RETURN TO VIENNA

In the summer of 2015, I take the train back to New York from the suburbs where Litzi lives. As I take one last walk down the blocks between the station and the building where I live, in a room that’s now nearly emptied out, I wonder whether I’ve been looking at my problem with New York from the wrong angle. For a long time, I thought I wanted to go back to Vienna because I felt lonely. But what if I felt lonely because I wanted to go back to Vienna? Had a part of me, perhaps unconsciously, realized long ago how very privileged I was to even have a home where I felt welcome? Maybe that’s why I hadn’t put much effort into creating a new network, a circle of friends, a substitute for my family. I had just drifted and found only a few deeper relationships that seemed as if they might last.

I met many people in New York who lived there because there was no space for them where they had come from. My own great aunt. The Chinese journalist who couldn’t freely practice her profession back home. The vegetable vendor from Bangladesh and the cleaning lady from Ecuador who were supporting their families back home. My friend from Italy who needed some distance from a difficult relationship. The Pilates coach from Spain who just wanted a chance to work. My colleague from Georgia who was a toddler when her family fled from war. My acquaintance from a small town in Florida, where he’d faced discrimination because of his homosexuality. That wasn’t my story. I had come here for adventure, but now I yearned for the comfort of those family dinners.

*

By the winter of 1955, Hansi’s letters to Pepi focused mainly on his return journey. My grandparents have saved enough to buy a car in Vienna, a used Volkswagen. Hansi also hopes to get a new bed. And would they all share an apartment? Hansi hopes he and Helga might move in with Pepi on Neubaugasse. “I know the most natural thing would be to grow up, move out, get an apartment of our own, and bring children into the world,” Hansi writes Pepi. “But I have no such ambitions. I don’t want to move away from you (because then I might as well just stay in America), nor do I aspire to have my own household and children.”

At the end of March 1956, they board a ship bound for Cherbourg. The trip back is as stormy as the outbound journey had been. Helga is constantly nauseous. It’s not just seasickness.

*

My grandparents first moved into their own apartment when Helga was already pregnant with her second child, my mother. They had lived with her parents after their first son was born. Years later—after my uncle, their fourth and final child, was born—they found a larger apartment in the nineteenth district. The family of six moved in on the second floor. When an apartment was vacated on the ground floor, Hansi set it up for Pepi. The two of them had breakfast together every morning.

Pepi, a relative, and Hansi, 1950s.

Hansi returned to America twice, for a few months each time, because of the better earning potential there. While posted at a private clinic with all the latest technology, he discovered a new device that recorded electrical activity in the brain. Electroencephalography is used in neurology to diagnose epilepsy and other such conditions. Hansi bought an EEG device and shipped it to Austria. After Pepi moved out of Neubaugasse, Hansi converted his former hiding place into a doctor’s office and exam room in which he saw patients. Soon business was so good that he gave up his job at the city-run clinic. He had always said he was allergic to supervisors; Helga, however, enjoyed working at the hospital until the day she retired.

Hansi and Helga worked while Hertha, Helga’s mother, took care of the four children. She would pick them up from school by car, always impeccably dressed in a skirt with matching jacket, hat, and pumps. She set her white leather clutch on the back seat. It was always full of little chocolates and cream-filled bunnies for the children to enjoy.

At lunch, my great-grandmother taught her grandchildren proper manners. One’s upper arms must be close enough to the torso to pinch a book in the space between. Children weren’t to speak until spoken to. Pepi also came for lunch. In the wintertime, he would always bring roasted chestnuts and set them on the table before the meal. My mother remembers the kids wanting to eat them right away, but Hertha insisted they be distributed only after the main course. Each day, Pepi followed their banter in silence.

