by Trudi Kanter
The shocked Jews, plucked from the street at random, had to scrub off these slogans. Not one of them showed any emotion. Not a tear was shed, not even by the children. They kept on scrubbing. They kept on scrubbing long after the masters had left, but the paint could not be removed, and eventually, one by one, they shuffled off.
No one knew what was going to happen. Were we allowed out? Was it dangerous? Gradually we dared to use the telephone, hoping that the Gestapo were not listening in. We spoke in short sentences. Even innocuous things were conveyed in riddles.
Mother telephoned. I could hardly hear her. She tried to tell me that they were worried about their daughter. Newspapers had reported the scenes at Kohlmarkt. She was so careful with her words that not even I could understand her.
“Trudi,” she said. “You know, the daughter . . . Yes, the newspapers, you know. She, you know who I mean. We worry. Ask her, yes? Ask her.”
I finally understood what she meant and told her there was no reason to be alarmed, that her daughter was perfectly all right. Father came on the line to hear for himself. His voice a little choked, he said only, “Darling.”
A wave of love rose up inside me. Insecure and helpless, any kind word or sign of affection shook me.
Pepi’s mother telephoned. “Trudi, we worry about you in the middle of it all. Come to us. You know where your home is. I have your room ready.”
Then Pepi himself: “Mother and Father want you to stay with us. Please come, even if we are apart. Extraordinary times warrant extraordinary behavior. It is better here. Don’t stay there on your own. Please come.”
How could I tell them that I was not on my own?
Friends telephoned. They thought I was in the middle of a battlefield.
Walter and I stayed at home for the next few days. Slowly, slowly, friends appeared again. Customers. After much persuasion, my parents.
Walter had been right again. For the moment, we were being left alone.
4
Pepi was a brilliant tap dancer, the best I had seen onstage. He had extended his dance units to twelve bars instead of the standard eight and had a very fast pair of feet. He was very witty, and always laughing. To him, the world was one solid lump of fun. He was never serious, never depressed, never pessimistic. It sounds lovely, but it wasn’t. Permanent sunshine, permanent heat. Without a cloud, or the relief of cool rain?
My skinny, long-boned father, who carried himself with great elegance, came to visit us at No. 11, his left arm in a sling.
“Don’t worry, children, don’t worry.” With an impish smile he said, “This is only for protection.” He took the sling off as Walter helped him out of his coat. “They won’t take an elderly man with his arm in a sling, will they?”
“Oh, Father! Elderly? You’re fifty-three! You’re just a boy!”
Like all the older Austrian intellectuals, he spoke with a slight touch of Viennese slang. Poor Father. I ruffled his dark, graying hair, looked into his brown eyes, filled with his family’s strength of character. He went straight to his favorite chair, which was deep enough to make himself and his long legs comfortable. Sitting on the floor next to him, I said, “Where’s Mother? Why didn’t she come with you?”
“She’s afraid. She said she could not stand by and see someone behave disrespectfully to me. She doesn’t want to end up in prison.”
They were such passionate people, my parents.
The doorbell went. Pepi, a grin on his face, arrived in time for coffee. But the grin had an edge to it. I knew Pepi.
“What is it?” I asked. “Why are you laughing?”
He glanced at me and looked away again. “They got me this morning.”
I looked at his warm face, retroussé nose, his freckles and toothy smile.
“What do you mean, they got you? Who? Where? Why?”
“The Nazis.” He danced to the table, took his coffee, and walked over to sit with Walter on the sofa. “I came from the Leopoldstadt. As I walked across the Danube Bridge, four Brownshirts stopped me. ‘What is your religion?’ one asked. ‘Jewish,’ I answered. He gave me a long street broom, you know, the ones we use for our garden, and said, ‘You come from the Jewish district, don’t you? Clean it, Jew.’ A blond, bull-necked Nazi put a top hat on my head. ‘Very well, sir,’ I said. I put the hat at a jaunty angle and swept the pavement, as ordered. People stopped and stared at me. I got annoyed and began to whistle a Jewish nationalist song:
As long as Jordan’s water masses
Flow through the land of tears
Just as long we won’t give up our aims
Our hopes and dreams—
Blood brothers . . .
