Vienna Prelude (46 page)

“Can he still be alive?” Elisa asked, alarmed when she saw the date of Theo’s transfer to Dachau.

“He’s alive.” Leah spoke with certainty. “Otherwise it would be listed in the file when he died.” She was still frowning down thoughtfully at the stack of passports. “If you can call Dachau being alive,” she added.

Elisa gasped, stricken at the thought of her father in such a place for so long.

It was clear from Leah’s expression that she was instantly sorry for what she’d said.

“Look,” Elisa said weakly. “They have copies of all our letters here. From Innsbruck. They know everything about how he escaped from the Adlon. John Murphy’s name is here and . . .” She felt ill. “And they say that Thomas came to the store the night we left Germany.
Thomas
was there! Did he . . . is Thomas von Kleistmann any part of this organization?”

“No,” Leah said. “If he went to warn your father, he acted on his own. If he tried to help you, it was apart from us. By then Theo knew already. He had seen the list. We have heard that Theo wanted fifteen others to leave Berlin. They were on the list as well.”

“
Thomas
,” Elisa said with amazement. “Yes. He must have come to the office that night. My father said it was a messenger, but—” She turned her gaze full on Leah. “He will help us,” she whispered. “I have to talk to him. He can help us.”

Leah looked doubtful. “Be careful, Elisa. You must not tell him anything.” She touched the case. “
Nothing
at all about all this. You must act on your own if you choose to ask Thomas von Kleistmann for help.”

A soft knock sounded on the door and a small voice called, “Fraülein Leah? We are finished.”

“There is a more important problem now,” Leah said, staring at the five passports. “What can we do with these little ones until we can get them passports and proper papers? They can’t stay in Vienna. Not now.”

“Fraülein Leah? Fraülein Elisa?”

Elisa looked at the box of angels beside the bed. With her toe, she absently nudged the lid from the box until the jumble of violin-playing angels smiled up at her. Elisa was suddenly involved, just as her father had been, in the lives and the lists of the Jews of Germany. “There was a reason Rudy called me,” she said. “I am Aryan . . . on paper, anyway. I am a violinist. And I carry a violin case . . .”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I will carry the case. You must tell me everything—
everything.
Where I must go. Who I must see.” Then she looked toward the bedroom door. “And I will tell you a place where we must take the children. A family in the Tyrol who have lost their son. I will talk to them.” She put her hand on Leah’s arm. “The children must not come through Vienna any longer. We’ll find another place for them while we get their passports.”

32

Dachau Night

Night had come without darkness or peace to Dachau. A huge stone wall topped by electric wires ringed the massive prison compound. From the towers, machine guns bristled and stern, black-shirted sentinels kept watch. Harsh floodlights glared down upon the stark white walls of the barracks, bleaching color and life from the scene.

From the door of Barracks 11, a thin skeleton of a man emerged dressed in a black-and-white striped uniform. He stood blinking up into the lights and turrets, then stumbled from the step. His face was colorless, and he walked with a jerking motion as he moved toward the forbidden area where the lights beat down unrelentingly and signs declared that those who stepped across the low wire would be shot. The figure did not seem human. His thin clothes flapped in the chill wind like the rags on a scarecrow.

Scharf Geschossen!
The black lettering warned.

The scarecrow trudged on toward the forbidden line. He did not look at the guards who shouted to him or halt at their command. Like an image on a black-and-white celluloid film, he lurched across a bleak screen. The guard dogs barked, straining on their leashes. One guard, then another, then still another clicked rifle bolts into place; the sound echoed hollowly across the silent night, a grim counterpoint to the crunch of ragged shoes against the snow.

“
Judenhund
! Halt!” cried a guard as he took aim on the stripes. A bony knee lifted a foot over the wire.

The figure seemed not to hear the words, the threats, the shouts. His hollow eyes stared past the harsh lights as though searching for something—some color, perhaps a single star.

