She would just find a light bite to eat in the hotel’s restaurant, she decided, before making her way to the Jewish district to find the leaders with whom she needed to meet.
The elevator operator said politely in response to her asking for the ground floor, “It’s a pleasant afternoon for a stroll, madam.”
“Oh no, I’m only going into the hotel restaurant,” she answered.
He glanced at her coat, still on, her yellow day gloves.
Downstairs, the heavy wood-paneled doors to the dining room were posted “Juden Verboten.” A large portrait of Hitler frowned over tables that were largely empty.
She no longer had an appetite. Perhaps she hadn’t ever.
She returned to the elevator and waited. Just as it arrived, though, she changed her mind and headed for the doors onto the Ringstrasse.
“It’s a pleasant afternoon for a stroll, madam,” the doorman said, as if they all rehearsed the line at the start of their shifts and, by force of insisting upon it, could make visitors believe that this dreary Vienna day was something else.
She asked the doorman if she might walk to the place where they sold the snow domes. She still had perhaps an hour before sunset and the end of the Sabbath.
“Snow domes?” he said. “I wouldn’t know, madam, but you might try the Christkindlmarkt. It’s returned to Am Hof this year, down Kärntner Strasse past St. Stephen’s. But the nicest stroll is to the right, beyond the Opera to the palace, the Volksgarten and the Burgtheater, and across the Ringstrasse to Parliament and the university.”
“And to the left?” she asked.
“To the left, there is the only the Stadtpark. Little else but private homes all the way to the canal.”
“And beyond the canal?” she asked, the mention of it making her long for home and for Joop.
“Madam, to cross the canal into Leopoldstadt would be . . . inappropriate for a proper lady such as yourself.”
“I see,” she said. “Well, perhaps I’ll just stroll along the Ringstrasse.”
She headed to the left, leaving his disapproval behind.
She’d hardly taken five steps before one of the can rattlers shook his collection tin at her. “None shall starve nor freeze,” he said, the same Nazi slogan heard all over the Reich this time of year, to provide food, clothing, and coal for less fortunate citizens during the holiday season, they claimed, but it was in fact the biggest scam ever presented in the guise of charity. Even famous actors and actresses like Paula Wessely and Heinz Rühmann were called into service to support it, with no real ability to decline.
“A reichsmark for the children?” the man asked.
Truus pulled her handbag to her as if he might raid it. A reichsmark for Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels, more like it, she thought.
“How nice,” she said. “I am indeed here to help Vienna’s children.”
The man smiled broadly.
“Your Jewish children,” she said.
The man’s smile disappeared. He shook his collection tin angrily as she walked on.
No Way Out
Žofie-Helene once again turned off the light in the empty cocoa storage room. The food she brought Stephan each day was being taken, the food and the blanket and the pen, the exercise book, the copy of Kaleidoscope. Sometimes Stephan left her a note on a wrapper, scraps of butcher paper she kept in the little box under her bed. She knew he was living down here somewhere, but she’d searched the Talmud school ruins, all three levels of the underground convent, and everywhere else she imagined might be dry enough to live in. Where are you, Stephan? she wanted to shout throughout the whole underground, but she only waited for her eyes to adjust, then groped her way back down the ladder. She crawled out through the low tunnel and stood in the underground passageway, wishing she could smell the chocolate still, wishing she could taste it in the darkness, have it reflected over and over again on her tongue. It was so dark here, so much darker, it seemed, than the first time she’d come, with Stephan. Even a kaleidoscope would reflect only endless darkness, with no edges, no pattern, no repeat.
She stood stock-still, sensing movement. Just vermin of the small animal kind, she told herself. She hesitated to move forward until her eyes had adjusted. She ought to use the flashlight in the cocoa cellar next time rather than the overhead light. It would be safer.
Were those voices? She was shocked into stillness. Which direction were they coming from?
A hand covered her mouth. She tried to scream, but it was too tight. She was pulled backward. She struggled to be free, trying to scream still, the hand tasting of dirt and filth.
“Shhhh . . .” Right in her ear as her feet dragged over the edge of a rubble pile.
Still with the hand over her mouth, still with the terror right up in her throat, the voices growing closer, echoing in the tunnel from the direction of her apartment. If she could scream, would they hear her? Would they help?
The breath on her neck reeked of dirt and bitter cocoa. The hands held her so tightly that there was no moving, no turning.
“Shhh . . .”
The voices grew nearer. A dog barked. Not a friendly bark.
The hands restraining her pulled her backward and up the circular stairway. She went voluntarily now, away from the terrifying bark—not one dog but several.
The voices closer and closer, the dogs barking so loudly, so sharply.
The hands urged her up the steps, and she moved as silently as she was able, more afraid now of those coming.
The sound of something bumping against the manhole cover, just the quietest metallic thunk against one of the triangles, but still it alarmed her. Would the dogs have heard that over their own ruckus?
She looked up. Nothing but darkness and silence overhead, a blessing. Sounds from the street might give them away.
They waited at the top of the steps, ready to flee but afraid to. On the street overhead, the muffled voices of men approaching, then passing by.