“They looked at me, and I stopped whistling. Thank God, they had no idea what tune it was. Now I really went mad. I gripped the broom with both hands and, sweeping the pavement, I moved along, tap-dancing. Trudi, can you imagine? I expected to be shot at any moment. Then I heard roars of laughter from the crowd. I was so lucky, Walter, I was so lucky that the boys were not Germans. They were Austrian Nazis with a sense of humor. They let me go. But that wasn’t all. Listen to this. I rushed along Kohlmarkt to tell you about it, when two German Nazis stopped me. ‘Gentlemen,’ I said, ‘I’ve just come from your competitors.’ ‘What is your religion?’ they demanded. ‘Non-Aryan, believer in God,’ I replied. They didn’t understand, so they let me go. Who wants to educate people?”
Nobody spoke.
“Who wants to change Pepi?” I asked softly.
He gazed at his shoes, resting on the red Persian rug.
5
An epidemic was rife in Austria: denunciation. The true masters of the city were now the janitors. They denounced all the tenants with whom they had had rows in the past. Particularly Jews. Maids enjoyed a reign of terror, too. Over the years, these girls—who often had boyfriends in the Party—had heard all their employers’ table talk and knew their political views inside out. There was now capital to be made out of this, or revenge to be taken, or envy to be assuaged.
The first real looting began. Jewish businesses and department stores were raided, mostly by youths. The synagogue in the Seitenstettengasse was occupied by the SS.
The humiliation of Jewish citizens continued. Their religious community association was closed down, its committee arrested. Aryan commissars were installed in every Jewish business. The owners could count themselves lucky if they didn’t end up in a concentration camp or at the Viennese Hotel Metropole, now the Gestapo headquarters.
Austria’s latent anti-Semitism came to the boil.
At Praterstern, the “Jewish district,” as they called it, things were particularly bad. Men, women, and children knelt on the ground to scrub pavements. The crowd howled with pleasure. The so-called cleaning squad was ordered to wash a stenciled portrait of Schuschnigg off the pediment of a statue. Storm troopers dragged an aged Jewish workman and his wife through the delighted crowds. With tears rolling down her cheeks, she looked straight ahead, through her tormentors. She tried to pat her husband’s hand.
“Work for Jews at last, work for Jews!” the mob howled. “We thank the Führer for finding work for the Jews!”
This is the truth about what happened, but I feel some reluctance to write it down. It is unfair to all those people who helped Jews. Many Austrians and some Germans, at tremendous risk to themselves, secretly did whatever was possible to help. I experienced great sympathy and many acts of kindness myself. So did my parents and friends. Austrians, with all their faults and weaknesses, were not really bad people. Nor were the Germans. But the mob now had the upper hand. The bitter, the envious, the unemployed. Worked up, ordered by their leaders to commit terrible crimes, they did as they were told. It took nerve to stand up to the Nazis. Not many heroes emerged from that diabolical period.
6
My trip paid off. I produced a collection with the models and materials I had bought in Paris. But my designs were less gay than those I had seen there. I used more veiling to hide women�
�s eyes. To hide their sorrow. It couldn’t possibly be a dressy season. People didn’t go out in the evening anymore. Even non-Jewish customers were worried.
I decided to go for soft-brimmed sports hats in pastel felts, straw hats in dark or bright colors trimmed with velvet ribbons. One or two small flower toques and large picture hats. I had bought silk traced with a Persian design and turned out draped turbans with matching scarves.
I made enough money to support myself, to keep my parents, and to put a little aside. It was enough for me to keep my workroom going for now. I was fond of my girls. They had shown incredible loyalty. The feeling of being among friends was essential to me.
Outside, the climate was suffocating, but business was relatively good. Jewish customers and most other women still wanted my hats. But I wondered why they wanted hats at all.
* * *
I had two special customers: Gaby and Lilli. Gaby, Lilli, and Doris, my showroom lady, were great friends. They all shared a particular trait: greed—for position, money, and love.
