All at once, dozens of storm troopers rushed through the crowd. Emil and Karl were shoved aside and were almost torn away from Berta. There was a great deal of shouting and confusion. People in the crowd were screaming.
Suddenly everyone ran off to one corner of the park. Emil and Karl were swept along with them.
Two storm troopers there were beating a man. The man’s face was no longer recognizable. It was completely swollen, and blood ran from his eyes, his ears, his nose. It seemed as though he was weeping blood.
“I am one-hundred-percent Aryan,” he pleaded in a weak voice. “You’ll pay dearly for this! You’ll pay for this!”
The storm troopers continued to strike him.
“Where’d you get that red piece of paper?” One of the men in uniform asked.
“I picked it up off the ground. I’m an Aryan!”
He collapsed, and the storm troopers left him lying on the ground.
Screams came from the other side of the park. The entire crowd ran over.
“That’s him!” some shouted. “He’s the one who scattered those papers!”
One old woman yelled louder than the rest: “I saw him tossing them into the air. I saw it myself!”
But before the storm troopers could reach him, the man pulled some documents out from his shirt pocket.
“Here are my papers,” he shouted in a loud voice, trying to be heard over the crowd.
The soldiers examined his papers carefully, and then they raised their hands, saluting him.
“Heil!” he answered.
The people in the crowd all raised their hands as well.
“They could kill an innocent person,” someone muttered.
“Yes. And whoever scattered those papers was very clever about it.”
“What does it say on them?” a short man asked.
“Pick one up and take a look. Why don’t you pick one up?” another man answered with a taunting laugh.
The first man just stood there, not knowing what to do, and looked down at the trampled pieces of paper.
People began to run back to the spot where they had all crowded together before.
“Let’s go home,” Emil quietly said to Berta.
But she didn’t reply. In all the commotion, Berta didn’t even hear that Emil had said something to her.
“Please, you’ll step on the children!” she said to the people around them.
“The children! The children!” they shouted with her.
Emil and Karl could no longer find a place to stand. They made their way to one corner of the park, but they could still see dozens of men, women, and children standing in a circle, surrounded by storm troopers.
A big, broad-shouldered man with a wild red beard and a head of scruffy red hair stood taller than the rest of the crowd. He wore an old jacket, its color faded beyond recognition, and tight-fitting shorts that just reached the top of his knees.
He let out a laugh that rolled like a barrel and ended in a shriek. Each time he laughed he clapped his hands together and yelled, “This is good! This is good!”
Then he stretched out his hand and gave a wild shout: “Heil! Heil!”
His face swelled and grew stern. His cheeks were so puffed up that it looked as though they were about to burst.
But just when it seemed that his eyes would pop out of his head from shouting “Heil,” he burst into a peal of laughter that ended in a shriek.
“This is good! This is good!” he said, his feet dancing.
“Idiot! Be quiet!”
“Heil!” he shouted with all his might. Then, like an army called into action, the crowd began to raise their hands and shouted back, “Heil!”
After this chorus of Heil’s he burst out laughing once more. His laughter was infectious. A few children started imitating the peculiar way that he laughed, and the whole crowd was delighted. Emil and Karl moved closer to him, and for a moment they forgot where they were. From the circle in the middle of the park, they could hear a man in uniform speaking, but he was too far away for the boys to understand what he was saying. The red-haired man was laughing so loudly, and the crowd along with him, that it was impossible to hear a word.
Suddenly they saw a soldier pick out one of the people from the group in the circle and lead him over to a tree.
The man scurried up the tree just like a squirrel. He climbed up to the very top and stayed there, sitting among the branches.
The whole crowd lunged forward, breaking through the dozens of storm troopers who were trying to keep them from getting too close.
Now they could hear everything. The soldier standing under the tree ordered the man above him to make sounds like a bird.
No response came from the tree.
“Crow like a rooster,” the soldier shouted.
From the tree a weak “cock-a-doodle-doo” could be heard.
“Louder!” The officer yelled.
The man up in the branches crowed louder now. The crowd went wild and applauded, as if they were watching a play. The red-haired man danced about, clapping his hands and shouting loudly, “This is good! This is good!”
When the man in the tree came down, the soldier hit him on the head twice. A second man was already waiting to take his place. He was an old man. He tried to climb the tree, but he couldn’t make his way up. Each time he fell down, the storm trooper struck him, and the entire crowd shook with laughter.
