by Sam Apple
“Do you want an apple, Sam Apple?” Hans asked, holding out an apple and laughing. “I think it is not the first time you get this question. But take, it is a good apple from farmer.”
I took the apple and sat down. We had been walking for only a few hours, but my feet were already sore from Manfred's boots. Kati and Wolfi drove ahead in Kati's white Jeep to set up the sheep's fence for the evening, and Andi found a quiet spot of his own. Hans and I sat in silence for a moment eating our apples and watching the sheep. Then Hans caught me staring at his stick. “You want I should tell you about the stick?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. It's hard to make it through seven years of Hebrew school without a little curiosity about a shepherd's stick. Shepherd imagery permeates the Old Testament: Abraham crossing Canaan with his flock, Jacob tending to Laban's sheep, and, perhaps most famous, Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.… Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.” For me the stick's appeal stemmed mostly from the book of Exodus. During Moses’ trials in Egypt, his stick is a veritable magic wand, turning into a python and splitting the Red Sea. Yet, in a touch of biblical irony, the stick is also Moses’ downfall. He is forbidden entry into the Land of Israel because, in his impatience to draw water from a rock, he ignores God's instructions to speak to the rock and instead strikes it with his stick.
Hans, still seated, picked up his stick and laid it across his lap. It was about seven feet long and the diameter of a quarter. The dark brown wood was covered with small knobs where branches had been whittled away. A second small piece of wood, shaped in an “L,” was nailed to the top like an upside-down coat hook. The hook, Hans explained, was for catching a sheep's leg. The stick had a flat top, as opposed to the curved crook on a traditional shepherd's stick, so that Hans has something to lean on during long stretches of standing.
While I was admiring the stick, a backpacked and bearded hiker in knee-high socks strolled by. He looked at the sheep for a moment, then asked Hans how many there were (this is the first question most people ask Hans when they encounter the flock). Hans answered him, and the man then asked why the flock had stopped in this field. Hans offered another brief answer, then turned to me. “People think that a shepherd only walks with the sheep,” he said, “but I must always calculate how much grass they have eaten and where there is good grass and where they are allowed to walk. A farmer will look at me and say, ‘What does this crazy shepherd do, moving his sheep in so many different directions?’ or ‘Why does this shepherd not move his sheep such long time?’ He does not understand that sometimes the sheep are in the shade and not eating good, or that I must go very far to find place to put the sheep for the night, or that later in the day there will not be good food and so I must keep them in one place and make sure they have just right amount of protein. This is one reason my singing is important for the sheep. It keeps them calm so they will stay and eat when they are not happy with the grass.”
At our first interview in Brooklyn, Hans had told me that his singing could inspire the sheep to keep moving during strenuous uphill climbs. I pointed out the seeming contradiction.
“It can be both,” he said. “It depends on the rhythm. If I want the sheep should move quickly, I must sing with fast rhythm like this.” Hans began making loud, throaty, yodeling noises. “It makes like a magnet, a little bit like when you walk yourself and you sing and this keeps you moving. The sheep hear the fast music, and they stop thinking and looking. But if I sing slow songs, then this can help them relax and not be distracted so they will eat good.”
If only Bashy could have increased the number of latkes I consumed by singing, I thought, she too would have devoted all of her spare time to memorizing Yiddish folk songs.
In the afternoon I was given the responsibility of running back every half hour and driving the van up to the flock so that we would not have to retrieve it at the end of the day. The key to this job is to avoid running over the lambs, which seem to have little regard for massive motor vehicles despite their terror of my petting them. I didn't particularly like driving duty, as it took me out of my shepherding groove, but I didn't want to complain. Later it began to pour, and I came to appreciate my time in the van. The rain cleared in an hour, and not long after, we reached a clearing where Kati had already set up the netted orange fence. When the sheep were safely enclosed, we jumped back in the van, and I capped off my triumphant first day of shepherding by slamming the van's door on my stick.
We drove back to Manfred and Lore's for the night. Kati was already there, but she didn't want to sleep in the same room as Hans. She and Wolfi set up a tent near the sheep. Andi slept in the living room, and Hans and I were given the spare bedroom, which had two beds lined head to head against the wall.
Unpacking our clothes, Hans and I struck up a conversation about Yiddish, and I mentioned my family's tendency to add gezunt to the end of every other verb. Hans lit up. He had never heard most of the expressions I mentioned. He practiced saying shlof gezunt (sleep in health) a few times, then paused, the smile still stuck on his face. “I would like to continue our conversation,” he said, “but first I want to express, I am happy at last to find a point where you reacted with personal details. I mean, you are doing a good job as journalist, but I like to see people outside of their job. When you ask questions, it gives me some imagination about you, and I'm also interested in you personally. I don't want that it is only one-way route.”
I was embarrassed, but I understood. Hans had been revealing himself to me all day, and I had offered very little in return. On the one hand, I wanted to be a good journalist and keep my emotional distance from my subject; but on the other hand, my trip was more than a search for objective truths. I already had an emotional stake in Hans's story. I decided right then that I was going to stop playing reporter all the time and let my relationship with Hans develop more naturally.
