The Last Train to London

by Meg Waite Clayton

  Removal

  Eichmann wondered if the dead men in the portraits hanging around them in Vienna’s Israelitische Kultusgemeinde office might have more idea of what was in store for Vienna’s Jews than the Jewish leaders gathered at the table did. He watched patiently as Josef Löwenherz, the community center’s director, extracted reading glasses from a vest, catching his shirt collar so that it poked out untidily. The glasses did nothing to improve the look of the man’s bug eyes and furry upper lip, his hairline retreating as surely as was his stature. Such a lawyerly thing to do, to read the document carefully, as if he might have some choice in the matter.

  Löwenherz signed the document and passed it to Herbert Hagen, who signed for the Reich before passing it on to Eichmann. Eichmann’s appointment here in Vienna was temporary; Hagen had made that clear. It was up to Eichmann to make himself indispensable, and this raid of these IKG offices on Seitenstettengasse was his first step toward that end.

  Eichmann scrawled his name beside Hagen’s, set his pen next to the silver bell on the dark wood table, and stood and saluted Hagen, who, having completed his part, left for some fancy meal or some fancy woman.

  “All right then,” Eichmann said to the Jews at the table, “there are boxes to be loaded.”

  Löwenherz stammered, “You mean for us to do the loading?”

  IT WAS EICHMANN’S own little joke, to complete this deed under the domed ceiling in the Stadttempel’s ostentatious oval room. When the Jews had finished carting their membership lists and other evidence of subversive activities from the five-story stone building to removal trucks waiting in the narrow cobblestone lane, he ordered them back inside.

  Löwenherz, sweaty now and clearly unhappy to have Tier in the sacred room, but not objecting, glanced up to the second-level balcony as if it might provide escape.

  “I suppose the lesser Jews sit up there,” Eichmann said.

  Löwenherz answered, “The women, of course.”

  Eichmann laughed. “The women, yes, of course.”

  His men fastened the synagogue doors, and an aide began reading the short list of Vienna’s Jewish leaders: Desider Friedmann, the IKG president; Robert Stricker, the publisher of Vienna’s Zionist daily newspaper; Jacob Ehrlich; Oskar Gruenbaum.

  “Adolf Böhm . . .”

  Eichmann waited until the shocked Adolf Böhm had taken his place in the line before saying, “No, Herr Böhm, I have changed my mind about you.” He was pleased to see the relief register on the writer’s face. Yes, this would prove to be as effective as he’d planned, to have the man feel in his weak old heart the risk he would take if he did not cooperate. To let all those who remained free today feel that risk.

  His aide read the last name, “Josef Löwenherz.”

  At the betrayal in Löwenherz’s bug eyes, Eichmann nodded. This was no mistake. He had not forgotten the lesson learned at such cost to his dignity and advancement: that he needn’t pay Jews for what he wanted from them.

  Only after the arrested men had been enclosed in the darkness of the truck and it had rumbled off did Eichmann reenter Löwenherz’s office, Tier at heel. He scanned the dark table and the fancy wallpaper, the paintings. “Yes, your time has come,” he said to the men in the portraits. He took the silver bell from the table where his pen still sat and slipped it into his pocket, a souvenir of little value, but one he would put to good use.

  He returned then to the elegant six-floor Hotel Metropole where, as a young man, he’d arrived by streetcar (a dirty, clanging monstrosity like the one passing beside him now) and been prevented from entering. Now the doorman held the door for him and bowed as he passed, while in the basement, currently fashioned as a Nazi prison, the Jews he’d just arrested cowered in cells, waiting for him to decide their fates.

  The Jewish Question in Austria

  Eichmann waited two days, long enough for the wound to fester, before summoning six of the Jewish leaders he’d let go free, all led by an old and frail and terrified Adolf Böhm. Eichmann wasn’t quite sure why he’d summoned the others—Goldhammer, Plaschkes, Koerner, Rothenberg, and Fleischmann. Perhaps just to let them all see that he could.

