men informing on me to the authorities as you are. The laws of Austria with regard to Jews are now the same as those of Germany.”
“I understand,” David replied quietly, “but I have to find my father and try to get him released.”
Superintendent Müller sighed. “You know the Hotel Metropol in Morzinplatz?”
David nodded, the colour draining from his face. He did indeed know of the Hotel Metropol, who did not after these last few weeks?
“He will probably have been taken there. It’s become the Gestapo headquarters… there are cellars…” His voice trailed off. “I’m sorry, I can’t help you any further, Herr Doktor, except to say, if I were a Jew, I would go nowhere near the place. Heil Hitler!”
“Thank you, Herr Superintendent,” replied David quietly. “Good day,” and he left the room.
Jacob drove slowly along Franz-Josef-Kai until he was within two hundred yards of the Hotel Metropol, when David said abruptly, “Stop here and let me out. Keep driving round and pick me up again here.” He opened the back door of the car as Jacob drew to a halt and was out before his driver could open his own door. David stepped onto the pavement and mingled with the throng going about their business there. He walked towards Morzinplatz where the Hotel Metropol stood in all its elegance and style. Four storeys high, its main entrance dignified with tall columns, its windows tall and wide, it was an imposing building. A beautiful building, once the preserve of the rich and famous, and now, draped with swastika banners, a house of terror. The Nazis had been in Vienna for only three weeks, but already the rumours were circulating about the horrors of what went on within. People disappeared inside, not through the graceful portico at the front, but through a small, back entrance that, it was said, led straight to the cellars where prisoners were kept and tortured.
David stood across the square from the hotel and looked at it in despair. How could he discover if his father was in there? There were SS guards outside the front door, and, even as he watched, a long, black sedan drew up at the front. The two sentries snapped to attention, while the driver of the car leaped out to open the door for his passenger. All three men saluted the man who strode inside, returning their salutes with a casual “Heil Hitler”. David had seen pictures of that man in the papers, and seeing him in the flesh now he shuddered; Heinrich Himmler was an extremely powerful man, and every Jew with any sense of self-preservation was in mortal fear of him. David shrank back into a doorway, and watched as the black car glided away again, disappearing round the back of the hotel. He knew his nerve had failed; he knew he dare not approach the hotel. Keeping his head down, he crossed the street and walked beside the canal until he reached the Salztor Bridge. Standing on the end of the bridge, David looked along Salztorgasse towards the back of the hotel, but although he could see the building, he could not see the infamous door leading to the cellar. Could his father really be in the hands of the Gestapo? How could he find out? Müller’s advice was good advice. No Jew should go within a mile of the Hotel Metropol. If his father was in there, there was nothing he, David, could do, certainly not immediately, certainly not without careful thought.
Shaken and frightened, and ashamed of his fear, David retraced his footsteps along the canal to the corner where Jacob had dropped him, and as his car slid up beside him, he wrenched open the back door and scrambled in.
“Home,” he said.
“There is nothing we can do if he has been taken to the Metropol,” he said to Edith when he reached home again, and armed with a stiff drink told her what he had discovered.
Edith stifled a cry. “What will you tell your mother?” she asked. “What shall we tell the children?”
“We tell the children nothing more than they know already. That he has been arrested, but will be home again soon. As for Mother, we’ll see how she is. Today she was in shock. Tomorrow she’ll be stronger. In the meantime I will consider what, if anything, we can do.”
“Can you really not go into the hotel and ask?” Edith looked at him with wide blue eyes. “He’s your father. They must tell you if he’s there. If it were one of my family…”
David turned away, his sham
e at his own fear making him harsh. “Your family! When your sister wrote to you and told you she’d been burned out of her home by the Nazis, you didn’t even answer the letter,” he snarled. “Don’t talk to me about family duty.”
