by Sam Apple
I told Hans about this dream one afternoon, and he told me that he had recently dreamed that he was together in a room with all his old girlfriends—all of them wearing beautiful gowns.
Twenty-nine
Yiddish Folk in Finland
“You have to hear this song,” Yukka told Hans.
Hans was on an organic farm in Finland. Yukka was a Sami, a nomadic people from the northern tip of the Scandinavian Peninsula.
“Listen close,” Yukka said. “It's a Jewish song but it sounds German, so maybe you will understand some of the words that I can't.”
Yukka picked up his piano accordian and began to play “Tsen Brider, a Yiddish folk song he had learned on a rarm in Sweden, from a German man. The German man had just come across a copy of a new LP by Zupfgeigenhansel, a West German folk duo. The record was a collection of old Yiddish folk songs titled Jiddische Lieder, and Yukka had been so excited by the songs that he copied down all the lyrics and taught himself to play a few.
Yukka sang and Hans listened.
“When I heard these songs, it felt like…” Hans made a whooshing sound and held his hand to his forehead. “It struck me down completely,” he said. “I was all my life singing, and I had never heard one Yiddish song, at least not that I was conscious of. It was the first time in my life I heard the word ‘oy.’ ”
After telling me this, Hans proceeded through Jiddische Lieder, singing a few lines from every track.
“I cannot explain how these songs resonated in myself,” Hans said. “I did not even understand many of the words then. But when German speakers listen to Yiddish music, it makes very strange feelings for us. Many words we understand but cannot translate. We feel, if you want, what they should mean. And for me these songs were like a postcard from a sunken world. Maybe in your city you have this culture, but here no one had thought about Yiddish for thirty years.”
Hans wasn't the only one discovering Yiddish music at the time. Jiddische Lieder turned out to be just the beginning of a blossoming Jewish music scene in Europe. As Ruth Ellen Gruber observes in Virtually Jewish, the record was released in 1979, the same year the American miniseries Holocaust was broadcast in Germany. The miniseries brought the gruesome details of the Nazis’ crimes into millions of German homes for the first time and sparked a new wave of questioning. Jiddische Lieder overtly played off of this newfound interest in the Holocaust. The LP came with a booklet that included not only the lyrics to the songs, but also photos and short historical tidbits on East European Jewry.
By the time Jiddische Lieder became a hit in Europe, the Jewish music revival had already taken hold in North America. But in America and Canada most of the performers and audience members had been Jewish, a new generation of Jews who were seeking a connection to the world of their parents and grandparents. In Europe most of the performers and almost all of the audience members were Gentiles (there are three separate musical groups with the word “goyim” in their name), and their feelings about the music—especially in the early years of the trend, but still today—have been largely intertwined with their feelings about Nazism. The fad even caught on in Austria. Although Hans is one of the few Aus-trians to take Yiddish music into the countryside, and certainly the only Yiddish singer to show slides of sheep during his performances, there are at least four other professional groups and performers who play Jewish music in Austria.
Hans had a special connection to the music because his father is Jewish. But I also got the sense after listening to him talk about those first days of Yiddish singing that he sometimes sees himself as just another European leftist who had stumbled onto Yiddish music. After all, Yiddish would have been a perfect fit for Hans even if he had not been half Jewish. He was already interested in old cultures and folk customs, and the music carried with it the victim status that resonates so deeply with Hans. And then there was the fact that Hans is capable of feeling the guilt of German speakers, his leftist, Jewish roots notwithstanding.
“Maybe I could have discovered this music if I did not have Jewish background,” Hans told me. “But as my father is Jew, it makes something special. My father was not interested in being Jewish or talking Yiddish, but I think he still passed to me some of this Yiddishkeit. He refuses this, but look how he taught me everything already from when I was so little. I think this interest in learning comes from being Jewish. Even if you are not religious, these patterns can affect the way you look at the world—even how we speak and how we use our hands and how we go up with the voice when we want to make a point. And so when I sing Yiddish songs, I hear back how my father talks, and I try to bring more of this kind of talking to the songs.”
From Finland, Hans went back to Germany to visit his friends at Finkhof. To his amazement, they already knew all the songs from Jiddische Lieder and could even play some of them on the guitar. For the next few weeks Hans went on a Yiddish folksinging binge, learning the words to all the songs on the record and singing them with every Finkhof shepherd he could flag down for a duet. It was the start of an obsession that would leave Hans searching out Yiddish music everywhere he went and memorizing the songs almost as though he had a duty to do so. Hans soon memorized more than 100 Yiddish songs. But there was still one problem. Even in Yiddish it was a struggle for Hans to pronounce the word “Jew.”
Thirty
Naked in the Alps
Lying on the couch with Irene in the morning, two days before I was scheduled to leave the country, I suggested that maybe I could change my ticket so that we could spend some more time together after I returned from Israel.
“Yes, but what good would that do?” Irene said. “So we'd grow more close for a few days and then you'd leave and it would be even worse.”
She was right. I let it drop.