  “You will step back,” he demanded. “You are too close. Now, I’m charged with solving the Jewish question in Austria. I expect your unwavering cooperation. Herr Böhm, you are the Adolf Böhm who wrote the history of Zionism? I’ve learned much from your writings.” He recited by heart a short passage of the man’s writing he’d memorized the night before. “Kol hakavod,” he said to the gaping Jews. “You’re surprised at my Hebrew? I was born in Sarona.”

  Tier’s ears perked. Eichmann couldn’t have said why he’d claimed Jerusalem as his birthplace the first time he’d done so, but it had proven surprisingly effective at winning the trust of naive Jews.

  “I understand, Böhm, that a second volume of your work has appeared recently?” he continued. “Perhaps you will do me the favor of having a copy brought to me? Now, there is no future for Jews in Austria. What would you recommend be done to streamline your emigration?”

  Böhm’s horrid old mouth gaped at him. “You want me to . . .”

  “You have no opinion on how to help your people, Herr Böhm?”

  “I . . . Well, I . . . It’s not my—”

  Eichmann rang the little silver bell on his desk, saying, “You’re too old for my purposes in any event.”

  “AND YOU ARE WHO?” Eichmann demanded of yet another of the Jews in custody. This was the fourth prisoner he’d interviewed since dismissing Böhm and the leaders he hadn’t arrested. Really, it was hard to imagine how these Jews had been any success.

  The Jew, perplexed, stammered, “Josef Löwenherz.”

  Löwenherz. The IKG director. A man did look different after a few days in a cold cell. Eichmann fingered the silver bell—Löwenherz’s own. The man stared at it but said nothing.

  “There is no future for Jews in Austria,” Eichmann said, a line now grown tiresome. “What would you recommend be done to streamline your emigration?”

  “To . . . To streamline emigration?” Löwenherz stammered. “If . . . If I may say . . . Not that I would know better than . . . Well, it seems to me that wealthy Jews are reluctant to leave their comfortable lives, and poor ones lack the means to do so.”

  Eichmann set a hand on Tier’s head. Quite amazing, how easily terror could be stoked by such simple gestures. In the first ten days after the Germans had arrived in Austria, one hundred Jews jumped to their deaths or took poison or shot themselves.

  “So you are proposing we make the lives of wealthy Jews less comfortable?” Eichmann asked the man.

  “No, I . . . I understand, Herr Eichmann, sir, that there are . . . What I mean to say is that many receive one of the various papers needed to obtain a visa to leave the Reich, only to have it expire before they can obtain the other necessary paperwork. Receipts for the payment of bills and taxes and fees. You see, we . . . The whole process must then be begun again.”

  “That is a problem, not a solution.”

  “Yes. Yes, but perhaps . . . Again, not that I would know better, but mightn’t you organize all the offices for the necessary permits and payments into a single building? That might allow us . . . those you would grant permission to emigrate . . . to move with visa in hand just down the hall to pay for . . . to remedy . . .”

  “Which would rid us of wealthy Jews, leaving us only with the lowest scum?”

  “I . . . We are a community. It has always been our intention that wealthier Jews would help fund—”

  “Yes, a tax,” Eichmann interrupted. “A tax on wealthy Jews to fund emigration of the poor.”

  “A tax? Well, I meant—”

  “A tax to be paid for an exit visa, and everything in a single building. Herr Löwenherz, I will see if I might arrange for your release after you’ve drafted me this plan.”

  “You want me to draft a plan for the emigration of Jews from Vienna?”

  “A plan for emigration of
Jews from all of Austria.”

  “How many, sir?”

  “How many? How many? Did you not hear me? There is no place in the Reich for you Jews!”

  Eichmann rang his bell, and an aide took Löwenherz away.

  “We might call for all Austrian Jews to relocate to the Leopoldstadt ghetto, Tier, to make this easier,” Eichmann said. “But no point in causing alarm by announcing that yet.”

  He called out to the hallway, “A list of Jew leaders we’ve imprisoned.” And to Tier’s perked ears, “We might release a few. Carrot and stick, Tier. Carrot and stick.”

