THE LAST WINDS OF March were blowing over Vienna. Against them Dr. Vederle raised the collar of his overcoat as he walked through the streets. They were chill winds, blowing from the North, blowing over a sick Germany to stricken Vienna heavy-laden with the terrible pollens of hatred and human pain.
As he walked he considered the letter in his pocket. It had come at last, that very morning, mailed in New York on the twentieth, traveling by five-day boat, and then delayed, unaccountably, another five days coming across civilized western Europe from Southampton to Vienna. Was there a secret censorship of mails?
He took the letter out and examined it again. There were no signs of its having been opened. Ah, well, if they knew, the Gestapo, that he was actively preparing to leave, they knew.
He would not succumb to a thousand fears and apprehensions. The question he was considering now was a realistic question, brought into focus by the letter. Could they wait in Vienna for the affidavits? Or was it wiser, safer, to leave Austria at once, and do their waiting elsewhere?
For the letter, cordial as it was, showed him clearly that there would be delay. It was disappointing that Ann Willis had been forced to turn the affidavits over to a stranger, who could not have the personal compulsion to help that Mrs. Willis herself had. Then, to the list of documents that would have to be prepared—there was plenty of room for delays there—by a bank, a lawyer, by this Vera M. Stamford herself, who was apparently a busy woman with a thousand other things to do.
Christa had read the letter with him, and the same uneasy disappointment assailed her.
“The affidavits won’t be here for a month, I’m sure. Is there nothing to do but just wait?”
“I must think,” he had answered. Was there a month’s leeway in this swiftly changing, darkening Vienna?
A half-formed plan teased his mind.
Now, walking swiftly, he must decide, and either reject it as needless and thus overdramatic or make it workable and act upon it.
He turned a corner and came upon some street disturbance; automatically he stood still at the edge of a crowd, to see what caused it. Over the shoulders of the jeering people ringed about in a large circle, he looked down upon the sidewalk.
Six men and two women were on the ground, on hands and knees. They were probably Jews. They wielded brushes, rags, crumpled masses of newspaper. Kicking and prodding them on with their task were two dozen storm troopers. The task was to wipe or wash out the chalked name of SCHUSCHNIGG, printed during the night on the stone walk. Schuschnigg had been arrested a few days ago, was being tortured, according to rumor, by a blaring radio at his ear so that for days and nights he had had no sleep.
The look in the eyes of the crouching, cleaning Jews made Vederle turn away, nauseated and murderous. The mourning, the unbelief in those eyes…
Each day now, some new event brought that nausea, that helpless impulse to stop, to halt, to kill these precise-gestured storm troopers.
Yesterday they had arrested Professor Carl Meiers, one of Europe’s greatest physicists. They had smashed the laboratories and imprisoned Dr. Anton Rachler, one of the world’s leading crystal-lographers. They had seized Professor Johann Biedenkass, the anthropologist, and shot him to death while he was “trying to escape custody.” Not one of these three was engaged in politics or in anything but the grave, fine life of science; by the demented Nazi standard each was an “enemy of the Reich.”
How could a crystallographer, immersed in the precisely beautiful study of crystals, be an enemy of the Reich? “Today the German university professor must ask himself one question…”
Recently he had read a newspaper story that was offered as a highly humorous bit. It told of some hot argument among students at the University of Moscow or Odessa. The fight was whether the Mendelian Law had to be discarded—was it not “contrary to Marxian dialectic and thus counterrevolutionary”? He had not thought it even mildly funny. The world was sick, with this insane sickness of “The State.” Germany, Soviet Russia, now Austria.
A month’s leeway? He wrenched his mind back to his half-formed plan. He could count on Margaretta van Morduyn, young as she was. He glanced at his watch. She would be reaching the office now. He walked more briskly.
A uniformed messenger was waiting in the anteroom. He delivered a letter; it was in Christa’s handwriting, marked “Urgent” and “Private.” Paul? Ilse? Christa herself? No, about such matters she would have telephoned. He signed for it, took it into his office, ripped it open.
They are ransacking Freud’s house now—confiscating his and Anna’s papers, documents, etc. K. just came by and told me; it is still going on. Don’t know yet whether they will arrest him and family. Be careful.
Freud. Two years ago his eightieth birthday had been an international event. During the celebration at the Wiener Konzerthaus, attended by scientists from a dozen countries, Thomas Mann had read a birthday oration written in tribute and homage. To Freud, in his summer residence, letters and telegrams had poured in from the whole international world of science. Now, here in his own Vienna, Freud…
For a moment Franz Vederle cradled his face in tense hands. In his mind, an old and calm voice counseled him, “Hold fast to the truth.” Then composed again, he opened the door to the waiting room.
“Good morning, Miss van Morduyn, come in now, please.”
She came in, a pretty girl, the only child of a powerful banking family in Holland. She started for the analytic couch, but a gesture from him stopped her. He motioned her to a chair facing him.
“Here, Herr Doktor?”
“Yes, please. We will not have your hour this morning. I am going to ask you instead to do something of great importance for me and my family.”
“Oh, yes, of course.”