But there was no way that he could get up the tree. After he’d been hit several times, he could no longer stay on his feet, so the officers forced him to sing as he lay on the ground.
The old man sang in such a peculiar voice that the storm troopers went berserk.
“Louder!” they shouted. “Even louder!”
But the more the officers shouted, the softer the old man’s voice became.
Then it seemed that everything went crazy, like an insane asylum. Under the storm troopers’ orders the people in the circle started to sing in a strange mix of voices. Their children wailed along with them. Dozens of people crawled on the ground, chewing on the grass and calling out “moo!” or barking “bow-wow!” Others were ordered to sit in the trees, crowing and trilling like birds.
And above all this tumult the red-haired man’s “Heil! Heil!” and his raucous laughter could still be heard.
“This is good! This is good!”
Suddenly a shot rang out. The crowd shuddered and started to run away. The gunshot came from within the circle. Karl had seen it—a finely dressed man with silver-gray hair had pointed the revolver at himself. Now he fell, the revolver still in his hand.
People began to push closer, right up to the spot where the man with the revolver lay. Several storm troopers ran past and kicked him in the stomach. The revolver fell out of his hand.
One of the soldiers bent over, raised the man’s bloody head, and spoke to the onlookers, as if he were reciting a poem:
“How beautifully they die, these children of Israel! How excellent!”
The crowd began to disperse. Many people began to make their way out of the park, heading down the side streets. Others were so exhausted that they dropped onto the grass, as if they had fainted.
Berta took advantage of this opportunity and headed for the gate with Emil and Karl.
But then she, too, sat down for a while on the grass.
“I have to rest. I can’t move my feet.”
Emil wanted to say something, but Berta interrupted him.
“Don’t talk now, Emil, not one word!”
“Yes,” Karl added, “Don’t say anything.”
Another woman came over and sat down near Berta. She was stooped, like an old woman, though her face didn’t look old at all. She sat hunched over, as though she felt cold on such a hot, humid day.
“What a day this has been!” she mumbled, as if to herself. Then she turned to Berta. “How did you like it? Nice?”
Berta started to move away from her.
The woman snapped at her. “You don’t have to run away from me. I’m not going to bite you. How do you like our Vienna?” she asked again.
“I don’t know, I’m just a janitor’s wife, an ignorant woman!” she blurted.
“I’m just an ignorant woman, too,” the stranger said.
The women looked at each other without saying anything for a while.
“Nice boys,” the woman said. “Handsome boys.”
“Come,” Berta said to Emil and Karl. “Time to go.”
But as soon as she started to get up, the woman grabbed her by the hand.
“You don’t have to run away from me, I’m your friend.”
She spoke quietly, but so gently and kindly that Berta stayed where she was, and so did Emil and Karl.
Berta summoned all her courage and asked, “How do you know that we’re friends?”
“That’s easy—when I spoke to you, you said nothing. Silence says a great deal.”
The stranger stroked Karl’s hair and at the same time caressed Emil.
“In that case, I’d like to ask your advice. My husband’s gone. These boys aren’t mine; their situation is very bad. Today I have to leave the city. Someone has to look after these boys. Someone!” the janitor’s wife said quickly.
“Your husband’s gone?” The woman bent over even closer and added softly, “Was he arrested?”
Berta didn’t answer. Her teary eyes spoke for her.
“You can turn the boys over to me. I’ll make sure that no harm comes to them,” the woman said.
“Their situation is very bad. They have no mothers, they have no fathers, they have no roof over their heads. They need to be taken care of.”
The stranger answered in a dry but insistent voice. “You can trust them to me.”
“Emil, Karl, do you want to go with this woman? I have to go away. If I stay in the city I’ll have no way of getting food, I have to go to my mother.”
The two boys went over to the woman and looked her in the eye.
Karl was the first to answer that he was ready to go with her. Emil nodded his head in agreement.
Emil took hold of Berta and kissed her hand.
“No farewells,” the stranger insisted. Turning to the janitor’s wife, she said, “Go, and don’t look back.”
Berta remained seated.
“I feel like a criminal for leaving the children, but I have no choice.”
“You don’t have to worry about them at all. Just pick yourself up and go.”
They heard a group of laughing men and women approach. A storm trooper walked along with them, his laughter ringing out above the rest.
“Go!” the stranger shouted.
Berta rose and walked out the main gate.
“We can go now, too.”
The stranger and the boys got up as well, and they set out through a different entrance to the park.