  * * *

  THE VIENNA INDEPENDENT

  * * *

  AUSTRIA OVERWHELMINGLY VOTES TO JOIN GERMAN REICH

  * * *

  Austria’s final humiliation

  BY KÄTHE PERGER

  VIENNA, April 11, 1938 — Members to the first Great German Reichstag were elected by 49,326,791 voters in Austria and Germany yesterday. In the ultimate insult to our once proud and independent nation, 99.73% of Austrians voted for our own subjugation to the Führer in a choice between “yes” and “no.” In Vienna, 1,219,331 voted “yes,” while a mere 4,939 voted “no.” The conquest gives Hitler mastery of central Europe in a world that will never know whether the Nazis were a majority or not.

  Other nations, including England and America, rushed to recognize the conquest. With barely a murmur of protest at home or abroad, the U.S. State Department closed its Austrian legation before Germany could abolish it . . .

  At the Ferris Wheel

  Stephan checked his watch again as he stood with Papa and Walter outside the British consulate, Walter tossing his Peter Rabbit as two women just in front of them looked on disapprovingly.

  “. . . My sister got out before the British put in place this new visa requirement,” the prettier woman was saying. “She’s doing maid’s work, but she’s in England.”

  “Papa, I’m supposed to meet Dieter and Žofie,” Stephan said.

  His father examined the line, stretching forever ahead of them although they’d arrived even before the consulate opened. “Not at the park?”

  Stephan stood silently, watching Walter toss his rabbit.

  “Well, take Walter with you, then. Be back in two hours. And keep yourselves tidy.”

  Stephan said, “Peter stays here, Wall-man.”

  Walter handed his rabbit to their father without a thought to the indignity of a grown man standing with a stuffed doll in hand, but there was no dignity in Vienna these days.

  “You can apply for your sons, sir; they don’t need to be with you,” the prettier woman said.

  “Their mother wants someone to see what good, intelligent boys they are,” Papa answered her in what Stephan thought of as his “I, Herman Neuman of Neuman’s Chocolates” voice. But at the hurt in the woman’s eyes, he said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . . I’m just . . . At the American embassy, I waited until nearly ten at night only to be told they see six thousand people each day for visas that won’t be granted for years. But they told me the British still grant unlimited educational visas.”

  “For students admitted to university. Is your son bound for Oxford?”

  His father hesitated, then said, “My Stephan is a playwright. He hopes to study with Stefan Zweig”—his words true, and yet the implication they left was as much a lie as Stephan’s silence about the park.

  STEPHAN, WITH WALTER in tow, spotted the long single braid hanging almost to Žofie-Helene’s waist in the line at the Ferris wheel, the gondolas circling slowly as the ride was loaded. Everywhere in Prater Park, kids wore Hitler Youth uniforms: dark shorts, khaki cotton shirts, knee-high white stockings, and red armbands with black swastikas. Even Dieter, in line with Žofie, wore a swastika pin on his coat.

  “Walter, I didn’t know you were coming!” Žofie-Helene said.

  “I didn’t either!” Walter said. “Stephan promised Papa we wouldn’t come to the park!”

  Žofie tousled Walter’s hair as she said to the next person in line, “You don’t mind, do you? I didn’t know his little brother was coming too.” Then to Stephan, “We told them we were saving you a place in line.”

  Stephan said, “We’ll wait. Walter hates Ferris wheels.”

  “I do not!” Walter objected.

  “Fine. I hate Ferris wheels,” Stephan said.

  Dieter said, “Stephan, you’ve ridden this thing a hundred times.”

  Stephan said, “It makes me feel I’ve left my stomach on the ground.”

  “That’s just the centripetal acceleration altering the normal force of the gondola on your body,” Žofie-Helene said. “At the top you feel almost weightless, and at the bottom you feel twice as heavy. I can take Walter.”

  “The Wall stays with me,” Stephan said. They’d reached the head of the line, and the attendant was opening the gondola door. “You go ahead. We’ll wait,” he insisted, holding Walter’s hand tightly lest he object.

  Dieter climbed in, and Žofie followed, the others behind them filling the car. Stephan watched them circle upward, Dieter putting his arm around Žofie, that ugly swastika pin nearly touching her sleeve as they waved down to him.

  “I wanted to ride,” Walter said.

  “I know,” Stephan said. “I did too.”

  STEPHAN STOOD WATCHING as Žofie-Helene sat on one of the promenade’s long wooden benches. She patted the seat beside her, saying, “Come on, Walter. Sit with me,” but Stephan grabbed his brother’s hand.