“I have told you,” his voice was calm, “as I did all my patients, that it might become necessary to interrupt the analysis. Naturally, I hoped that it would not happen.”
“Oh, Dr. Vederle, I thought—I hoped—”
“I know. It is difficult and unfortunate for every patient if the analyst seems to desert him. You know that in Germany and now here, many patients have had to break the thread and continue elsewhere. You, for instance. I think Le Manion in Paris—”
“Then you are leaving? Soon? Oh, I—”
She gulped. He waited for a moment, his eyes sympathetic over her floundering look. Every patient was the same. But the adjustment would be made in the face of the necessity.
“We have no visas as yet. There will be delay about it. I have decided that we should leave without them. So it would be wise to arrange our departure to look—not like a permanent exit. It is there you can help.”
“Oh, I’ll do anything—anything you tell me.”
“Good. Would you come with me now, to the Dutch Consul? I shall explain on our way there.”
She showed astonishment, but only nodded and gathered her coat, gloves, and purse in readiness. Vederle telephoned his house.
“Christl,” he said, his voice casual. “Thanks for your note. I think that the children need a holiday, perhaps in the mountains. Could you pack at once for a vacation?”
“What—why are you—”
“We will talk it out in an hour or so. But would you start the packing at once? Perhaps there will be accommodations on tonight’s train to Basel. Or tomorrow’s.”
“Bas—ah, I see. Franz, I—” She hesitated. He waited. They had wondered whether or not telephones were being tapped.
Then she went on again, in another voice, practical and matter-of-fact.
“I shall start the packing at once., I—what about your things? How shall I know just which—”
“No, just your things and the children’s. Spring vacations in Switzerland are not for doctors. I may be able to join you on Palm Sunday for a few days.”
“Franz, but you are not—”
“Nothing is basically changed, Christl. Be patient about hearing more.”
His voice was decisive. Whatever he was planning was necessary.
The doctor and his young patient reached the Dutch Consulate. Margaretta had reacted to his plan as he had predicted she would. She was eager, almost gay, over it. After a brief delay, they were shown in to the office of the Consul General. An aide introduced them, and started to leave. A gesture from Vederle stopped him and he waited, uncertain and embarrassed.
“I would so appreciate some help,” Vederle began quietly. He turned to the aide. “Would you—could I trouble you to escort Miss Van Morduyn into another room for a moment—and”—he dropped his voice into a meaningful whisper—“and stay at her side?”
The clerk looked to his chief for permission.
The Consul General gazed first at Vederle, then at the blonde and lovely girl. He nodded to the clerk, who went to the door and held it open for her. She started for it, then wheeled, ran to Vederle, clung to him, her body tense, her fingers clutching at his coat. When she spoke her voice was shrill, wavering.
“No, no, they will take me to the lake if I leave you. No, no—”
“Hush, Margaretta,” he said. “You are safe here. I will not let them take you to the lake. Wait just a moment with this friendly young man. I will call for you in a moment.”
He led her to the door, stood with her for a moment. Docile, she went out.
It was enough. A big, lavish scene might have aroused suspicion, not this brief, anguished interchange. The Consul General leaned forward toward him.
“My patient is—ah—mentally disturbed. The past week or two has exaggerated her condition so much, the—ah—general excitement of soldiers, the bombers overhead, the street scenes—that I think it safest to return her to her parents in Holland. Would you give me the required certification to accompany her over the border?”
“She is not fit to travel alone?”
Vederle shook his head.
“She becomes quite—disturbed. I do not even wish to delegate a nurse to go with her. I would like to fly on some plane tomorrow, if two seats can be had and if you will give a temporary visa and a money permit for several days’ expenses there.”
There was a pause. It hung between them for a long moment. “Her father is the banker, van Morduyn.” Vederle offered the last remark as though it had no conceivable interest or bearing on the situation.
The name was finality itself. After that there was nothing but technicalities; in thirty minutes Vederle and Margaretta left the Consulate, their papers complete, two seats on the Antwerp plane already reserved for them by telephone.
On the street, they faced each other briefly.
“Was I all right?” Margaretta said anxiously. She saw his smile and knew there was gratitude in it.
“Do as well at the frontier,” he said, “and I shall believe you have an immense future on the stage.” He shook her hand warmly. “I shall come for you in a cab at three-thirty tomorrow.”
She nodded and they parted. His spirits had risen unaccountably in the last hour. There were relief and strength in action, in the end of waiting about for transatlantic boats, for the mails. He hailed a cab and made for the railway station. He bought three tickets for the next evening, on the Venice-Milan train. There was no difficulty. The Italian border was still open, and less suspect than the Swiss.
He was not yet done. The statement from the children’s doctor might prove useful; one could not predict everything, but one could prepare for it. Entering the offices, Franz was struck by the empty waiting room, usually so crowded with mothers and children and nurses, waiting their appointments with the renowned Dr. Hermann Schneirmann. Today not even the nurse was there. He was admitted by Schneirmann himself. “He looks older and overtired, too,” Franz thought.
“Hello, Hermann. Would you give me a statement that Paul and Ilse are over the whooping cough, convalescent but no longer infectious?” he began. “I am sending them away with Christa, for a holiday.”
