LISA!” MALKA yelled from the kitchen. “Look out the window for your father.”
Lisa rose reluctantly from the piano bench and went to the window of their second-story apartment, peering into the cobblestone courtyard.
“Do you see him?”
“No, Mama, not yet.” The wind was blowing fiercely; the streetlights rattled. Winter was on its way. Before long, it would be Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, Lisa’s favorite time of year.
“Is he there yet?”
“No, I said I didn’t see him!”
“Where is he!” Malka began making a lot of noise with the pans in the kitchen. It was her way of letting off steam.
“Don’t break anything, Mama!” Lisa said, laughing. She was answered with another crash. “All right, then, get your sisters and we’ll start without him.”
Lisa knew what was making her father late: It was that “gambling” thing her mother got so angry about. He would stay out playing cards with some of the neighborhood men in the storeroom of Mr. Rothbard’s butcher shop. Lisa didn’t understand a thing about cards, but she knew they must be terrible since they made her mother so upset.
Abraham Jura had always called himself “the best tailor in all Vienna.” Her father was a proud, elegant man who wore starched white shirts with tall collars. His customers had been Jews and gentiles alike and came from all over the city to have their suits custom-made. But now Abraham had few sewing jobs, his longtime customers were turning up with less frequency. Gentiles had been forbidden to use Jewish tailors. A sign on his shop read “Jüdisches Geschäft”: “Jewish Business.”
Sometimes, after she was in bed, there were raised voices coming from her parents’ bedroom. The arguments were about money; that much she could figure out, and it seemed her father was angry at almost everyone these days. Gone were the early evening dinners and the bear hugs when Papa came home from work to greet his family.
She was upset by his wrinkled clothes and frayed cuffs. Fingering the loose buttons, she frowned. “Papa, I’m going to sew your buttons on for you. You must have forgotten how,” she teased him playfully. “Who will come visit a tailor that has a loose button?”
Her father would look at her sadly and say nothing. At those times, when she felt her father changing before her eyes, she would escape to the piano and her fantasies.
Abraham or no Abraham, Malka lit the Shabbat candles. It was Friday sunset and the Sabbath was beginning. She lit two white tapers in the silver holders that had been her own mother’s and turned to her youngest daughter. “Sonia, why don’t you tell us what they mean?”
“One candle is for the Lord, who made the heaven and the earth and rested on the seventh day,” Sonia replied proudly.
“And the second candle, Lisa?”
“We light the second because we observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy.”
Malka lit four more candles, one for each of her three daughters and one for her mother, Briendla, in Poland. A warm yellow light filled the room. A similar glow was appearing in parlors and dining rooms all across the neighborhood.
Lisa’s mother had a tradition of feeding the poor on the night of the Sabbath, and people would line up in the hallway an hour before sunset. Some came in tattered clothing and unkempt hair, others came with neatly mended patches, temporarily down on their luck. The faces would change, but one remained the same—a tall old man with a straggly white beard, the girls’ favorite, who told them a story every week.
This evening, rather than bringing a plate of hot kosher food, Malka came into the hallway and said sadly, “I am afraid we have nothing to share tonight.”
Lisa was stunned. She watched the hungry people shuffle away and saw the sorrow in her mother’s eyes. The old storyteller stayed behind, staring at the mezuzah hanging in the doorway.
After a long painful moment, he turned to Malka: “God will bless you for all of your past generosity.”
The girls joined their mother inside and began the meal without their father. When they finished, they cleared the table and watched her pull the large mahogany rocking chair to the window. Malka rocked slowly back and forth, reciting her prayers, eyes focused on the street below.
Lisa and Sonia awoke to loud noises—not the usual raised voices that often accompanied her father’s late night homecomings, but ominous noises of distant shouting.
Throwing on their robes, they rushed to her parents’ bedroom. It was empty, so they ran to the living room window and saw the sky was red with the flames of burning buildings. Above the shouting came the piercing sound of shattering glass. It exploded in terrifying crescendos from up and down the streets. Storm troopers were running down the block like a band of outlaws—brown-shirted soldiers were throwing rocks and bricks through windows. They swung clubs recklessly in the air. She wondered if they were drunk. Did they let soldiers drink?
