I TRAVELED TO Vienna with my fifteen-year-old daughter to visit the addresses thrown up by the archives. Triggered by school history lessons, she wanted to visit a “museum of the Anschluss,” but no such institution existed. We made do with the wall of a single room at the small, private, and rather wonderful Third Man Museum, an homage to the Orson Welles film that was one of Rita’s favorites, and mine. The room traced the unhappy events from 1938 to 1945 by means of photographs, newspapers, and letters. A copy of the voting form for the plebiscite that followed the Anschluss, organized to ratify the union with Germany, declared the support of the Catholic Church, firm and unambiguous.
Later we walked through Viennese streets, to 69 Klosterneuburger Strasse, the building where Leon lived when he arrived from Lemberg in 1914. Once the home of his sister Gusta and brother-in-law Max, the liquor store was now a convenience store. Close by was Leon’s school, the Realschule on Karajangasse, and his first shop, on Rauscherstrasse. We went to Taborstrasse, where Leon and Rita lived together, the building where my mother was born. The street was elegant, but No. 72 was among the buildings destroyed by war. Later we stood outside 34 Rembrandtstrasse, Malke’s last Viennese home, a Wohngemeinschaft (shared apartment) she occupied with other elderly residents. It wasn’t too difficult to imagine the last day, which began early in the morning of July 14, 1942, the street closed by the SS to prevent escapes. “They are going to take the whole street, whoever is a Jew,” a panicked resident of a nearby street recalled as an SS man marched around with a pizzle shouting, “Alle raus, alle raus.”
Malke was seventy-two years old, allowed to travel east with a single suitcase. Escorted to the Aspangbahnhof, behind the Belvedere Schloss, she and other deportees were spat at, jeered, and abused by spectators, who applauded the departures. One comfort was that she was not entirely alone, traveling with Rita’s mother, Rosa. It was a haunting image, two elderly ladies on a platform at the Aspangbahnhof, each hanging on to a small suitcase, two among 994 elderly Viennese Jews heading east.
They traveled on Transport No. IV/4, a regular train with a seat in a normal compartment with lunch boxes and refreshments, a deceptively comfortable “evacuation.” The journey lasted twenty-four hours and led to Theresienstadt, sixty kilometers north of Prague. On arrival, they were searched. The first hours were uncertain and traumatic, waiting around, eventually directed to their quarters, a single room, empty save for a few old mattresses on the floor.
Rosa survived for a few weeks. According to a death certificate she died on September 16 of pericolitis. It was signed by Dr. Siegfried Streim, a dentist from Hamburg, who spent two more years at Theresienstadt before being deported to Auschwitz, where he died in the autumn of 1944.
A week after Rosa died, Malke was deported from Theresienstadt on Transport Bq 402. By train, she headed east, beyond Warsaw, entering the territory of Hans Frank. The train journey extended over a thousand kilometers, twenty-four hours locked into a cattle wagon with eighty other frail, elderly Untermenschen. Among the 1,985 other people who traveled on that transport were three of Sigmund Freud’s sisters: seventy-eight-year-old Pauline (Pauli), eighty-one-year-old Maria (Mitzi), and eighty-two-year-old Regina (Rosa).
The train stopped at a camp, a mile and a half from the railway station of the small town of Treblinka. The routine that followed was well rehearsed, under the personal direction of Commandant Franz Stangl. If she was still alive, Malke would have joined the Freud sisters in getting off the train within five minutes of its arrival. They were ordered to line up on the platform, divided into separate groups of men and women, forced to strip naked under the threat of lashes. Jewish workers collected their discarded clothes and carried them off to barracks. Those able to do so walked naked into the camp, along Himmelfahrtstrasse, the “street to heaven.” The women’s hair was shaved by barbers, to be packed into bundles for the manufacture of mattresses.
Reading an account of this process, I recalled a scene in Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah. Among the very few to survive Treblinka, the barber Abraham Bomba was interviewed as he cut a man’s hair, being pressed for details of the task he carried out, matters that he plainly did not wish to talk of. Bomba refused to answer, yet Lanzmann persisted. Eventually, the barber cracked, weeping as he described his own actions, the shaving of the hair of women.
“I was obsessed by the last moments of those who were to die,” Lanzmann wrote of his visit to Treblinka, “by their first moments in the death camps.” Those moments were taboo. The cutting of hair, the naked walk, the gas.
Malke’s life was over within fifteen minutes of stepping off the train.