The two men looked at each other in silence and complete understanding. Schneirmann lit a cigarette and sat at his desk, drawing writing paper and pen toward him. Vederle saw then that the hand holding the pen trembled.
Schneirmann wrote and signed the statement, folded it precisely, handed it over. He looked at Franz; his face held no expression whatever.
“My mother killed herself during the night,” he said, then. “She is, was, a Jewess.”
“God, Hermann, I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have troubled you now—”
“She did it, I believe, not so much out of personal fear, but because she believed it would be easier for me if she—if she removed the physical proof that I am half Jewish. The futility of it hurts me—as much as—”
His voice broke a little.
Vederle went over to him, put his hand on his shoulder, and said nothing.
“You know there is great resistance in New York and in London,” Schneirmann asked in a moment, and quite matter-of-factly, “to refugee physicians? Among the doctors there, I mean?”
“Yes, I had heard something—”
“Oh, a regular boycott, is developing. I have had most discouraging letters. The English and American doctors are afraid the refugee will practice for a pittance fee to get started. They are even making stricter new laws about licensing refugee physicians.”
“Yes. I suppose it’s natural. Many people hate—unconsciously, probably—hate all refugees. In New York and London and Paris there have already been so many from Germany. It will be harder for late-comers, like us.”
“Like us? Then you are really—?”
Vederle nodded. “And you?”
Schneirmann shrugged gently. He seemed not to care enough, to be indifferent to the future. He looked old, beaten, though Franz knew he was not much past fifty. Still, fifty—the needed energy, the necessary will to act, to organize, to begin again, all these were often siphoned from a man’s spirit by the time he was fifty.
“Is it money?” he went on, hesitating. “I could—”
“Thanks, Franz. No, not especially. I am alone, it would not cost so much for me alone. I—well, it would be so hard to return later, for those who leave now. I think it might be wiser to wait it out. It will never be as bad here as in Germany.”
There it was, the folly, the fantasy, the inability to face the whole reality. In the past fortnight, Vederle had heard the same sentiment from a dozen people. How many thousands, how many millions among the seven million Austrians still believed that somehow it would be “better” in Austria than in Germany? What would make them see that Nazism was Nazism—that there could not be a “mild” Nazism since its very essence was violence, destruction? “I think you’re mistaken, Hermann. I think it will be exactly as bad,” he said, “and more quickly. It took them years there to develop the technique. Now it’s perfected, and they’ll clamp it down at once here.”
The other only shrugged once more.
“Listen. Christa will be at the Karl Hof in Basel. If you change your mind and wish help—whatever help other refugees can give—write her there. She will know where to find me, in case we are separated.”
He left then, pocketing the signed document Schneirmann had given him. When he reached home, he found the house in turmoil. Suitcases, trunks, packing cases of every size stood about, half packed. Books, manuscript, even sheet music and bound volumes of music were piled up, waiting. Skis stood in one corner of the hallway, the two long pair, a medium pair for Paul, and the small runners for Ilse. There were tennis rackets too, ice skates, and sitting in forlorn isolation on the settee in the living room were Ilse’s family of dolls, six of them, in all sizes, ranged primly side by side, waiting. The spaniel, Hansi, raced about in a bright frenzy of anticipation.
Franz almost laughed in his first despairing glimpse of the complete misunderstanding in this household of what flight actually meant.
Paul and Ilse came rushing toward him.
“My bicycle, Father, I’ll need it, and yet Mommy says—” Paul’s eyes were gleaming with excitement. So he looked each June during the preparations for going to their country place. Ilse was shoving herself in front of Paul, eager to get attention for her problems.
“And I couldn’t leave Gretchen or Nina or Trudy home for so long, Daddy,” she begged, as if they had already argued the matter for some time. “They would get so lonely. I—”
Christa came to him. She threw out both her hands to indicate the rooms strewn with their belongings, all the big and little parts of their life, memory, shared experiences. She looked confused, unhappy.
“And my camera—what about that, and the stamp album?” Paul was saying. “I just simply couldn’t think of leaving—”
“Please tell Mommy, the doll carriage, the big one, not that little old straw thing—” Ilse’s voice was tense with pleading.
“And what do you think, Father?” Paul went on, his voice heavy with young and amused irony. “Mommy even said we’d have to ask you about taking Hansi. We could never leave Hansi behind.”
How make children understand that all the hundred precious things, the beloved landmarks of normal and sheltered childhood, were to be abandoned? He and Christa had decided not to tell them too soon of what lay ahead; to guard them for as long as possible from the news that might be more difficult for them than adults knew. Now he had to try to explain and prepare them at least in part. They must not, later, feel that they had been fooled or betrayed.
“Here, here, what’s all this you’re asking me?” he said to both upturned, searching, faces. “Come and let’s talk this over a minute.”
He started for his small study, and the two children danced in behind him. They were in high, prancing spirits—a vacation in Switzerland was real adventure, more fun even than going to the Traunsee.