What I hadn't decided right then was that it was okay for Hans to lean over my bed and make sure that I was tucked in snugly, as he did some ten minutes later. I pictured Mike Wallace being tucked in by one of his subjects after a long day of reporting. I felt ridiculous, but I was touched.
When it was clear that I was nice and cozy, Hans climbed into his own bed, and we began to chat with the lights out, like a couple of third graders at a sleepover party. I told Hans a little bit about my life in New York, and he began to tell me about his childhood, half of which was spent fighting Nazism, the other half fighting almost everything else.
Five
Burden on My Soul, Very Heavy
On October 23, 1943, eleven years before Hans was born, his mother, Rosa, came home from a long day of work and sat down on the living room couch. Her feet hurt from standing all day at the factory, where, along with hundreds of other young Viennese women, she labored to make medical bandages for Nazi troops and horses. A staunch Communist, Rosa had been fighting fascism from the time she was old enough to hand out pamphlets. She had taken the job only to ensure that the Nazis wouldn't send her off to work in Germany.
Before Rosa, then twenty-three years old, could take her shoes off, she heard a loud knock. Rosa opened the front door to a tall man dressed in plain work clothes. The man told Rosa that he was a French Communist with information for Rosa's father, Johann. Rosa had no reason to distrust the man. Her entire family was involved in the Communist underground, and another Communist from France had arrived only the week before.
Rosa invited the man to sit and wait until Johann came home from work. Rosa sat down across from him. An hour passed. The man took a gold cigarette case out of his pocket and removed a cigarette. Now Rosa was suspicious. No good Communist would have carried a gold cigarette case.
Another hour passed before Johann arrived home and led the man to the back of the small apartment to speak with him. As they spoke, Rosa glanced out of the window. The streets were pitch-black so that Allied bombers would not be able to locate their targets, but Rosa could make out three cars parked acr
oss the street. The cars, an unusual sight in her neighborhood, made her nervous. She checked them again and again but saw no one inside. Then she spotted the red glow of a cigarette above a steering wheel.
Now the man made sense. He was a Gestapo agent. The cars were his escort. Rosa took a deep breath and walked to the back room. She poked her head in and told the man that there were cars waiting for him. The game was up, but the man stayed in character, insisting that the Gestapo cars were there to capture him. He jumped up from his chair and asked to be let out the back door.
Rosa and Johann thought that the scare was over, at least for the time being. They sat down and tried to think of what to do next. Fifteen minutes later a small team of Gestapo agents burst through the front door. They kicked Johann in the stomach and handcuffed him.
Rosa raced to her bedroom and pulled out her black dress of mourning. A fellow Communist and Nazi hater, Rosa's husband had been killed fighting on the Russian front earlier that year. “My husband died fighting for the Nazis,” she screamed, holding up the garment. One of the Gestapo agents ripped the dress out of Rosa's hands.
Johann and Rosa were taken away to the Gestapo's Vienna headquarters at the Hotel Metropol—a luxury hotel with upholstered doors to ensure privacy—where they were tortured for days. Among their tormentors was the same agent who had sat in the family's living room pretending to be a Communist. The agents demanded names of other Communists, but Rosa remained silent. After three days of beatings and listening to her father's moans from an adjacent room, Rosa began to wonder how much longer she could hold out before giving the Gestapo agents the information they wanted. Later that night, as an agent marched her up a set of stairs, she saw her chance. She took small steps. “Walk faster,” the agent ordered from the stair below her. At the third floor Rosa looked down and decided she was not high enough. She continued to climb slowly. When she reached the landing of the fourth floor, she raced to her right and dived headfirst over the banister. The agent caught her feet. Rosa, upside down, grabbed the bottom of the banister with her hands and kicked furiously. One shoe came off in the agent's hand. With her free leg, Rosa landed a blow to the agent's head. The second shoe came off in his other hand.
Rosa survived the fall, but her psychological wounds never healed. More than fifteen years later, when Hans was a young boy, he would awake in the night to the sound of his mother screaming from nightmares about her torturers. Rosa would sleep in the living room so as not to wake her husband, but Hans would wake up and run to his mother's side to calm her. Rosa would be lying in a pool of sweat, and Hans would hold her hand and ask what was wrong. They would talk into the night, Rosa sparing no details about her trials at the hands of the Gestapo.
At the time, Rosa was editing and writing for a Communist women's newspaper. Sometimes she covered the trials of former Nazis, and in the process she witnessed firsthand one of the great scandals of postwar Europe. In 1945, under heavy pressure from the occupying Allied forces, the new provisional Austrian government passed anti-Nazi legislation, and extrajudiciary courts known as Volksgerichte, or “people's court,” were set up. (The judges were hard to find because so many had been Nazis.) Nazi voting rights were restricted, and former members of the party were prevented from holding a wide array of government positions. Thousands of low-ranking Nazis were tried and convicted by the Volksgerichte. Forty-three were sentenced to death and thirty executed.