  Žofie stood and turned all in one motion, as if there might be a big spider there, and fixed on the shiny metal “Nur Für Arier” plaque. Reserved for Aryans. “Oh! Yes, Mama says it’s disgraceful the way the Nazis treat Jews. She says we should all stand with them.”

  “Of course Stephan is standing with the Jews,” Dieter said. “He’s one of them.”

  Žofie-Helene said, “Don’t be a cretin, Dieter.”

  “But he is. He sits behind a yellow line at school now, in the last row with the other Jews.”

  “He does not.”

  “With two empty rows of desks between them and us.”

  She looked to Stephan, who couldn’t deny it.

  “You . . . You’re Jewish, Stephan? But you don’t look Jewish.”

  Stephan pulled Walter to him. “What do you think a Jew looks like?”

  “But . . . Then why don’t you leave Vienna? Mama says any Jew who can is leaving, anyone with money, and you— Well, you’re rich.”

  “My father can’t leave his business. Without his business, we have no money.”

  “You could go to school in America. Or . . . isn’t Stefan Zweig in England? You could study writing with Stefan Zweig.”

  Dieter said, “He could not.”

  “Why not?” Žofie shot back.

  Stephan said, “We can’t leave my mother anyway.”

  Žofie said, “When your mother recovers, then.”

  Stephan leaned close to Žofie-Helene, and whispered so that Walter couldn’t hear, “One doesn’t recover from cancer of the bones.”

  The words were barely out before he regretted them; he never spoke of Mutti’s illness, much less to hurt anyone. Why had he wanted to hurt Žofie? He felt filthy, unworthy of her. He felt like the filthy Jew his teachers now called him—not Mr. Kruge, who taught literature, but the others.

  He stepped back, wanting to apologize and yet not wanting to, wanting to ask Žofie what she meant in coming to the park with Dieter. Wanting to blame her for his lie to his father, although that wasn’t right either; it was his own fault, his own foolishness in letting Dieter goad him into coming. So he just stood there, staring at her, and she stared back, his anger reflecting in her face as something else.

  From up the wide promenade came the sound of cheering and, underneath it, a heavy thud thud thud. Marching feet.

  “Let’s go, Walter,” he said with alarm.

  “You promised—”

  “We have to get back to Papa.”
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  “I’ll tell him you brought me to the park.”

  “Walter,” Stephan said.

  He reached down to take his brother’s hand, but Walter scrambled out of his grasp and leapt at Žofie with such force that she fell back onto the bench, Walter more or less in her lap.

  “Papa said two hours,” Walter whined. “It hasn’t been two hours.”

  Stephan tried to take his brother from Žofie, but she wrapped her arms around him, saying, “Stephan.”

  Already, the line of storm troopers was in sight.

  “Now, Walter. Right this minute.”

  Walter began to cry, but Žofie, hearing the panic in Stephan’s voice, or seeing the storm troopers herself, or both, released him. Stephan tried to swing him up onto his shoulders, but Walter squirmed and Stephan lost his grasp, and poor Walter fell to the ground.

  “Walter!” Žofie exclaimed, scrambling to help him. “Walter, are you okay?”

  And the storm troopers were marching in tidy formation straight toward them.

  “Give Stephan your pin, Deet!” Žofie demanded, sitting back on the bench with Walter, trying to appear calm. “Quickly!”

  Dieter only stared at her.

  The storm troopers were stopping right in front of them, the leader demanding, “There is some problem here?”

  “No. No, everything is fine, sir,” Žofie answered.

  The lead storm trooper looked from Žofie and Walter and Dieter on the bench to Stephan, still standing. Stephan felt the bareness of his jacket, the absence of a swastika pin like Dieter wore, the new “Vienna safety pin.”

  “We’re not with him,” Dieter declared.

  “He is a Jew?” the man demanded.

  Dieter said, “Yes,” just as Žofie said, “No.”

  The man put his face right in Žofie’s, so close that it was all Stephan could do not to grab him and pull him back. Walter, still in her arms, began to cry in earnest, not the showy tears meant to get his way, but absolute terror.