Dr. Vederle sat down and Ilse climbed to his knee. Paul threw himself on the rug and began emptying out an unbelievable assortment of things from his pockets.
“Listen to me, you monkeys,” Vederle began. “This is the time for us to have a very grown-up talk.”
The children unknowingly straightened up, suddenly watchful of his face and voice. Paul abandoned the small pile of possessions on the rug before him. Ilse twisted about to look into his face.
“I want to explain a little about your trip.” His tone fitted the easy, casual mood he wished to create for them. “You see, children, this isn’t going to be the same as all the other trips you’ve taken. This is more important.”
“How—why? Do you mean longer?” Paul asked.
Franz nodded.
“It’s to Switzerland, yes—but that’s only the first part.”
“Where, Daddy, oh, hurry, where are we going—to France? Italy?”
“Italy is where they give red wine to the babies,” Ilse put in surprisingly. Vederle laughed.
“No, not France or Italy. Much more interesting than that. How would you like to get on a great big ocean liner—”
“You mean—to America? Are—we—going—?” Paul’s voice was large and deep with awe. He had heard so much, read so much, about that strange country.
“Yes, that’s really where. Oh, not right away, of course. First you want to have some fun in Switzerland—”
Paul’s eyes were shining. But suddenly Ilse’s arms were tight around her father’s neck. She was pressing herself to him, her face hot against his cheek.
“Oh, no, Daddy, please, please, no. I don’t want to go there. I want to stay right here. Oh, please—”
She was not crying. Her chin and lips fought against the quivering that beset them, her arms pressed tighter. “I don’t want to go there—” And again he was at the station, hearing little Editha Wolff’s voice cry out against her unnamable fear. The first time a child meets fear, feels slipping out of its grasp all that is safe and known…
He remembered so well how it could be once when he was no more than five, no bigger than this frightened little Ilse, he had been roused from sleep by his mother in the middle of the night.
There was a fire blazing near the city’s gas supply, and the alarm had gone out—it was possible the great gas tanks might explode. He had been rushed into some clothes, half blind and staggering with the reluctant and stubborn sleepiness of a little boy; with his mother and father, he had gone running forth into the streets, to get as far as possible from the neighborhood.
They were the same streets he knew, that he played on and walked on. Yet he was never to forget the terrible quality of strangeness, because it was the middle of the night, because a lurid half-light glowed in the sky from the great fire beyond the houses, because—just because this was new, different, monstrous. He wanted only to reach out to his father, to his mother, to climb into somebody’s lap and hide his head and cry to them to stop all this Thing that was happening. But they were half walking, half running, and he had to go with them. Soon he heard his own sobbing voice in the air in front of him; he hadn’t meant to behave badly; he loathed himself for being a crybaby, but he simply could not check the awful feeling in his heart.
He remembered hearing his mother say, “Carry him, the poor child is tired,” and that then he was scooped up into his father’s arms and held against his shoulder, his own small knees hooked up against his father’s plump and comfortable stomach. He remembered, as if the memory were still somewhere in the muscles of his arms, how his small-boy’s arms had gone tight around his father’s neck, clinging, hanging to him as if to some God-given safety.
And here was little Ilse with her first fear. No menacing sky casting a fearful glare, no rushing through newly strange, nighttime streets—but a child’s terror was the same, whatever the cause. The very absence of tears told him that she was feeling no everyday kind of misery.
“Why don’t you cry, if you like?” he suggested quietly to her. “If you feel so badly, you can cry, you know, a little girl like you.”
She looked up at him, searching, and he smiled down at her. He had never talked that way about crying before, really he never seemed to notice one way or another before, as though it didn’t matter. He certainly never made fun of crying, the way other children’s fathers did. Something went all easy inside her, and she put her face back into his big shoulder and cried, and cried, but even that seemed all easy. Her arms went soft, the hard feeling left them, and she felt she had never loved this father so much and if he wanted them to go to another country, it was all right.
Paul had been patient, waiting. Now he began questioning again, and Franz explained as clearly as he thought he should. After a moment, Ilse’s weeping edged off into long, indrawn sobs and then quieted completely.
“It’s something that happens to very many people,” Vederle was saying, “that they decide for some reason to move from one house to another, or one city to another, and sometimes even from one country to another. Only when they move to another country, then they usually stay there much longer. That’s what we may do. We may come back here to Döbling before very long, or it may be that we shall stay in America instead, for a long time. We might like it there too much to want to leave, ever.”
“But my English is so very bad,” Paul said. “At school, the teacher—”
Christa came in as Paul was speaking.
“Your English is better than mine,” she said to him. “I envy you—and Father, who speaks it all the time to his American or British patients. But yours will be even better than his in a few months.”
“And I will learn, too?” Ilse asked. “Will I speak English, too?”
Vederle laughed.
“We’ll all speak English. Now let’s hurry with the packing. You may take along only the most precious toys—only the small ones. Bicycles and doll carriages are too big.”
He hesitated. Was it wiser to avoid the issue of Hansi? Or kinder to settle it at once?
“And we’ll put Hansi to board with Aunt Maria until we come back.”
