Vienna: February 14, 1944
It was her birthday.
Her twentieth.
A hurry-home day.
She had no idea what her father had planned. Before the war he had surprised her. Something unimagined, something extravagant. These days he surprised her in more modest ways, but still surprised her.
She boarded a tram at dusk, just outside the Konservatorium. There was snow on the streets. Not enough to stop a tram—little or nothing could do that—but it left the interior dank and moist, the floorboards running with water, the passengers glistening, the windows blurry with condensation.
Two stops on, a man took the empty seat next to her. It was gloomy, no lamps lit for Allied bombers to see from above, and she only realized it was Roberto Cacciato when he spoke to her.
She had been in a daydream, mentally rehearsing her part in a Mozart symphony. Her right hand twitching at the neck of an invisible cello.
“What have I missed?” he said.
It jerked her back to the moment.
“Oh . . . the Prague. You missed the Prague symphony. In fact, I think you’ve missed every rehearsal we’ve had for it.”
“Doesn’t matter. Not much for a clarinet to do in it. Besides, I know the part backwards.”
“Why don’t you come?”
He tapped the brown paper parcel he was holding.
“There are other things one must do.”
She was about to ask him what he meant when the tram braked suddenly. She wiped at the condensation on the window next to her. There were soldiers running in the street, then the front door of the tram opened and an SS Hauptsturmführer stepped onto the platform.
She turned to look at Roberto, but as the front door had opened so had the rear and he had leapt through it to the street and run off.
As he rounded the back of the tram, running as fast as a man with a club foot can, three soldiers out in the square shouldered their carbines almost idly, and without a word of warning, shot him in the back.
He fell face down on the thin sheet of snow, a spreading red stain over his heart on the back of his blue jacket, his hat cartwheeling off to spin to a standstill twenty paces away.
One of the soldiers turned the body over with his boot, then gestured with a thumbs-down to the other two.
She turned her head away. Every head in the tram was facing forward, every head practicing what she had not, and what every Viennese had learned since the fickle day they had cheered Hitler into the Heldenplatz—see no evil. This was how Vienna survived.
Only one face looked back at her. The SS Hauptsturmführer. He picked up the brown paper parcel next to her.
“Yours?” he said simply.
Hear no evil.
“No. N . . . n . . . no.”
Speak no evil.
“It was . . .”
“His? The boy’s? Fine, you come along with me, young lady.”
With one hand he hefted the parcel, with the other he took her by the arm—firmly enough to let her know that if she squirmed or tried to break his grip he would hurt her.
They took her in an open car with a flapping canvas roof to a police station in Marokkanergasse, south of the city centre near the Belvedere gardens.
Sitting alone in a cell she thought it could not be long before her father came to collect her—explanations, apologies, bribes, although one had to be very careful how one bribed a German. But her father never came. In the morning a guard awoke her at first light and, feeling stiff, cold, and sleepless, she was hustled into a police van and driven off again.
Through the grille that separated her from the driver she could see that they were crossing the entire city centre to reach the northern side. For a while she thought that they might simply be taking her home. A good ticking off and returned to the bosom of her family. But the van turned right towards the Danube Canal and pulled up at the Rossauer Lände Prison, a monstrosity in red and dirty cream brick not half a kilometre from her parents’ apartment.
She knew Rossauer Lände. It was where the Jews had been held in the early days of the war, prior to being relocated in the east. There had been much talk of the new towns in the eastern Reich, there had been endless radio broadcasts at school—lectures by Hitler himself—on the matter of Lebensraum. Plenty of people had told her that the Jews would be better off in the east. There was talk of a new town just for Jews, Osswichim, or Auswiczin, or some such Polish word. But mostly there was little talk of the Jews and no one ever seemed to hear from them. Another motto the Viennese had learnt in the eagerness of their lazy embrace of national socialism was “out of sight, out of mind”—and among the new tasks the Führer had set them that day in the Heldenplatz, the most daunting, and the least mentioned, was “what to do with the Jews?”: “The Jewish Problem,” as it was so neatly called, as though it were no more than a matter of faulty plumbing or a blocked drain.
Alone in a cell once more she could hear nothing but the sound of doors banging down distant corridors and of water dripping. There were no human noises, no voices, no footsteps. And then it dawned on her. The prison was empty, and it was empty because Vienna had no more Jews. Once, at the end of the decade, there had been close to a quarter of a million. Now there were none.