Then, in a rattle of machine-gun fire, the black-and-white stripes jumped forward in a strange jerking dance that tore and stained the fabric—red, perhaps, if there had been color. But there was no color—only the white glare of the lights and a body tumbling forward as a spirit broke free and sailed over the walls of Dachau toward colors and stars.

The entire incident had taken only moments. Shouting sentries fell silent once again. They would let the body lie where it had fallen as a warning for other inmates.

Inside the long unheated buildings, Jews and Social Democrats, Catholics and Protestants huddled in close-packed rows, trying to sleep, trying to keep warm, trying to forget the sound of the gunshots. Thousands of them were crammed into barracks that had been built for only a few hundred at best. In the morning there would be numbers missing from the roll call. They would die tonight and be cremated, along with the one who had committed suicide by crossing the forbidden line. Then they would be shipped home in little boxes like Christmas packages. A slip of paper would offer the explanation:
Died of natural causes.

These were Hitler’s gifts to the German people and the Greater German Reich. He had swept the cities clean of beggars. He had pulled dissenters from their pulpits and public offices. Day by day more Jews were defrauded of their property; their belongings were scooped into the coffers of the public building funds or the armament industry. The humans themselves had been swept into grim black closets like Dachau. The Aryan cities of the Reich were becoming pure for German culture once again. Those who were missing were those who had somehow disturbed the conscience and peace of mind of the German people. What difference did it make if a few thousand, more or less, came back in ashes? A handful of dust to spread in the rose garden? What difference would it make if eventually a few million died, more or less—as long as there were no beggars, no gypsies, no Christian dissenters, no Bolsheviks, no Jews? The Aryan race of the great thousand-year Reich must be pure! Society must be pure! Sweep the dust into Dachau and forty other camps in Germany. Had not the Führer proclaimed his purpose in the Christmas broadcast? “I am doing the work of the Lord!”

After four months in solitary confinement, Theo Lindheim had come into Dachau. Like Pastor Niemöller and Pastor Jacobi, he had been given a false name and a new identity with the prison identification number. He was too well known among the people of Germany for the SS to risk some news of his fate being leaked. Those men who had been prominent or popular before Hitler came to power were all called by other names within the walls of the camps.

But somehow, it made no difference. Theo was listed on the records as Jacob Stern, but still prisoners quietly saluted this unnamed war hero when he passed by in the exercise yard. To speak his name and be heard would mean a beating with a rubber truncheon or worse. And so faceless men, cold and ragged, saluted Theo with their eyes when he passed. They spoke without speaking, and between them was a covenant to remember what Germany had been before all this—a covenant to remember that although they were imprisoned, those who lived outside the walls were also captives of Hitler’s brutal rule.

No one was free in Germany now.
No one!
The streets were clean. Great buildings of white stone were being erected everywhere to the glory of the Reich. There were no disagreements and no freedom. Germany was a nation of prisoners, ruled by a government of jailers. Göring himself had said, “I would like to see all of Germany in uniform, marching in column.”

Tonight, outside the walls of Dachau, neat rows of field-gray uniforms marched through the streets of Berlin and Munich and Hamburg in eerie torchlight procession. Perhaps they were warmer than those inside the walls of Dachau; perhaps they had more to eat; but they too had lost their names. They had no faces. Their breath sucked color and life from the very air as they raised their arms as one mob to shout, “
Sieg Heil! Heil!
”

Like Faust, the mob had sold its soul to the devil for the sake of . . . what? Clean streets? New buildings? Jobs and possessions stolen from another human being in the name of “Aryan racial purity”? In the name of this purity, Hitler had robbed even the Christ child in the manger of His identity, declaring, “Jesus was not Jewish; it could not be! His young mother was not Jewish! We must eliminate these slanders from the German Christian religion! We must expunge all traces of Judaism from our churches! The very thought that Christ was Jewish is unthinkable!”