“Oh, Father, no, oh, we couldn’t—”
That was Paul. Ilse said nothing; she ran to Hansi, flung herself down beside him, clutched him to her so passionately that he squealed and struggled.
“Yes, we must; I’m so awfully sorry. You know dogs are not allowed to travel in some countries, and even where they are allowed, they have to go in a small, tight box or cage with the trunks. Poor Hansi would be so uncomfortable and alone—”
Long after the children were in bed, exhausted by the strange excitements of the day, Christa and Franz were still channeling all their thoughts, their energies, to the task of their own packing. They talked almost not at all; over their hurried supper, he had told her about the visit to the Consulate, his tickets for the plane, her tickets for the night train tomorrow. She had merely nodded, not surprised except over details. It was better to leave Vienna separately of course, the departure would not look like permanent emigration. If all went well they would meet in Basel, in three days. The affidavits could be sent there instead. There was an American Consulate there and at Zurich; the visas could be issued at almost any branch of the American Foreign Service.
Beyond these timetable matters, these mundane arrangements of trains, addresses, schedules, they each withdrew into silence. Such upheaval was too grave to be verbalized easily. It was better to suppress one’s emotions as one tore down one’s past.
It was nearly three in the morning when they approached the end. Two large trunks and four suitcases stood ready for their locks. One large canvas duffel bag, spilling out sports equipment from its top, was to be taken also; at the very bottom of this innocent-visaged vehicle were Vederle’s printed manuscripts and his still unfinished work. His great medical library, which included not only the standard reference works every good doctor has, but also a unique, complete collection of every major paper, pamphlet, report, and book on his own field of psychoanalysis—that would have to stay behind.
Their other books, their Bechstein piano, their furniture, pictures, china, linens, all the beloved and slow accumulations of their thirteen years together as man and wife—these were all to be left untouched.
They would remain where they now were, on their shelves, in their cabinets, in their corners—a house to which the owners were soon returning. Only after the four Vederles were actually on the Atlantic was the second half of the removal to be attempted. Then, if all had gone smoothly, Christa’s aunt would hire workmen to crate, and express companies to ship, the contents of the house, and put the house itself up for rent or sale. But only then.
Spent emotionally and physically from the hours behind them, Franz and Christa finally sat wearily together in the living room. All that remained was to pack the single suitcase he would take on the airplane. They sat apart from each other, their minds still too occupied with the minutiae of decisions about what must be left, what taken, to be able to reach toward each other.
Suddenly Christa was sobbing. Suddenly, unexpectedly, she bent her face to her hands and was crying. She sat bolt upright, rigid except for the crying which shook her.
“I can’t, Franz, we mustn’t,” she began. “It is not your fault, I do not blame you for thinking I wished this too—I let you cable her without understanding what it would be—”
He stood up and came toward her. But he stopped a few feet away, listening to the words pouring forth between the concealing palms over her mouth. Between the spread fingers, he could see her eyes, tight closed in this violent rejection.
“For a long time, you knew that I did not want to think of leaving. Then—those first days after it really happened—Anschluss and the Webbers and the others—then I know you felt I was ready to go. Even my note today—I don’t blame you for feeling I agreed, because I did. But now—”
“Yes?” His voice was quiet, without disapproval.
“But now I know I can’t. You will have your work, new patients, and you are, anyway, different, stronger—men are always stronger. But I—I will never feel at home, never feel happy, always want to be back here—”
“No, Christl, it only seems hopeless now, because you are tired, because this packing up is hard—”
“I can’t, Franz. I feel I—I cannot learn to live over again—I—oh, I’m afraid—”
He sat beside her then, but did not make any other move.
“People are always a little afraid, Christl,” he said. “But your fears will go. We’ll be together, always, and the children. What could harm us? Many people are going through this same sadness and fear—all over the earth, everywhere. Think of all the Germans who’ve already gone to Holland, Belgium, Denmark, England—”
“That’s it, that’s just what I mean,” she broke in, passion and pleading in her voice. “Why can’t we simply go somewhere near—Holland or Belgium is as safe as America, and we would not be such foreigners there—the language—the habits—we could still see our friends, families—”
“As safe as America? Many Germans came to Austria, thinking it would always be safe here. I suppose that Holland or Belgium is safe—yet sometimes I think of the Wolffs in Holland, the Markheimers in France—”
“How wise they were. They’re at home—in Europe—Europeans are never happy anywhere else.”
He was looking off into a distance in history. “I try to imagine how it would be to settle again, build a new life, and then—have to fly once more—to have it to do all over again—”
“But really what I mean,” she cried out as if she were afraid to lose his attention to these new speculations of his, “I might as well say it. You will be angry, you will think I have no principles, but I must tell you—I have been feeling it more and more—”
“I will not be angry. Of course, say it. Say it wholly, and without keeping back any part.”
“—Say that I can’t—really—see any more why we should go at all. Do you hear, why we should go at all! It was an impulse—a fine, big impulse to protest, to stand on our principles. But, oh, Franz, maybe—”
“Yes—maybe?”
