The Far Side of the Sky (3 page)

With promises to contact each other the moment either heard a shred of news, Franz bade Ernst goodbye. Minutes after his friend left, Jakob telephoned to say that he had arranged an interview for Franz at eleven o’clock that morning at the British consulate. His father’s voice was ragged with exhaustion and grief, but Jakob never once mentioned Karl.

Franz waited fifteen more minutes, but neither Esther nor Hannah emerged from their rooms. Deciding he could not wait any longer, he jotted a quick note to his sister-in-law and left it on the table. As Franz lifted his hat and coat off the peg, he was overcome by the intense memory of the night before. He winced at the recollection of his brother’s panicky voice over the telephone.
“Franz, they’re here!”

“Where are you?” Franz demanded.

“My office,” Karl whispered. “God help me, Franz!
Essie is here too!
” “I’m coming, Karl.”

“It’s so dangerous. I would never have called if Essie weren’t—” The line went dead.

Franz dropped Hannah off at Frau Lieberman’s with a hasty explanation. The old widow begged him not to leave the building but Franz ignored her. Heart in his throat, he raced the ten blocks over to his brother’s office building, though twice he had to suddenly divert to avoid one of the roaming mobs.

Franz ducked into the lane behind Karl’s office and found Esther sitting amid shards of glass, propped up against the rear wall of the building.
She stared into her lap while the blood dripped freely from her lacerated forearm. “Essie, your arm!” Franz cried, but she didn’t even look up at him.

He threw off his jacket and struggled to tear his shirt sleeve. Buttons flew in the air as the cloth ripped. Franz wrapped the makeshift tourniquet tightly above her elbow, and the hemorrhage slowed.

“Is Karl still inside?” Franz asked.

Esther slowly raised her gaze to meet his. In one glance, she confirmed his worst fears. His knees buckled, and he shot a hand out to support himself against the wall. “Oh, Essie, no! Please, no.”

“I didn’t want to leave him,” she said in a monotone voice. “He pushed me out through the back window. I could hear the shouting and then …”

They waited in terrible silence for ten or fifteen minutes until their breathing settled and Franz convinced himself that the street in front of the building had emptied. Esther said nothing as they inched down the lane toward the side street. At the corner, Franz poked his head around the edge of the building. Across the street, under the beam of a street lamp, a swaying shadow caught his eye. He was filled with dread as he looked up to see the body dangling from the lamppost. Along the front of the dead man’s shirt one of the Nazis had splashed a Star of David in red paint. The victim’s face was swollen and bloodied, but there was no doubt.
Karl!
He groaned.

Esther followed his gaze across the street. Before Franz could stop her, she leapt out from behind him and dashed toward the lamppost. She flung her arms around her husband’s legs and pulled his whole body toward her.

Just as Franz reached her, he heard the nearby sound of shouts and shattering glass. He grabbed Esther by the arm, inadvertently digging his fingers through the warm gash. She gasped in pain but said nothing.

Franz pried Esther’s hands free of Karl’s legs and dragged her away. After a few strides, she stopped resisting and let him lead her.

Once on the other side of the street, Franz slowed for a final glance at his brother. Karl’s waxy face held a neutral expression, but his brown eyes—which in life had brimmed with such compassion and amusement—seemed to find Franz’s.

I will take care of Essie. I swear it, Karl.

Sweat dampened his armpits as Franz stepped out of his building and into the bright but chilly November morning. He yanked his hat even lower on his head and stared down at his feet, reassuring himself that he could easily pass for a Gentile. With his straight nose, hazel eyes and strong jaw, he didn’t possess a particularly Jewish look—at least, not in terms of the hook-nosed, beady-eyed caricatures that filled the newspapers and schoolbooks. His real risk lay in being spotted by a Gentile acquaintance, neighbour or even patient. From those awful final days at the Vienna General Hospital, before being stripped of his title as chief of surgery and professor, Franz had learned how willing, even eager, some people were to point Jews out to the nearest Nazi official.