It was Paul who found his grandfather. Coming home from school the next day, he saw a crowd gathered on a street corner. They were shouting and jeering, their laughter ringing out across the street. Paul walked over to see what all the fun was, only to stare in horror at what he saw. A group of people were on their knees and armed only with a scrubbing brush and bucket of water, were being made to clean the street. Two SS men stood over them, ready to deal with any trouble. Even as he watched, one of the guards kicked an old man in the ribs shouting at him to scrub harder, and as the old man’s face jerked upward, Paul found himself staring down at his grandfather. The jeering crowd applauded the soldier’s action, with shouts of, “That’s right! Make the dirty Jew clean up properly! Come on, Granddad, get scrubbing. Time you did an honest day’s work!” There were some small children in the crowd; one, high on his father’s shoulders, chanted merrily, “Dirty Jew! Dirty Jew! Dirty Jew!”
Paul stood petrified, his face a mask of horror. His grandfather, looking up, saw him. Paul took a step forward and the old man hurled the scrubbing brush at him, screeching shrilly, “Seen enough, have you? Come for a good laugh? Here to see the Jews getting what’s coming to them?” His shrieks were cut off by another boot in the ribs, and another roar of laughter from the assembled crowd as he crumpled forward on the ground. Paul turned away sickened, his legs like jelly as walked away. Once round the corner and out of sight he began to run, and although the breath was screaming in his lungs, he didn’t stop until he was home. David was already there, and came out of his study to see what was the matter as Paul crashed through the door and collapsed sobbing on the floor.
“Paul? Paul! What on earth…?”
“Opa! It’s Opa!” was all he could say.
Gradually they calmed him down, and he managed to tell them what he’d seen. Opa, scrubbing the streets. Opa on his hands and knees with a scrubbing brush and bucket, the jeering crowd, the little boy chanting… and the soldiers with guns… kicking, kicking Opa in the ribs.
“Where, Paul? Where was this?” asked his father.
Paul still looked dazed but he knew where. He passed that street corner every day on the way to school.
“Antonstrasse,” he said. “By the pharmacy.”
David turned to Edith who, wide-eyed with fear for her son, was sitting beside Paul on the sofa, clutching his hand. “Edith, you must go and see what’s happening,” David said. “Go and find out where they are keeping him?”
“Me!” Edith shrieked. “How can I go? I have to stay here and look after Paul.”
“Paul’s fine,” David said, trying to stay calm himself. “It has to be you, Edith. If I go anyone there will recognise me as a Jew. You look as Aryan as the best of them. No one will notice you in the crowd and maybe you can follow and find out where he’s being held.”
Edith stared at him in horror. “David, I couldn’t,” she stammered. “I really couldn’t.”
“Edith, my father earned himself a kicking so that your son, our Paul, wasn’t recognised as a Jew by the crowd. You have to go.”
“I’ll go back, Papa,” Paul said. He sat on the sofa beside his mother, white-faced, but determined. “I’ll go back and see what’s going on.”
“No!” Edith was on her feet. “I’ll go.” Without another word she walked out of the room and they heard the front door slamming behind her.
Paul stared up at his father. “Will she be all right?” he asked. “You should have gone.”
“No,” replied David, “I would have made things worse, and might have been arrested as well, which would have helped no one. Your mother can pass as just a bystander, just another in the crowd. Now we’ll just have to wait.”
They didn’t have to wait long. Less than ten minutes later Edith was back at the front door, calling David to fetch the car.
“They’ve moved on,” she said, “and they’ve left your father in the gutter. Come on, David. Get the car, we can pick him up.”
Within moments, they were in the car and on their way. They reached the street corner and saw what looked like a heap of old rags at the side of the road. As the car came to a halt, the three of them leaped out and ran to the old man. He was unconscious, his head bleeding, his arm twisted at an alarming angle, but he was breathing, his breath coming in painful rasps.
“Gently,” David said as he ran exploratory hands over his father’s body. “He’s dislocated his shoulder, we must move him very carefully and get him onto the back seat of the car.” Awkwardly the three of them lifted the old man and carried him to the car. He was a dead weight in their arms, and it was difficult to manoeuvre him through the car door, but at last they managed it.