Pepi’s relationship to Helga and her parents remained fairly distant; their personalities were quite different. Helga had no choice but to accept Pepi’s presence. He and Hansi were symbiotic, she says. Pepi was there for every holiday, usually kept quiet, and never interfered. Only now have I come across the notes he took on the four grandchildren’s development over the years. When asked, “What did you do in kindergarten today?” my uncle said, “went poopie.” My mother asked Pepi if he had a wife, mother, or father, and was shocked when he said no. Didn’t that make him sad? Some of Pepi’s notes are hurtful in their severity. He often comes to extreme conclusions, calling people “lying,” “gross,” or “selfish.” I doubt such judgments were meant for anyone’s eyes but his.

As my mother and her siblings grew up, Hertha’s rules relaxed a bit. She would give them money and became their go-to person for things they would rather not discuss with their parents. When Hertha and Paul traveled, they’d leave their apartment to their grandchildren. Hertha survived her husband by more than twenty years. My mother says her grandfather had a pleasant scent of cigars and aftershave. He worked as a police-department doctor until retirement, and he was eventually granted the honorary title of Hofrat, the equivalent of privy councilor. He could often be seen taking his dachshund, Pitzi, for walks. He was a nervous, anxious, sentimental man. He insisted on blessing family members before important events, be it a school exam or air travel. He did so according to Old Testament tradition, laying his hands on their heads and reciting the priestly blessing. “May the Lord bless you and keep you, and let his face shine unto you and be gracious to you. May the Lord lift up His face unto you and give you peace.” When he couldn’t do it in person, he’d call and demand that the telephone receiver be held over the intended beneficiary’s head.

I was eight years old when my great-grandmother died in 1997. I remember seeing her sitting in bed, frail, nearly blind. Nevertheless, her lips were red and her hair perfectly coiffed. Her white leather clutch was always next to her on the bed.

*

After Pepi’s death in 1973, the family suggested having a tree planted for him along the Avenue of the Righteous at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. An Israeli commission awards the title “Righteous Among the Nations” to those who rescued Jews under Nazi persecution. To this day, Pepi is not one of them. He wouldn’t have wanted that under any circumstances, Hansi said—he found such sentimental gestures offensive. To Pepi, what he had done was self-evident. Why should he be honored for not doing the wrong thing?

For a long time, this struck me as incomprehensible. How could a monument be bad if it moved people to see Pepi as a role model and emulate his behavior? I had always listened in as members of our extended family were ranked according to whether they would hide us. My grandmother’s longtime medical secretary? Absolutely. My cousins’ former nanny? Probably not. My classmate’s parents? Maybe. Many of Pepi’s traits were inherited by the family. The art of listening and questioning, for example: Pepi taught Hansi, who passed it on to my mother, who used it on me. If someone annoyed or offended me, she would let me tell her all about it and ask if I could guess why they might have done what they did. Today I consider listening to people the most strenuous aspect of my job as a journalist: I have to pay close attention to what people say, suss out whether they’re saying it merely because they think it’s what I want to hear, and then formulate my next question.

Pepi’s sheer courage and recklessness often make such family lore sound like a bunch of adventure stories, but I’m a long way from all that. Would I be capable of standing up against a seemingly invincible, perilous power? I don’t know.

My high school hallways had glass fire doors. Most of the time, they were held open by a strong magnet, so there was an empty triangle between the door frame, door, and wall. During break one day, when my classmates and I were ten or eleven, we came upon a closed fire door. One of us came up with the idea of opening the door and then having one of us squeeze into that triangle. The girl chosen was someone I didn’t like because, in gym class a few months before, she had told everyone not to pass the ball to me. From a sports perspective, it was completely justified, but it devastated me.

One of us pushed the girl to the other side of the glass door. Then four or five others, including me, leaned against the door. Everyone laughed, including the trapped girl, who used both arms to brace herself against the door. She played along, perhaps grateful for the attention. Clearly, she wasn’t comfortable; her laugh had the high pitch of despair. But as soon as the magnet clicked shut, she sank to the floor and started to cry. Her right arm suddenly hung limp. A teacher rushed over to free her.