Gaby didn’t just walk into my salon, she strode in. Eyes like pools, dark, deep, pensive. Gaby carefully selected the men who were to be given the privilege of keeping her in luxury. For her, no nouveaux riches, vulgar, self-made men. Her men had to have been born into millions. And she had to love—or at least like—them. Gaby was, in short, a high-class courtesan.
She stood in front of the mirror, a little taller than average. She held herself straight: a classical beauty. She picked up my favorite beret, made of red roses, and put it on her dark, silky hair. Aristocratic looks, allure, pride—she had it all. (In the end, she married a handsome South American aristocrat, a multimillionaire, of course.)
“Too many veils for me,” she said. “Even in Egypt, women are allowed to show their eyes. Let them see mine. Frau Trudi, Egypt is where you should go. Everybody’s rich, and those who aren’t are your servants. To protect you, they sleep on the floor outside your bedroom door. You want a glass of water, a drink, just clap your hands. And they have the finest stores. If you order clothes, they come to your home for fittings. Ready in forty-eight hours. Their shoes and bags made to order are a dream. And people throw unforgettable parties. And here is something you will like: the men call you habibi.”
Lilli arrived. She wore a tight-fitting black velvet suit and stormed toward Gaby, arms outstretched to embrace her. A small, veiled straw beret sat on her flaming red hair.
“Darling Gaby, you look ravishing! A new dress! Look, Frau Trudi, look how clever she is. That deep, wide décolleté shows her beautiful straight back, her broad shoulders, and that divinely long neck. Gaby, I adore you. You have a new man! Admit!”
Gaby liked Lilli but didn’t want to be seen with her. They always arranged to rendezvous at my salon. Lilli liked sex, she liked money, and, if she liked a man who could afford to keep her, she would live with him for a while. Sooner or later, she would move on to another man. For a month, a week, a night. She was a cocotte, without principle. Men wouldn’t leave her alone.
“What’s been happening?” Gaby asked her.
“He took possession of me with such force that afterward I suspected he had broken my ribs! There has to be a change! I will not pretend anymore that I love them so much.” She crunched her lobster sandwich. “They need to know that they have to pay. I am entitled to be paid,” she rasped, pacing. She smoked permanently. Her long, painted fingernails drummed the table.
“Cheated. I was cheated!” she shrieked. She took another puff of her cigarette. The fine veiling of her hat caught fire. She was in flames. We ran to her, dragged her to the floor, and pulled off the burning hat. Unhurt, except for her slightly singed hair, Lilli sat on the floor and cried. Her white skin had turned pink. Doris bent down and kissed her.
I said to her once, “Lilli, your way of living—don’t you ever regret it?”
“Je ne regrette rien, jamais,” she said in her Hungarian accent. Her small, reedlike body quivered.
(Lilli’s breasts were famous. Round and firm. The nipples pink. Desirable. They saved her life, if you can call it a life. She ended up in a concentration camp. Because of her eroticism, and her beauty, and her delightful breasts, the Germans spared her from the gas chamber. They made her a camp whore. She survived. I heard she married an American soldier.)
Doris brought coffee and petits fours from Demel.
“Just what we need,” Gaby said.
Lilli chose the draped silk turban with matching scarf. She wore the hat slightly tilted forward, added a short veil, and pushed all her hair inside. She looked exotic, Japanese. The blue-green of the Persian design was the exact color of her slanted mermaid eyes.
Gaby decided on the large picture hat in white, nearly transparent straw. It had a small wreath of lilies of the valley around the crown.
Everybody kissed everybody good-bye. I sank back in my chair and sighed with relief.
7
Walter lived in an exquisite building at 7 Stubenring. The apartment was modern, luxurious, tasteful, designed by an American interior decorator.
Walter was informed that a German officer wished to buy his apartment for a nominal sum. He agreed, knowing that if he refused it would be requisitioned anyway. By offering this small amount, the officer wanted to make certain it was officially his. The deeds were to be signed within two days.