I got dressed and took a train to visit Sepp, an old friend of Hans's who lived in Amstetten. For several years in the mid-1990s, Sepp and his wife had invited Hans's family to live in their basement while the sheep were in the region, and I was hoping he would be able to give me a better sense of the Breuers’ daily lives.
On the way there, I sat next to a blond, clean-cut Austrian teenager who could have been a model for a Nazi propaganda poster. We struck up a conversation, and he told me that he was from Ybbs and that both of his grandfathers had fought in the Wehrmacht (the German armed forces) during World War II. One had his right arm permanently paralyzed; the other died years later of complications from his war injuries. “When my grandmother talks about the war and how she had to hide her food from the Russian soldiers, she cries,” he said.
I asked him how he felt about his grandparents having fought on the side of the Nazis.
“Well, they didn't know what was going on during the war,” he said. “They didn't know about the concentration camps and the one and a half million Jews the Nazis killed.”
“It was six million.”
“Really, six million?”
“Yes, six million,” I said. “Are there any Jews in Ybbs now?”
“No, I don't think so. I've never met a Jew.”
“Were there any Jews in your town before the war?”
“I don't think so.” He paused. “Are you Jewish?”
“Yes.”
“So now I've met a Jew.” He smiled.
And then something strange happened. I started to feel guilty. Part of me wanted to educate this kid about the crimes of the Wehrmacht, but another part of me didn't want him to feel bad about his own family. “I'm not here to point fingers at every Austrian,” I lied. “I know not everyone was guilty. I just want to make sense of it.”
“Well, the economic times were bad, and then Hitler came and offered people jobs.…”
Maybe it was because he was young, but I couldn't get mad at him. Like Irene, he had clearly grown up with an incomplete, if not false, story about what had happened, but he hadn't been able to see through the half-truths. It was hard to blame him for the failures of his Austrian education.
Sepp had a
thin beard and looked like a taller version of Bob Dylan. He picked me up in a beat-up Volkswagen Beetle that had no front seat on the passenger's side. As we drove from the train station to his home, he offered to make a detour to see a Jewish cemetery nearby in Ybbs—the town the boy on the train was from. There had been Jews in the area after all.
The cemetery was on a small plot of overgrown grass and weeds enclosed by a low, black-stained concrete wall. The hundred or so tombstones, engraved in German and Hebrew, ran in two straight rows down the center of the plot. Some of the stones were in excellent shape, having been restored, Sepp informed me, by a group of students in the area. Others had faded so that the names were no longer legible.
Along the edges of the cemetery, among the bushes, were a few toppled tombstones. I crouched down and tried to lift one of them, to at least stand it against a tree, but it was too heavy. I've never been a big crier, but something about those tombstones in the grass got me. I fought back my tears. Beyond the wall, I could see fields of yellowing crops and the rolling green hills, spotted here and there with red roofs. The sad little cemetery amid so much beauty felt like a mistake.
I went around and put pebbles at the foot of every tombstone. It took a while, but I found a stone for them all: David Adler, Joseph Brod, Rosalie Brod, Regine Shultz.… Most of the years of death were from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the last year I could find was 1937.
It was hot and silent and strangely still. Sepp watched me from the entrance.
Before we left, we stopped in at the small building that was adjacent to the cemetery. An elderly couple and a younger woman sat playing cards beneath a shelf of Christian knickknacks.
With Sepp as my translator, I asked if any of the families of the dead ever came to the cemetery. The old woman said that there was one family that had come a few times over the years. The Jewish dead before 1938 were also victims of the Nazis, I thought. There was no one left to look after them. Later in the afternoon Sepp and I sat down at the wooden table in his kitchen. I had intended to ask him about Hans, but we ended up talking about Nazis instead. After being unemployed for five years, Sepp's grandfather had taken a job as a carpenter at the Mauthausen concentration camp. He never spoke a word about what he had witnessed until about a year before he died, at which point he began to tell nightmarish stories: He remembered seeing two friends forced to strangle a third friend by standing on opposite ends of a steel bar placed across his neck; he saw a naked prisoner's face pressed into a pool of urine in the ice, then left there for all to see, his nose frozen to the ground.
I told Sepp about the boy on the train, about how he said his family had not known what was happening to Jews.
Sepp said that in the nearby town of Melk, there had been an outpost of the Mauthausen camp. The prisoners were herded in wagons through the city every morning on the way to the surrounding hills, where they were forced to work on tunneling projects and often buried alive. “Everyone would have seen them going through the city,” Sepp said. “And even if they did not, they would have known because it's impossible to burn five thousand bodies, as they did there, without anyone being aware of it.”
Sepp wasn't surprised the boy on the train didn't know any of this. In 1974 he and several other students had gone through Melk and asked people who would have been between the ages of twenty and forty during the war what they knew about the concentration camp outpost that had been in their city. Almost 80 percent had completely denied any knowledge of it.