“I think perhaps the best thing is to stay here after all, and fight the Nazis here—not desert Austria now—”
Dismay lanced through his heart. This argument he had heard, too, as often almost as he had heard Schneirmann’s “it can’t be as bad in Austria.” Once he himself had dared to hope. But now? The hard, incorruptible fact that the Nazis would soon enough make any effective fight a mere dream, would kill or imprison the fighters, would plunder them of all power, of money, possessions, press, radio, meeting places—could this hard reality be overlooked any longer by anyone?
Yes, the fight would go on, of course, underground, latent, waiting for events which might let it come into the open. But those events? There would have to be, first, war—would it, after all, come to war? Or would the world outside the maniac orbit of Spain, Italy, the Reich see in time and act in time? Perhaps so—perhaps the Loyalists in Spain, perhaps the Chinese would soon have stanch allies, before it was too late. In the meantime, the underground fight—
“What are you thinking, Franz?”
It was too complex to explain. Better to remain on the level passages of practical affairs.
“How would we live here, Christa? My own practice is already falling to pieces. There will be no analysis even permitted in a few months—they will call it a degenerate Jewish myth.”
“Yes, but there will always be a need for doctors. You were a doctor before you began to specialize…”
“No.”
The first shaft of anger. She was tired, she was ridden by tensions and anxieties, true, but this suggestion was too monstrous. How could she brush aside his years of devoted work and study and practice in this still evolving branch of science?
To suggest he go back now to taking temperatures and writing prescriptions—it was a betrayal, an enmity.
Calmness came over him, then, all at once. Betrayal, nonsense, Enmity, nonsense. He, too, was too tired, too intense. She was not seriously suggesting anything of the sort. She was merely thrashing about in her weary, frightened mind, reaching violently for anything that came to hand which might serve as a weapon against the departure she still resisted more than he—or she—had suspected. Time, she needed time, to accept the necessity more completely. There was always a mourning period after any death. “To say good-by is to die a little.” It was an overemotional cliché, but there was truth in it.
Silent minutes slid by. When he began to talk, it was not in direct reply to what she had said, but of Germany and Austria, of the deep, neurotic self-revelations in Mein Kampf, in Hitler’s obsessive, revenge-ridden concept of “the master race.” He talked almost dispassionately, wanting her to gain insight for herself from the things she knew so well but still refused to fit in the painful pattern they made. Often they had had such talks, but never before had he felt there was so much at stake, for her own future and for the children’s, as well as for his.
It was almost four o‘clock when she spoke again.
“Oh, you are right, my darling,” she said, and such hopeless weariness lay upon the words that his heart tightened for her. “We must go. I shall try—not to let you down this way any more.”
For the last time, they slept in the house they loved in the country they loved.
As Franz and Christa slept, the last winds of March blew down over Germany to Vienna, blew over a confused and inert France down through the winter-whistling Pyrenees to Spain.
There, advancing just then through Catalonia and to the coast were General Franco’s troops; the towns and villages and cities in their path watched their fearful coming, knowing what it would mean.
Toward government-held territory, three million Spaniards fled for safety from the spread of the Fascist power, from the firing squads for Loyalist civilians, from the political inquisitions of the Fascist police. Three million fleeing within the borders of Spain itself, as now across half a world, sixteen million Chinese were fleeing within the borders of China itself.
And those who could not reach government-held territory in Spain turned toward the great wave of refugees beginning again to flow northward through the snowy mountain passes and on the uneasy seas into French cities and ports.
Months before, after the fall of Bilbao, the first such wave had come rolling over the borders, fleeing from Santander, from the Asturian ports, from all parts of northern Spain, by road, by rail, by sea. By October, 1937, France’s troubled Minister of the Interior announced that there were some 55,000 such Spaniards already within the land, and that their maintenance by local charities or by France itself in its government-erected camps was costing the country one million francs a day.
A million francs a day? It is too much. Let us have a formal decree and halt this expensive hospitality to the driven, the desperate. The decree ordered Spanish refugees to leave France by the sixteenth of October, and some 25,000 had been forced backward into Spain. They went, corrosive envy in their hearts for those fortunate ones who stayed behind.
The fortunate ones. Forget about them, they are the blessed, they have found harbor. Forget, for instance, the twelve hundred in the refugee camp at Maneuille just over the border. The camp once was a factory, but now, strewn about on the floors under the rusting machinery are straw mattresses where the tired may rest. The walls are soft with cobwebs, there is no fire or warmth, but there are rats and spiders to run over sleeping faces in the dark of the night. There are children here, among these fortunates, they are feverish with grippe, mottled with measles, racked with whooping cough. There is a committee organized in the small département of France where this camp is located, and a good simple Frenchman named Henri Grilloux is the elected chairman. He has tried for days upon days to visit the camp, but the authorities refuse permission. When he finally does go, he is horrified, he is a good simple Frenchman, he is gentle because he is gentle, he calls upon all the people of the département to come to a meeting, to find the ways to stop this fine torture. The meeting is held. From the whole region only fifty people come, fifty others who are good and gentle in their hearts. All fifty are workers; they have little money to donate.
The fortunate ones stayed behind. The less fortunate returned to Spain, spread reports of how it could be.