From the tunnels, the barking dogs grew even closer. Men running. Men shouting.
Footsteps running so fast, a single person. The steps passed and faded.
The dogs’ barking echoed so frighteningly now that it might be fifty dogs. An army of footfalls followed, and the underground lightened with bobbing flashlight beams. Voices shouted now, just below: “You little Jew!” “We know you’re here!”
Were they calling up the stairway?
Just as quickly the dogs and the boots and the voices faded in the other direction.
“Stephan?” she whispered.
The hand over her mouth again, not threat but warning. She remained frozen, listening, waiting for what seemed so very long.
Footsteps, slower ones, came again from the direction of home, a man lighting his way with a flashlight, saying, “You must leave it to a Jew to live in such filth.”
You will give your mother a message for me. You will tell her that Herr Rothschild is happy for us to use his little palace on Prinz-Eugen-Strasse.
She braced herself for the irregular nonagon of a laugh, but there followed only the one set of footsteps. The companion to whom the man spoke was the dog all of Vienna had come to fear.
WHEN IT WAS absolutely quiet again, Stephan sucked at his finger, cleaning it as best he could before setting it to Žofie’s lips, trying to impress on her the continued need for silence, the ever-present need for silence. He put his lips just to her ear and whispered as quietly as possible, “You can’t come here, Žofie.”
She whispered into his ear, “I . . . I never imagined . . . ,” her voice so soft, so warm. How long had it been since he’d sat listening to the “Ave Maria” with her, since he’d watched her explain her complicated equations to those two professors, or fed her chocolate, or listened to her read lines he’d written just for her?
She whispered, “That’s why you don’t stay in the cave below the storage room? Because there isn’t a way out.”
Her fingers brushed his cheek, but he leaned away.
He ran a hand through his hair. He was so filthy.
“Those men aren’t Baker Street irregulars,” he whispered, trying to make the point without alarming her too much. “You can’t be found helping me.”
Far away in the tunnels, shots sounded, startling even in their faintness.
Almost as startling: the warmth of Žofie’s fingers intertwining with his. Had she taken his hand, or had he taken hers?
A single additional shot sounded, followed by silence.
He felt Žofie’s breath on his ear again.
She whispered, “It’s your mother, Stephan.”
At the Canal
The Danube Canal was still and murky, the bridge across it open but the road beyond the bridge cordoned off. People passed Truus on this side of the canal as they might any Saturday evening, offering friendly St. Nicholas Day greetings as the occasional car or trolley passed. But beyond the cordon, the cobbled streets of Leopoldstadt were emptier than the streets back home were even on evenings when the canals were frozen over, even when the rain had its way.
Truus walked first one way, then the other. Still, she saw absolutely no one in the neighborhood across the bridge. The sun was just set, the streetlights coming on and the Sabbath ended, and still the quarter remained abandoned.
Beginning to worry as the gray sky faded and the curfew approached, she asked a passerby, “Is no one out because of the Sabbath?”
The woman, startled, glanced across the canal. “Because of the Winterhilfe decree, of course,” she said. “Ah, you are a foreigner. I see. This is the Saturday before St. Nicholas Day. No Jews are allowed on the streets, so we can all enjoy the Christkindlmarkt undisturbed.”
Truus looked back over her shoulder as if the hotel doorman might be able to see the whole of the long fifteen blocks around the curve of the Ringstrasse, or as if Joop might be able to see all the way from Amsterdam. The Jews of Vienna were confined indoors, the children forbidden to gather with friends to play tag in the snow just beginning to fall? She ought to stop here, then. She ought to turn back. There would be no one to meet. However would she even find them? She would only wreak terror by knocking on doors to ask where the Jewish leaders might be found.
It was the problems you failed to anticipate . . .
Still, she crossed over the bridge, the sky now as dark as the water. She slipped past the cordon, her heart pounding so much more rapidly than her husband’s ever did, even when they made love.
Hiding in Shadow
Stephan pressed his back to the cold stone of the building, hiding in its shadow, watching. He couldn’t help Mutti, he couldn’t take care of Walter, if he was arrested and sent to a labor camp. And Jews were forbidden to be out tonight.
The figure was a woman. He relaxed only slightly when he realized that. What was a woman doing on the streets of Leopoldstadt now? A prosperous woman, from the look of her. It was hard to tell in the darkness, but her bearing alone suggested she was a woman of substance.
He watched her continue down the street, the woman walking slowly now, as if she might be expecting what was likely to come.
A moment later, two SS officers came hustling after her, demanding to know what business she had in this neighborhood.
Stephan took advantage of the distraction to slip in the door of his mother’s building. He hurried down the dark hall, trying not to think about what he and Walter would do if Mutti too was gone.
The Cell
Truus was escorted through the delivery entrance of the Hotel Metropole and into the hotel basement prison, past cell after cell of silent shadows. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. A door closed behind her before she could get her bearings, and she was alone. For you are with me. You are with me.
She knocked on the door.
The guard did not so much as glance up from his newspaper. “Shut up,” he said.