“You’ll have to walk home, Paul,” said his father. “There’s no room for you. Off you go, quickly. We’ll see you at home.” Paul set off at a trot, and, having made the old man as comfortable as they could, David and Edith got back into the car. As they pulled away and turned the car for home, there was a thud on Edith’s door and she spun round to see a woman reaching for another stone to hurl at them, shouting as she did so, “Dirty Jews!” David accelerated away and the second stone fell short.
They got Friedrich upstairs and into bed, and, while he was still unconscious, David managed to ease his father’s shoulder back into its socket. Then he bathed the cut on his head and gave him a thorough examination.
“He’s very bruised,” he told his mother as she waited anxiously by her husband’s bed. “His ribs are probably cracked and will be very painful when he wakes up, but as far as I can tell they aren’t broken. The head wound looks worse than it is. They always bleed a lot.” He gave her a reassuring smile. “He’s lucky. It could have been a lot worse. He needs rest, but it won’t be long before he’s feeling much better.”
“And when he is,” David said to Edith much later when they were alone, “we’ll have to decide what we’re all going to do.”
“What can we do?” Edith said bleakly. “Things are going to get worse.”
“Yes,” agreed David. “The time has come to leave. I spoke to my father about it before. Now we must give it serious consideration.”
14
So we are to leave Vienna,” wailed Edith, “and go to Shanghai!”
“Shanghai!” echoed Ruth, staring at her sister.
“David says we have to go. After what happened to his father, he says it’s too dangerous to stay here and we must get the children away to safety.”
“But why Shanghai?” asked Ruth.
The two sisters were sitting in Edith’s drawing room, coffee cups in their hands and a plate of pastries, such as Ruth never saw these days, on the table between them. Edith had sent Jacob with a message that she needed to see Ruth, and, tired as she was from a day’s work in the shop, Ruth had trailed across the town to the house in Liechtensteinstrasse, when the haberdashery closed.
“He says Jews have been moving there for several years. There’s a big Jewish community. We shan’t be alone.”
“But, China! Surely there are other, better places you could go, America, England, France?”
“Those countries won’t take any more Jews,” Edith moaned. “They have quotas or something. David says if we go to Shanghai we don’t need visas to get in. We can just get on a boat and go.”
“If the Germans let you,” pointed out Ruth.
“Oh, they will. They want to get rid of us, we just have to leave everything behind,” Edith’s voice broke as she looked round her elegant drawing room. She said with a sob, “We’re allowed to take thirty marks and a suitcase each.”
“Thirty marks!” Ruth reached out and took her sister’s hand. “How on earth will you live?” she asked gently.
“David says…” sobbed Edith, “David says there are several hospitals
there, so he will be able to work.” She pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and blew her nose, before saying a little more steadily, “He says, and I know he’s right, that the important thing is to get the children to safety; and his parents, too.”
“How is your father-in-law?” Ruth asked. “Has he recovered?”
Edith sighed. “He’s recovered physically, though his ribs are still painful where he was kicked, but he’s a changed man. He’s morose and silent. He stays upstairs most of the time and we have to send his meals up on a tray. He’s afraid to go out.”
“I’m not surprised,” said Ruth. “It was a terrible ordeal. What happened to him when he was arrested? Did he say?”
“We’re not sure,” sighed Edith. “He says he was taken to a prison and thrown into some sort of cell with lots of other people, but we don’t know where it was. It was so crowded that they could only just sit on the floor, there was no room to lie down, and they were given nothing to eat. Then the next morning they were taken out onto the streets and told to clean them up. He had to scrub walls first, to get rid of the last of the posters about the plebiscite. Then he was set to scrubbing slogans off the street. That’s when Paul saw him.”
“Thank goodness he did. You might never have found him again otherwise.”
“They left him for dead in the gutter,” Edith said bleakly. “An old man. No one went to help him.”
“No one dares,” said Ruth, gently.
“No one wants to,” snapped Edith. “They all hate us. Look at what’s happening to all the Jewish families. David’s parents have lost their home and it will probably only be a matter of time before we’re turned out, too. Paul’s not allowed to go to the gymnasium anymore, none of the Jewish boys are. It’s not fair.” Edith’s voice was a childish wail: “It’s not fair, he was doing so well.”
The Runaway Family Page 25