Yet now again, in another spring, in the last weeks of March and the first weeks of April, 1938, in the face of their knowledge that France did not want them, new thousands and tens of thousands were struggling north, searching out the chances of safety in France.
And that newest of man’s creatures, the refugee child, fled too.
While Franz and Christa slept fitfully in their restless, partly dismantled house, little Paul and Ilse slept for the last time in their sweet, familiar beds.
But in many thousands of strange beds in French, English, Danish, Russian houses or camps other children were sleeping, sleeping the lonely sleep of small children parted from their mothers and fathers and all the friendly safety of home.
Over 10,000 child refugees had said their wide-eyed farewells in Spain and gone forth alone to France; 6000 more had traveled thousands of strange miles to Soviet Russia; 3600 had sailed from Bilbao’s warm wharfs to the cool docks of Southampton and were now distributed to the new child-refugee camps or colonies, and some few to compassionate private houses throughout England.
Nearly 700 child refugees, mostly orphans, were sent across the ocean from Spain to Mexico, but the distance and the cost soon cut that life line. Private groups of citizens in Holland and Sweden and Czechoslovakia, unable to receive any Spanish children in their own countries, undertook absentee support of another 575 small wanderers in three French colonies. But Denmark established a colony for 102 Spanish children at Ordrup.
These were the children of Madrid, of Toledo and Alicante, of Barcelona. Some few went off to foreign lands eagerly, some others went unknowing or indifferent. But, for the most part, when the moment came to say good-by to mother or father or grandparents, the impersonal air of railway station or dock heard high-pitched young voices crying out, “But I don’t want to go away; it’s better at home than anywhere.”
The implacable winds of late March blew down over Germany into Austria, blew down over England and France into Spain. Paul and Ilse Vederle still slept their comforting sleep, and somewhere in Czechoslovakia, in the Sudeten regions, a young mother left her bed to go and stare down into the crib where her child stretched and smiled through his guileless dreaming.
Christa stood on the porch, waiting for the taxi. The big luggage had already gone; Franz had arranged all that before he had left for the airport in the early afternoon. Paul and Ilse were guardedly playing in the garden, watchful of their traveling clothes. Paul was sturdy and big in his topcoat, and Ilse prim and beautiful in her little girl’s sailor hat with streamers, her tailored English suit, so diminutive, so grown up.
It was late afternoon, but the sunshine of that first day of April was benign to Christa’s nerves. This had to be, there was no use fighting against it, no use in the lump in her throat. The next three hours would be hard; these family farewells were only ordeals for everyone. Still, a silent departure would have wounded Franz’ relatives and her own so deeply—
It all had to be. The lump in the throat would go away in time.
Ilse gave a shout of excitement, and Christa turned toward her. The child was kneeling in the grass, absorbed in something. Paul was talking to her quickly, giving directions, clamping his hands ‘tightly together, yet with the knuckles raised, as though he were making room for something inside.
“But tight, now, or it will run away—like this, oh, like this, or you’ll squash it, you silly.”
Now Ilse was getting to her feet, slowly, carefully, as though she were carrying some precious liquid in a brimming glass. She turned and Christa saw that her arms were held taut, straight out before her, and that her hands too were cupped tightly together.’
“Oh, Mommy, come, look, it is so beautiful.”
“No, don’t,” cried Paul. “Don’t open your hands, it’ll fly right off forever.”
“Maybe I could peek through a crack in your fingers,” Christa said.
“No, oh, not out here,” Ilse said. “In the house—then if she flies away I can catch her again.”
Just inside the door, Ilse stopped. Paul crowded in beside her, and Christa closed the door with elaborate care behind them all.
“Now, darling, hurry and show me,” she said. “The taxi will be here any moment. What can it be—a tiny bird?”
The small cupped hands parted in a series of minute little jerks. There, finally exposed on the pink palm of the lower hand lay a red-brown ladybug, its speckled beetle wings held tight together to make an unbroken curve of shell.
“It’s a ladybug, a lovely little ladybug,” Ilse whispered.
“She named her ‘Elizabetha,’ ” Paul said.
“She’s lovely, she really is, darling,” Christa said, “and it’s a nice name.”
“Oh, please, Mommy, can I take her with me?” Ilse asked. Her blue eyes looked up searchingly, they were alive with begging.
“Take her along?”
“Please, oh, please let me. Darling Hansi can’t come—I know—but Elizabetha—she’s so little. I could pretend she knew us as long as Hansi—oh, please.”
“Yes, darling, yes, Elizabetha shall come along.” The lump in the throat, the sudden faltering knowledge in her heart that she could not bear this going away. “I’ll get a box for her. Paul, you run out and get some leaves and grass.”
“Just a little box, Mommy.”
Christa went into the living room, took up a matchbox and emptied it. Ilse watched rapturously; her cupped hands made gestures of approval. Paul came running in, with a handful of grass and lilac leaves. Christa slid the box open; Paul laid blades of grass and bits of leaf inside.
“It’s a beautiful little castle, just big enough,” Ilse cried, and slowly she transferred the tiny beetle to the green bed and slid the cover shut. “Oh, Paul, now we have a pet to go with us, a real, live pet.”