“Excuse me,” she said, “I am sure you will want to mind your manners with me. Now, you must let me out and return me to my hotel.”
The Interrogation Begins
As I have said twenty times now to as many people, sir, I am visiting from Amsterdam,” Truus repeated to this newest young Nazi who had “joined her” in the bare basement interrogation room to which she’d been brought perhaps an hour after being put in the cell. She intertwined the soft yellow leather of her gloves gently to make her own point: Do you not see how well I am dressed? The metal chair was hard against her tailbone, the smell of wet laundry pervasive. Tools of torture waited in the form of the wide leather military belts her interrogators hitched their thumbs to, with their metal buckles as big as tea saucers, their swastika and eagle adornments that could knock out a person’s teeth. You prepare a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. She set her gloved hands on the table between herself and her interrogator. “I arrived by aeroplane today,” she said. She was not just anyone. She was a Christian Dutchwoman who traveled by plane. Had any of them ever traveled by air?
The man looked from her gloved hands to her handsome coat—a bolster against the chill room. He met her gaze and kept it, waiting for her to look away.
When he turned, finally, to another of the soldiers, she was careful to keep the triumph from her eyes or even her posture, the set of her hands. It was her advantage, being a woman. What proud man ever imagined himself bested by a woman, even when he had been?
He met her gaze again. “This,” he said, “will not explain why you wander the Jewish ghetto at a time when Jews are forbidden in the streets.”
The Promise
Stephan sat at his mother’s bed, spooning soup for her in the dingy little room—a closet, really, smaller and darker and more airless than they would have asked the lowest chambermaid to endure back at the palais.
“Promise me you will take Walter,” Mutti said weakly. “You will find a way out of Austria, and you will take him with you.”
“I promise, Mutti. I promise.”
He would promise anything to make her stop talking, to make her save her strength.
“And you’ll stay with him always. You’ll watch over him. Always.”
“Always, Mutti. I promise. Now eat this soup Herr Perger brought, or Žofie will scold me.”
He breathed in the dill and potato aroma of the soup, trying hard not to want to eat it himself, and failing.
“I love you, Stephan,” Mutti said. “Never doubt that. Someday this will be over and you will write your plays, and I don’t think I will ever see them performed, but—”
“Shh . . . Rest, Mutti. Frau Isternitz will take care of Walter tonight while you rest.”
“Listen to me, Stephan.” Mutti’s voice had a sudden strength that made him glad to have declined a serving of the soup himself, leaving more for her. “You will sit beside Walter in the dark of a theater as the curtain rises, and you’ll touch Walter’s hand, and you will know I’m there with you, Papa and I are there.”
The Interrogation Continues
Why am I to doubt that you are a Jewess?” demanded this new interrogator—Huber, his name was, and everything about him said he was in charge.
Truus answered politely, “You might simply look at my passport. As I have told your colleagues, you will find it back at the Hotel Bristol, where I am staying.”
Huber frowned at the mention of her posh hotel. He eyed Truus, who was still sitting upright in the same uncomfortable metal chair she’d been in all the night and the early morning.
“Why are you really here, Frau Wijsmuller?” he demanded. “What agenda have you brought from the Netherlands?”
“Again, as I told all your various colleagues,” Truus answered patiently, “I am in Vienna on behalf of the Council for German Jewry. I am sent by Norman Bentwich of England for a meeting this morning with Obersturmführer Eichmann. I urge you—”
“A meeting with Obersturmführer Eichmann?” Huber addressed the men, “And no such meeting is scheduled?”
The interrogato
rs looked from one to the other.
“Who arrested this woman?” Huber demanded.
No one admitted to the action, although the arresting officers only minutes before had stood proudly for their feat.
“Has no one thought to see if this meeting is indeed to occur?”
“We’re to trouble Obersturmführer Eichmann in the middle of the night?” the man who’d first interrogated Truus asked.
“You might have called his attaché, you fool.”
Huber turned and left the cold little room, the interrogator trailing like a dog who has messed a rug. The others too filed out, leaving Truus alone in the room.
She remained immobile but for a quick glance at her watch. Nearly morning. Joop would soon be rising and dressing, cutting himself a bit of the hagelslag she’d made for him before she left, and sitting alone at the narrow table. In a little apartment on a neighboring canal, Klara van Lange and her husband would soon be sitting at their own breakfast table, making plans for the baby they were expecting. Klara would not forget to take a dinner to Joop. She had promised, and Klara van Lange was as good as her word.
Huber and his men at last reappeared.
“Frau Wijsmuller,” he said, “I’m afraid Herr Eichmann’s attaché states that your appointment does not appear on the obersturmführer’s calendar.”
“Doesn’t it?” Truus said. “I suppose this attaché must be quite confident that he has made no error about it, of course. I understand Herr Eichmann is disinclined to forgive those who deny his will. And then there is of course the matter of the foreign press.”
“The foreign press?”
“It would be a shame for the foreign press to have this story of a proper Dutchwoman bringing St. Nicholas greetings to Obersturmführer Eichmann from Britain and the Netherlands only to find herself spending the night in a cold, uninviting jail.”
The Last Train to London Page 24