Tonight the Nazi Storm Troopers and Hitler Youth marched row on row. “
Gott mit uns
—God with us” was inscribed on every belt buckle. The sound of their boots on the pavement was like the echo of the Roman legions on the stones of Jerusalem’s streets when a young Jewish woman gave birth to a son in a cave above Bethlehem. That son had grown to manhood with the sound of marching legions in His ears. The crash of soldiers’ boots had followed Him to His execution; the ring of their hammers had crashed against the spikes in His hands and feet, and a soldier in field gray with a swastika on His arm had driven the lance into His side. Soldiers had killed the Jewish child called by the Hebrew name
Emmanuel . . .
God with us.
Like the SS, they had come by torchlight to arrest Him in the night. They had thrown Him into prison, pulled out His beard by the roots, and beaten Him. “Hail, King of the Jews!” they had jeered.

Yes, there were echoes of that time and place tonight in Dachau. In the endless rows of skeletons dressed in rags lived the poor and the homeless, the shepherds and wise men alike who looked for a Messiah to deliver them. In the arrogant cruelty of Hitler’s army, once again the generals of Rome sought to crush even the barest ember of hope from men’s lives. But even here there was forbidden light—even in the hell of Dachau.

In the corner of Barrack 8 men huddled together for warmth tonight. They jokingly called their corner the “Herrgottseck—the corner of the Lord.” As Theo Lindheim crouched on a wooden pallet between a Catholic priest and a Jewish cantor from the synagogue in Strassburg, he thought that perhaps the only free men left in Germany shivered within these thin walls. Here, with all else stripped from them, these men could be only what they were, for good or for evil. It was almost Christmas. It was just past Hanukkah. Tonight a priest without vestments, a cantor without tallith remembered the Festival of Lights and the One who was proclaimed to be The Light.

For the holiday, the prisoners had been given an extra ration beside their five ounces of bread to eat. Guards had distributed a raw potato for each man in the barracks. The eight in the Herrgottseck had carefully hoarded their treasures for the feast tonight. Now, eight potato halves were placed in a circle. They had been hollowed out, and a wick made from an oil-soaked rag had been placed in each one to form a candle. At great risk, the priest had stolen a match from the kitchen.

A cold draft sifted up through the boards of the barrack’s floor. Theo shivered and pulled his thin blanket around his chin. He prayed that the draft would not snuff out their match. Somehow the lighting of these candles tonight had become the focus of his existence, the reason he continued to breathe and think and hope when so many had given up.

Outside their circle of eight, someone mocked them in a hoarse, bitter whisper. “So, Priest, here is Christmas. Peace on earth. Of course, this is not earth,
ja
? But purgatory. Almost hell, only not warm enough. Hell would be better. Warmer.”

“Shut up!” another voice hissed from the darkness. “Let them alone.”

“You think your little candles will warm you?” mocked the voice again.

Yes! Theo wanted to shout. Yes! This one defiant act of worship will warm me. Please, dear Lord, do not let the flame die. Please let our candles burn!

“Come closer,” said the cantor, and the eight pressed in shoulder to bony shoulder, ribs and spines and skulls forming a wall against the threat of a hostile wisp of air. The potato candles were moved forward into a tight circle, their wicks placed together at the center. The cantor held a small bundle of straw and the priest held the match. The only match.

“Tonight,” the priest said quietly, “God has provided only one match. And so we who are both Jews and Christians worship as one in this place.”

Theo could not see the priest’s face. They all looked the same in the darkness, but there was a smile in the voice of the priest. So it had taken Dachau to bring priest and cantor together. Dachau, 1937. Christmas. Hanukkah. A moment of covenant among men who suffered together.

The cantor’s voice was like a song as he spoke. “Tonight we remember the great miracle that happened in the temple. After the enemy had desecrated our place of worship and we drove him out from Jerusalem, there was oil enough to light the lamps for only one day. And God caused the flames to burn for eight days until more oil was sanctified. On this darkest night of our souls, when we find no light within ourselves, we ask God for a miracle—”

“What miracle can you expect here?” taunted the voice outside the circle.

“Only that the light will burn. That we will remember God is with us,” replied the cantor.