I suddenly remembered a particularly vicious anti-Nazi tract Walter had been reading. “Walter,” I said. “That book is in your flat.”
“Blast. I’ll have to go and get it.”
We went that same evening.
The front door to the building, dark brown mahogany, was heavily carved. The hall, lined with mahogany, was generously mirrored from floor to ceiling. I filched a red rose from one of the flower arrangements and put it in my buttonhole.
The lift was silent. As were the porters, the tenants—even their dogs. We went over to Walter’s apartment in secret to steal a book that belonged to Walter. We tried to creep unnoticed into the flat that was still his. What a stupid situation! How childish we were! I wore a short, tight, black dress, dark glasses, and short black gloves. My hair was covered by a black beret that I wore at an angle. Walter’s raincoat was tightly belted, his collar turned up. The brim of his black hat was pulled down over his face.
Entering his dimly lit French blue bedroom brought back memories. It was there that I had stood at the windows, nervously waiting for Walter to come home after Mira’s funeral. It was there that he had held me tight without saying a word, and I realized that I had not lost him. The exquisite off-white rug on the parquet floor made it feel as though you were walking on a cloud.
I went into the library. The walls were lined with built-in bookshelves. Leather-bound first editions of novels in German, English, and French. In the middle of this large room, on a fine blue and red Persian rug, stood Walter’s large desk. Solid. A reflection of his reliability.
Between two windows, below a well-lit painting, was a round table on which stood a silver candelabra with five lights. I noticed that Walter had had the four dining chairs reupholstered in blue raw silk. We used to have dinner here by candlelight.
Walter called me into the white, mosaic-tiled bathroom. He had carefully wrapped up the book. He was taking his toothbrushes, his eau de cologne, and his carnation soap. Thick monogrammed towels and his dressing gown. A tube of toothpaste.
“Listen, darling,” Walter said. “Now that we are here, we may as well take some other things, too.”
The flat was the first thing that we had to say good-bye to. It was exciting, tiptoeing away. We took the two rugs.
For many years after that, Walter and I used to play a game:
“What hung over the French commode in my sitting room?”
“What was the lighting in the library?”
“What color were the shades on my bedside lamps?”
“What color were the curtains in the bedroom? In the bathroom? In the kitchen?”
&
nbsp; “Did I have curtains in my hall?”
However long it had been, the answers always came quickly. We never forgot the homes we had loved so much.
One day, Walter asked, “What color were my pajamas the night you first stayed with me?”
“Shame on me,” I said. “I can’t remember.”
8
We were afraid to go out. Officially, we were told nothing. There was no announcement in the newspaper or on the radio. We had so many questions. Who dared to ask them?
Suddenly, exit visas would be granted only if the applicant owed no taxes. Most of my customers disappeared, owing me money. Jewish bank accounts had been frozen. How would I pay my taxes? How would I get a visa?
* * *
The last house along Kohlmarkt on my side of the street was set well back, leaving a big expanse of corner pavement open. A flat roof extended over the pavement, protecting it from the rain. There, the Nazis put up a huge, black, velvet-covered table that held a white, life-size bust of Hitler.
They knew from experience that forcing just a few people to stand in line would spark a perpetuum mobile queue. This grew longer and longer; it dispersed at night and began again the following morning. As people passed the bust, they raised their right arms and shouted, “Heil Hitler!” Some kissed it. Some even went on their knees in front of it, thanking the Führer—without even knowing why.
* * *
There was a new newspaper: Der Stürmer. It was concerned only with “the Jewish question.” It sought to prove to the gentile inhabitants of Austria what low, dirty, despicable criminals Jews were. They took photographs of Jews who had been imprisoned for weeks, half-starved and forbidden to shave; these photographs were accompanied by stories of their alleged crimes. The photographs and captions were then turned into posters and displayed all over Vienna. The first time I saw them, I felt sick. Gradually there were more and more of them. They seemed to get bigger and bigger until they were enormous and terrifying. The mass hysteria was so powerful that even I began to think, Is it possible that we actually are such terrible people?