HANSI AND HELGA

Facts have a way of disappearing, that much is clear to me. Hansi’s secondary school? There are no archives of it. Paperwork from the period Pepi worked under the Wehrmacht? Unavailable. The documentation proving Helga’s “protected status,” or that of her sister and mother? We can only make educated guesses. How many people knew about Hansi’s existence as a Jew in hiding? No way to find out.

My uncertainty about just how closely Hansi and Helga’s recollections actually are to reality must also be factored in. Helga has spent her entire life dealing with the Holocaust quite intensively. To what extent have her experiences begun to meld with others’? Hansi’s notes remained incomplete. The last entry dates from a few weeks after his seventieth birthday, shortly before he was diagnosed with cancer. If he’d had more time, maybe he would have been more like Helga. With each conversation, she recalls new details.

When she tells me how she met Hansi, I wonder what his take would have been. He doesn’t say a word about it in his notes.

Emigration to Palestine was a huge topic among Vienna’s surviving Jews, including Helga, who had come into contact with the idea of Zionism in Theresienstadt. On September 11, 1945, she attended a Zionist group meeting. She remembers the date exactly. A warm meal was served, and probably not everyone there was an ardent Zionist, including the lean young man with jet-black hair and a striking look seated opposite her. He was nineteen, Helga sixteen. “He caught my eye,” says Helga.

Helga was there with a girlfriend, Hansi with a male acquaintance of his, and the four of them decided to get together again soon. On the occasion of his twentieth birthday on October 18, Hansi invited Helga to the apartment on Neubaugasse. They drank and smoked. Pepi was there and talked to her. Helga wanted Hansi to like her—she was impressed by how wild he was, how he bristled at the idea of abiding by the rules. When the weather improved, the group of new friends spent entire afternoons in a garden on Wilhelminenberg, toward the outskirts of the city. One time, Hansi climbed up onto the roof of the garden shed. “My heart stopped,” Helga recalls. Then he just casually jumped down again.

He had another idea: Helga should stand in front of the wooden wall. Hansi would show off his knife-throwing skills; Helga would prove how courageous she could be. “I thought I’d wet myself, I was so scared!” Hansi proved to be a masterful knife thrower, and to this day Helga shudders just thinking about it.

In those first few months after the war had ended, Hansi realized his years of isolation were over, and he was savoring it to the hilt. Helga kept spotting him in the company of other young women, until she learned how to make him jealous in turn. She went to the Volksoper with one admirer (“a good-looking guy, but dumb as a doornail”) and had another over to play chess; he ended up staying past the curfew. “He thought maybe something was brewing and asked to spend the night.” Helga handed him a blanket and said he could sleep in the elevator, but the next morning she did bring him breakfast.

Hansi and Pepi, late 1940s.

Helga and Hansi circled one another for nine months. Helga described it as an “on and off situation.” Who decided that? I ask. “Each of us had our own sore spots,” she replies. Vienna was nearly destroyed, money was tight, and Helga was full of rage over the years of torture. She wanted to emigrate to Palestine. And what was Hansi grappling with? Later on he told my aunt that the murder of his sixteen-year-old brother was the hardest blow he’d ever been dealt.

By the summer of 1946, Hansi and Helga were a couple. They took off for a weekend: the official story was that Helga was on the road with a girlfriend; instead, she entrusted that girlfriend with the task of sending Helga’s parents a couple of pre-written postcards. Helga’s father had been especially suspicious of Hansi from the start. Exactly why, Helga can’t say. Maybe he just didn’t care for him, or thought his daughter was too young.

In July, thanks to some major help from Pepi, Hansi passed his high school graduation exam. During the Latin portion, Hansi told his teacher he felt nauseated. He was given permission to go to the bathroom, where Pepi translated the text. That autumn, Hansi enrolled in the University of Vienna medical school. One of Pepi’s letters to Aunt Frieda painted the picture: “He gets up at 8:00, which I give him extra credit for, goes to class, comes home at 1:30, and only has fifteen minutes for lunch, since he has to be back in the dissecting room by 2:00. In the evenings, he has to study, reviewing all the anatomical details he dissected that afternoon, so that he can continue dissecting farther the next day.” He goes on: “Hans has nothing but very decent, nice acquaintances. He himself is, thankfully, still solid, and shows no inclination to rebel. He enjoys a glass of wine—an occasion that presents itself only rarely—but he would never get drunk. He attended a ball this past season, and came home at 3:00 a.m. But since he can’t really converse at such events, he prefers to find a table somewhere quiet with some boys and girls and just talk the night away.”

Helga still had another year of school ahead of her, which felt like an eternity. Surprisingly, she suddenly decided to quit school and instead take a shorter, six-month course to get her high school diploma—and, alongside Hansi, start studying for the medical exam. In the spring of 1947, half a year after Hansi, she passed her high school graduation exam and immediately enrolled in medical school. She had her own little room in her parents’ apartment on Porzellangasse, in the ninth district, and Hansi often visited her there so they could study together. In between, she says, they would take little breaks, which particularly piqued the curiosity of her eleven-year-old sister Liese. Helga had a model skeleton that terrified Liese. The next time Liese knocked on the door to her room, Helga put a flashlight in the skeleton’s mouth, turned the overhead light off, and stood the skeleton in the middle of the doorway so it would be right in front of Liese as she opened the door. After that, Hansi and Helga were left in peace, for a while at least. And Helga’s plans to go to Palestine? They had vanished.