Even though it was late, dozens of neighbors ran out onto the street. Lisa saw Mr. Mendelsohn, the druggist, racing out of his building, and watched in horror as two SS men picked him off the ground, flinging him into the plate-glass window of the pharmacy. She heard his agonized screams, jerked Sonia away from the window, and pulled her little sister back into the bedroom they shared. “Get under the bed and stay there.” Sonia looked up imploringly. “Get under the bed!” Lisa yelled, and ran into the hallway to search for her mother.
“Lisa!” She heard the cry on the stairwell and ran down to find her mother holding her father’s head in her lap. His face was covered with blood; his clothes were torn.
“It’s only a small cut, Lisa, don’t worry,” her father said when he saw her terrified expression.
“Are you all right? Where is Sonia? Where is Rosie?”
“I sent Sonja to hide under the bed, Rosie said she was going to Leo’s, remember? Let me help you with Papa.”
She took one elbow and her mother took the other, and they walked him slowly upstairs. As she looked back out the front door, she saw dozens of people being shoved down the road and beaten by soldiers.
Malka and Abraham had a beautiful bed, carved from cherrywood polished to a glow. Malka prized the bed above all other possessions. The children were never allowed to sit on the delicate white satin sheets, which had belonged to Malka’s grandmother. Now, as they helped Abraham onto the bed, Malka ignored the blood that stained the sheets and cleaned his cuts with a warm towel.
Lisa gently picked the shards of glass out of the folds of his clothing as her father chanted the Shema, the ancient prayer of the Jewish people.
“Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.”: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” When he had finally calmed down, he began to speak.
“I was leaving Rothbard’s when I saw them. I knew something was wrong—they weren’t marching anywhere—they were a mob. They took turns smashing the windows, the biggest ones first, like it was fun for them— they enjoyed the noise. Then they wrote nasty words in paint.”
“What kinds of words, Papa?”
“Shh,” Malka said. “We don’t need to know.”
“She’ll see them soon enough. They said Juden! Juden Schwein! Kill the Jews. Then one of them threw a bottle with gasoline inside a building.” Lisa was riveted by her father’s terrifying words.
Malka finished wiping Abraham’s face. “Shh, now. Let’s get you some soup.” But Abraham continued.
“I saw them drag people out of their homes. They took their things and burned them. Children that came into the streets were thrown on the ground. It was good you stayed inside.”
“Don’t tell us any more, Abraham.”
“You need to know what I saw! When I was running past the synagogue, they were taking out the ark and throwing the scrolls and the Torah in the street and setting them on fire . . . they were burning the Torah in the street!”
He paused to take a breath. “And there were no sirens. They wanted everything to burn.”
“I’ll turn on the radio, Papa, maybe there is news. Maybe the chancellor is saying something.” Lisa ran into the living room and twisted the large knob of the wireless; a stream of German patriotic music emerged. Abraham came into the room, walking gingerly in bare feet, trying to avoid loose pieces of glass, and switched off the radio.
More screams came from the window. They ran over and saw flames shooting out of the house on the corner and the neighbors were forming a bucket brigade. Men were running into the streets with pails.
“Malka, I need my shoes!”
She said nothing but walked into the bedroom and brought her husband his heavy boots. He laced them up in seconds and ran down the stairs to help.
The frightened family stared out the window. They watched the bonfires grow larger as more and more books and possessions were added to the fires.
Suddenly, several storm troopers grabbed the men from the bucket brigade and dragged them into the street. Lisa watched in horror as her father was forced to strip naked, get down on his knees, and scrub the dirty pavement. The storm troopers yelled, “Schwein, Juden Schwein!” and kicked them when they didn’t move fast enough.
Malka could no longer bear the shame. She took her two girls by the hand and led them to the bedroom, where they waited in silence for the terrible night to end.