Outside, a taxi ground to a stop. The children raced out to it, still intent on the two-inch box and its shy inhabitant. Christa locked the door behind her, and left, with no backward glance of farewell.
For her the next hours were numb with unreality. The farewell dinner, the Auf Wiedersehen’s at the station, with Aunt Maria weeping and Uncle Karl full of false cheer, with Anna and Johann and Dorothea prattling hearty practical advice—all of it hurt her in some new oppressive way she had never before experienced. It was actually good when the train pulled slowly away from their waving and smiling and weeping.
“Good-by, Austria. Good-by, Austria. Good-by.” Her mind would not give up the phrase.
Only as they approached the Italian border at Arnoldstein did she shake free of the numbing drug. The customs officials were waiting, they would examine luggage, ask questions, loose their indifferent officialdom at her. She must be relaxed, looking for all the world like a happy mother taking her children off for a brief holiday. She must, she must. If they grew suspicious over any detail? Ah, then she and the children would be sent back to Vienna, the Gestapo would arrive, she would be taken off for special examination. She must, she must.
But as the train slowed and halted at the border, something within her began to tremble, and fear marched across her heart.
“Your passports? Anything to declare for duty? How much money do you carry?”
The questions came at her automatically and she answered and moved automatically. She opened her purse wide, showed the twenty schillings that was all one could take out. Ilse was asleep, and did not stir, but Paul wakened, stood near his mother, watching, listening.
Her own voice seemed to her fluty and unreal as she spoke, but the customs men miraculously did not notice. Just as they were finishing, a dark uniform came up. Christa turned toward it, saw the flash of important gold braid on shoulder and collar. The Secret Police.
Without a word, he reached for tickets, passports, customs declaration, and the Italian customs officer as wordlessly handed them over. There was a moment of reading, the rustling of pages turning.
“So, Frau Vederle,” the uniformed one said, his voice smooth and cold. “You are abandoning our beloved country?”
“Abandoning? No, why, of course not.” Christa straightened a little; in her ears her voice echoed. Empty, hollow; she must control it, she must. “My children are just over the whooping cough—here is a written statement from their doctor—I am just taking, them—”
Paul, darling, do not forget you are not supposed to say anything.
“Yes, yes,” the officer said, spacing his words, edging each with iron. “I, of course, know that you would not leave Austria just when our beloved Führer has come—”
He turned to glance at Paul, standing a step apart from his mother’s side. Christa saw his eyes on the boy. Dear God, do not let him trap this child, so unused to deceit. Paul, darling, do not forget—
Paul’s eyes were on the man’s. Their glances met. Then, the small body tensed into a soldier’s straight line, the right arm shot up.
“Heil Hitler,” Paul shouted importantly. “Sieg Heil.”
The scene on the stairs, back home in Döbling. Christa felt she must scream with laughter, with relief.
The officer’s arm shot up.
“Heil Hitler,” he replied. He turned back to Christa, handed her documents back. “Now I am sure,” he said warmly. “Auf Wiedersehen.”
She watched him go off to another passenger. Then she put her hand on Paul’s shoulder.
“You are a good boy,” she only said. He looked at her questioningly.
The rest of the trip was somehow easier. At Milan, they stayed in the hotel, waiting for the telegram from Franz that would bring them enough money to continue to Basel. Hour followed slow hour, the time for departure drew closer. At last the cable arrived, Christa rushed the children to the telegraph office, showed her passports and identification papers, and finally had the small sum, the innocent-looking small sum in her hand.
They sped back to the hotel, picked up their stacked and waiting luggage in the lobby, and once again were going toward a railroad platform, settling themselves in a train, watching through the windows as strange scenes swept up and then receded.
It was then that Ilse suddenly cried out in alarm.
“Mummy, Elizabetha—where is the box—where is she?”
“Oh, Ilse, haven’t you—look in your purse.”
“No, no, I took the box out so Elizabetha could breathe. I—”
“Wait, darling, hush, where did you put the box?”
“I don’t remember, oh, Mommy—”
“She put it on the top suitcase,” Paul offered. “Right on the very top one of the pile in the lobby.”
“Didn’t you see it, Mommy? Didn’t you take it?” Ilse’s eyes turned their stricken look upon Christa.
“I didn’t see the little box,” she said. “The last minute was so rushed—oh, my poor baby, come here.”
For Ilse was sobbing, torn with this misery. For long minutes, Christa just held her, saying nothing, stroking her fair hair in the helpless silence of understanding. Paul looked on, awkward, unhappy himself.
“Somebody will find the box,” Christa said at last, “and take Elizabetha to board, just like Hansi. She will be all right—”
“No, oh, no,” Ilse sobbed. “No, she will die, Elizabetha will die there—”
“No, she won’t,” Paul comforted. “Ladybugs don’t die like that.”
“But she’s an Austrian ladybug,” Ilse said to him. “How could an Austrian ladybug live in Italy?”
How indeed? Christa only held the small shaking body closer. The lump in the throat, the awful, steady lump in the throat.