That afternoon, I reflected on what had happened. I had a guilty conscience and burst into tears in front of my mother. She handed me the phone. The girl seemed to be happy about my call. I stammered out an apology. She had sprained her shoulder joint, but it didn’t hurt that much anymore. Then she asked me what she had missed in math class. We became friends, did our homework together during lunch break, and passed the ball to one another in gym class. After completing high school, I lost track of her.

That was almost twenty years ago, and yet I can still see the expression on her face as she strained against the glass door. Locking her up, shutting her in had been a game—a game that, all of a sudden, had real consequences when she sank to the floor, cradling her injured shoulder. What would have happened, I wonder, if our game had ended as we had expected, culminating not in injury but in her mutually agreed-upon liberation? Maybe I wouldn’t have realized that I had done something wrong, that I had been part of a group that overpowered an individual and didn’t ask for consent. The consequences of my actions would have remained invisible, abstract.

According to this logic, a lot of people during the Nazi era would have felt compelled to join the resistance, especially those with a lot of persecuted friends. They experienced the consequences of their non-action more clearly than anyone else. This applies to Pepi, who knew my grandfather’s family before 1938—and yet at the same time, such reasoning falls short. What about those who were all too happy to get rid of their competitors, their neighbors—no matter how close they’d been before? No, Pepi did something different: he felt responsible. Taking responsibility is a decision. Someone who takes responsibility takes action. Pepi decided he had a role to play in my grandfather’s life.

A tree in Jerusalem can’t even begin to explain all that. Pepi’s legacy is alive. He has sixteen descendants, and his roots run deep in each of us.

*

The day of my master’s degree graduation ceremony in May 2013 is muggy. Several streets around the university are closed to accommodate the ten thousand expected visitors. I’ve borrowed the light-blue gown and matching cap from an alum, with just one little oversight: the gowns come in different sizes, and my generous predecessor is at least a foot taller.

We sit on the metal bleachers and cheer when the video camera projecting our class onto the big screen pans by us. I wonder if this sense of belonging, something everyone here clearly seems to feel, actually exists. Sure, I’m experiencing an adventure, but am I really part of it? The light-blue, oversized gown sticks to the back of my knees.

I find my parents and grandmother again in one of the huge party tents. Helga, eighty-four at the time, had announced that she wouldn’t miss it for the world, and flew over. The way she said it almost sounded like a threat: no one can keep me from coming. A few months earlier, I had produced a piece about my trip to Poughkeepsie for the university’s broadcast reporting workshop. Now some of my curious classmates wander over and want to meet my grandmother. The professor introduces himself to her too.

Helga and Anna, New York, May 22, 2013.

That weekend, just before Helga returns to Vienna, we take our last daytrip together in New York. It’s just a forty-five minute ride to Litzi’s on the Long Island Railroad. She picks us up from the station by car. It’s the last time I get to see the ninety-year-old behind the wheel.

We sit in the sunroom of her little one-story cottage and eat cake. The conversation meanders here and there, and Litzi asks after each family member. When she pronounces a name, she enunciates every syllable, sounding overly respectful. She usually still puts a “dear” in front, too. No matter what Helga says in response, Litzi is invariably enthusiastic. “He’s having a hard time at school …” “You don’t say—well, I’m sure he’ll do a great job!” Helga gives Litzi health tips, and she graciously nods after each recommendation.

I’m so distracted by my own insecurities that I hardly even listen. I had recently agreed to go to Berlin for an internship, but now I’m wondering whether I’d actually rather stay in New York. One year wasn’t enough. Maybe that’s how my grandparents felt when they got here: eager but uncertain, curious as to whether this would be just another adventure or the start of a new life.

We take a taxi back to the train station. Litzi stands in her front yard and waves to us as we go. Helga looks exhausted. She’s also clearly looking forward to Vienna, to her everyday life, to the family. I will miss her.