Poland: July 1945
The Russians kept her in Poland. She wasn’t sure where. No more than fifty miles from Auschwitz by the time it took to get there. It was a big, ancient country house, remarkably unscathed after five years of total war, on a vast estate far from the sound of anything. A fading dacha in dusty shades of red and green. Once it had been full of servants. Now it was full of soldiers. It didn’t look like a prison. It merely felt like one.
They told her she needed to build up her strength.
She watched spring arrive.
She taught Tosca to speak better German.
She told them she needed to see Magda.
Tosca told her this was not possible. Magda was fine; that was all she needed to know.
There were books in half a dozen languages—enough to keep her occupied in French and English as well as German. She read novels by the English writer Charles Dickens for the first time. And one evening in April, Tosca turned up with a film projector and reel upon reel of prewar Hollywood and they found a common taste in Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing across a bedsheet tacked to the drawing room wall.
And in the absence of a cello she played piano at a concert-sized Bechstein very like the one Viktor Rosen had owned.
By the summer, she had regained most of the weight she had lost. She had come to terms with mirrors, telling herself they’d never figure much in her life evermore, and dyed her hair blonde.
She told them she needed to go to Vienna.
Tosca told her that this was possible.
Two days later they set off.
Across Czechoslovakia and into the ruins of Vienna from the east.