But in 1948 a general amnesty restored voting rights to all former Nazis, excluding a handful of the worst offenders. And in their efforts to win the former Nazi votes, Austria's two major political camps, the socialists and the Christian conservatives, managed to bring the prosecution of war criminals to a near halt. Thousands of the early convictions of the Volksgerichte were overturned, so that by 1955, when the Allies left and Austria became an independent state, there were hardly any Nazis still in jail. Working on a 1997 study of 350 Nazi criminals who had been sentenced to more than ten years in jail (a number of them to life imprisonment) in the late 1940s, the Austrian scholar Winfried R. Garscha was astonished to discover that only 7 were still in jail by 1955.
In 1957 a new amnesty law managed to wipe out a huge number of the remaining pending cases, many against high-ranking Nazis. The proceedings might have come to a complete halt if not for the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961, which put Austria under international pressure to prosecute more of its Nazi perpetrators. The Federal Minister of the Interior set up a special police unit to collect evidence against Austrian war criminals. They investigated some 5,000 individuals who had been previously reported and found extensive evidence, often of involvement in mass murders. Only eighteen of these men went to jail.
For Austria's political observers in the ’50s and ’60s, the same scene repeated itself again and again. Murderers walked free because of lack of evidence, or because they were merely following orders—an excuse that had been deemed legally irrelevant until the 1957 amnesty. In 1960, Rosa discovered that the same Gestapo agent who had shown up at her door that night in 1943 and then ruthlessly tortured her was living in a big house in Vienna and sang in the choir of a nearby church. Rosa turned to the police, who told her that unless she could clearly pin a murder on the accused, she should give up.
And so it's no wonder, then, that when Hans began to tell me about his childhood in the ’50s and ’60s, his first words were “Growing up in this country, I always felt as if I was among enemies.” I was lying on my back staring up into the darkness. Hans's words floated to me through the chilly mountain air in the room. “I think these nights spent comforting my mother from nightmares took away my childhood from me,” Hans said. “I was very interested and always asked questions from very little, and she answered me the truth. Those nights are burden on my soul, very heavy, but I think this is central to my life, and it influences all of my activities.”
In 1963, when Hans was nine, Rosa put together an exhibition on Nazi crimes for the Communist Party. At a time when almost no one in the country would speak about what the Austrian Nazis had done, Hans was busy helping his mother lay out booklets with the stacks of photos of Nazi victims she had tracked down. Among the photos, Hans found pictures of children his own age. “These photos made very strong impression on me,” Hans said. “I would sit for long time and only stare into the eyes of all the Polish and Russian and Jewish children that had been killed.”
While Rosa was teaching Hans about Austria's Nazi past, his father, Georg, was training his son to be a good Communist. Georg worked for the Communist Party's central organ until he was expelled in 1957 for his anti-Stalinism. (He severed all ties with the party in 1968.) “My father was one of these Communists who treated it almost like religion,” Hans said. “If you had question, he would go to his bookshelf and say, ‘Marx says this’ or ‘Lenin says this.’ ”
Hans became so adept at parroting Georg's opinions that the other party members began calling him “the Little Breuer.” By age ten Hans was composing his own political pamphlets on Vietnam and nuclear arms. At eleven he sold the most raffle tickets in his Communist Youth group and was rewarded with a weeklong trip to an international camp in the Soviet Union. “People thought that I would be just like my father,” Hans told me. “But I have always been different from my father. For him the world is in order. Even with the Holocaust, it changed nothing. He says, ‘I am Austrian, this is my home. This is my culture.’ For me it is not like this. I was born after the Holocaust, knowing my mother had been tortured, so everything was broken for me. In the center for me was big broken thing. No home. No nation. No feelings of security. Only criminals. And with background like this and all of the things my parents taught me, I had either to be scared and not move at all or to become radical.”
The conversation drifted off. Hans said that we should get some sleep. Then he changed his mind and said he needed to tell me about a Yiddish song called “Ofyn Veg Shteyt a Boym” (“By the Road Stands a Tree”). Hans sang a few mournful lines in a vo
ice just above a whisper. The song is about a little boy who is crippled by his mother's love:
By the road stands a bent tree;
All the birds have flown away,
And the tree stands deserted.
I say to momma—“Listen,
If you don't stand in my way,
Then, one—two,
I'll quickly become a bird.
………….
I lift my wing, but it's hard…
Too many things, too many things
Has momma put on her weak little fledgling.
I look sadly into my momma's eyes;
Her love did not allow me to become a bird.
Hans told me that when he first heard the song, he couldn't understand it. But it nevertheless had had a powerful impact on him. He would play the tape over and over, until he and Kati were able to sing the melody together. When he came across the lyrics a year later, he was blown away. He felt the song spoke directly to his sorrows, and it sparked a new Freudian curiosity about all the psychological troubles he'd experienced as an adult. “I discovered that so many of my insecure behaviors with Kati go back to these nights I spent in my mother's bed,” Hans said. “My mother would hold me, and even now I cannot sleep good unless someone holds my hand or my foot in the night.”
I told Hans I understood. The conversation drifted off again until we were both quiet. I could hear that Hans was asleep by the heaviness of his breathing.