Even if the residents of the region had somehow not noticed the smells or had missed the wagons full of Jews, there had been other opportunities to take note of what the Nazis were doing. In 1944, after the Nazis occupied Hungary, tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews were sent to Austria in several different deportation waves. They served as slaves among the Austrian populace, harvesting fields in Styria, digging trenches in the Lower Danube area, and working in factories in Vienna, where they were employed by the city municipality. Many of these Hungarian Jews were literally worked to death. As the war neared its end, an order came in the spring of 1945 for the slave laborers to be marched to the Mauthausen and Gunskirchen concentration camps. The guards, some of them from the Hitler Youth, had orders to shoot the Jews who were too weak to walk. The marches from Styria to Mauthausen followed almost the same path Hans travels with his sheep in the spring. On April 10, 1945, 1,000 to 1,200 Jews walked through Judenburg on the way to their deaths.
I spent the night in Sepp's basement under a LEGALIZE IT marijuana poster, and in the morning I took the train back to Vienna to meet up with Hans and Wolfi. It was the last day I was scheduled to be in Austria, and we were going to drive together back to the flock to pick up several lambs that Hans would then deliver to a Turkish family in Krems.
Along the way, as the mountains of Styria swallowed us up, I told Hans about the conversations I had had with Sepp and Irene and the boy on the train, about how everyone seemed to have a personal link to the Nazis.
“There are thousands of stories like this in Austria,” Hans said. “In the first generation you could say not everyone was involved because some people were in other countries and some were really not participating in the crimes. But what happens with the second generation? If a young guy in the sixties had only one relative who was involved, or it was not even his family who was involved, but the father of his bride, still he had to face his father-in-law when he was drunk and speaking proudly of these things he did in Poland. It spreads out with each generation, so that I think now in this third generation we have hardly one family in Austria that is not connected. It is like this rot that the sheep get on their feet. First one sheep will get this disease, and then there can be rot on all the feet in the flock. And if you get these horrible lies about the Nazis when you are young— even if you reject it—also you get parts of it in you. You get these psychological burdens.
“I think the only way to break these things is to at least speak about all the suffering of the victims openly but then also to speak openly about the criminals and the suffering of their families. These criminals were fathers and sons, and this was enormous pain for the women and children they left behind. The psychological key to open the door would be to make groups and to feel this suffering together—not to cover it up, but to say we see all this evil, all this suffering, and don't want to repeat it.”
An hour or so later Hans pulled up in front of an old stone building, saying that he wanted to show me the museum his friend kept in the basement. No one answered the door when we arrived, so we walked around to the side of the building, where we encountered a muscular naked man with springy red hair and a leaf plastered across his nose asleep in the grass.
Hans called to the man, and he stood up without seeming the least bit startled that the three of us had just appeared on his property and interrupted his naked nap. Hans explained that we would like a quick tour of the museum. The man happily agreed, put on a pair of black socks and clogs, and led us into his basement museum sans shirt, pants, or underwear.
The museum was called “The Other Homeland” and was dedicated to exposing the ways in which the Austrian fascists and Nazis had used Alpine imagery in their ideological campaign against Jews and foreigners. The basement that housed the museum had once been used as a prison for captured Russian soldiers, and our guide had uncovered some of the markings they had made on the walls.
The first thing I noticed as we entered the cool, damp basement was a large black-and-white photo of skeletally thin children, presumably in a concentration camp, framed by rusted scythes. A pair of boots stuffed with hay stood mysteriously in the corner.
Hans observed from my fidgeting that I was surprised to find myself being led through an exhibit on Austrian fascism by a naked man with a leaf on his nose.
He smiled. “You should take photo of him.”
“I don't think that's a good idea,” I whispered.
“No, no,” Hans said. “I think he would like
it.” I took the photo.
Before we left, the man gave me a magazine he had produced on the exhibit. Inside was a copy of a legal declaration from 1938 stating that Jews within the district of the Salzburg Police Administration were “forbidden to wear any (authentic or inauthentic) traditional costumes such as Lederhosen, Joppen [traditional jackets], Dirndls, long white stockings, Tyrolean hats, etc. Contravention will be punished with fines of up to 133 Reichsmarks (200 Schillings) or detention of up to two weeks.”
The vision struck me as soon as Hans finished translating: I ask our guide if he happens to have a pair of leder-hosen and perhaps a Joppe, some stockings, and one of those pointy green hats with a feather in it. He says yes, and ten minutes later I am not walking but strutting through the Alpine countryside à la John Travolta in the first scene of Saturday Night Fever. Unlike Travolta, I am actually singing “Stayin Alive” in my best Bee Gees voice. Soon a crowd of locals is gaping. I continue to strut, arms swinging, fingers cupped.
I think that it was only after I had this vision, which comes back to me fairly often, that I began to understand why Hans walked the countryside singing in Yiddish.
From the museum, we met up with the flock. Kati and Andi were leading the sheep along the edge of an open road. On a hill above them, a lone horse with a thick white mane galloped back and forth. I watched as Hans said something to Kati and then scrambled after a good-sized lamb.