Franz would never forget the day his protege, Dr. Johan Grasser, turned on him. He had once seen so much of his younger self in the promising twenty-seven-year-old surgeon. Up until that spring morning, March 12, the day after the
Anschluss,
Grasser had shown Franz only deference and loyalty. However, as Franz stepped onto the surgical ward, Grasser’s folded-arms stance suggested a monumental shift in attitude. “Have you not heard, Herr Doktor?” The junior surgeon smirked. “We are part of the Reich now. And Jews have no place in German hospitals.”

The ambush had left Franz speechless and humiliated in front of a cluster of gawking nurses and orderlies. Despite all the affronts he had faced in the months since, the memory of Grasser’s betrayal still stung the most.

On the pavement, Franz’s feet crunched with every step. Shards of glass covered the ground like confetti after a parade. Through the shattered window of his ground-floor surgery, he saw upturned furniture and papers strewn across the waiting room. His sense of loss was minimal. Six months earlier, after his summary discharge from the hospital, he had been forced into the basic private practice, performing only minor excisions under local anaesthetic; the work of a surgical intern.

Glancing streetward for the first time, Franz was stunned to see the ground writhing. Moving in complete silence, men and women of all ages, and even children, were kneeling down, using small brushes or their own hands to gather up the broken glass. Armed guards, spaced in regular intervals, hovered over them. Dressed in gleaming black SS uniforms, the guards barked insults and orders while holding horsewhips menacingly at the ready.

A younger man rose up from his knees to stretch his back. Immediately, one of the guards cracked a whip across his neck, hurling the man back to the ground with a groan.

“Schweinhund!”
the trooper bellowed. He turned to another SS man with a laugh and snapped his whip triumphantly in the air.

Franz scanned the terrified faces near the pavement. He made eye contact with a middle-aged woman on her knees, recognizing her as Dalia Gruben, a Jewish patient whose gallbladder he had removed a year or two before. Wide-eyed, Gruben mouthed
“Go!”
to him.

Franz could barely move. Aside from the taunts of a few schoolyard bullies, he had hardly known anti-Semitism before the Nazis descended. Like most of the city’s Jews, he was assimilated; as proud an Austrian as any other. After the
Anschluss,
seemingly overnight Franz had lost scores of friends and colleagues, though few as confrontationally as Grasser; most simply avoided him. Franz had still not recovered from the precipitous plunge from respected citizen to pariah.

One of the nearest SS troopers, young enough to still be in his teens, swivelled his head in Franz’s direction. His hand reached for the pistol clipped to his belt, while his pale eyes ran up and down Franz as though assessing a dung heap.
“Juden?”
he growled.

Stunned, Franz shook his head.
“Nein.”

The young man’s hand fell away from his weapon and his face lit with an apologetic smile. At that moment, he could have passed for any polite Austrian youth performing a civic duty. “I am terribly sorry for any inconvenience, sir,” he said. “We will make sure these filthy Jews clean up their mess. Won’t take any time at all, but it is best not to loiter.”

Franz nodded and trudged away, guiltily imagining the eyes of his former patient burning into his back.

Aside from the Jews, the rest of Vienna seemed to have awoken to a typical autumn day. Non-Jewish businesses, their windows pristine, welcomed customers as usual. The scent of baking bread and brewing coffee filled the air. Gentiles bustled along the sidewalks past the broken windows, vandalized storefronts and Jews scrubbing the roads under armed guard as though it were a morning like any other.

Has the whole city gone mad?

Franz kept his head low as he walked along Reisnerstrasse toward the British consulate. Like the other consulates in Vienna, it had been an embassy up until the day of the
Anschluss,
when Vienna lost its designation as a capital city.

As he rounded the corner onto Jauresgasse, Franz spotted a Union Jack flying from the quaint baroque building on the corner. For months, he had witnessed lineups outside the consulates as Jews scoured the city searching indiscriminately and, for the most part, in futility for any foreign power willing to offer haven. Franz had expected to see another line in front of the British consulate, but the size of it stunned him. It snaked on for as far as he could see. The previous evening’s riots had panicked Jews into flocking en masse to the consulate.

Approaching the line, he saw nothing but pale and petrified faces. Even though a British visa would represent a new lease on life for entire
families, Franz saw no one jostle or shove anyone else. Their orderliness and compliance were ingrained Germanic and Jewish traits.

Franz tucked his gloved hands into his coat pockets, crossed the street and walked alongside the queue toward the entrance. Halfway down the block, he heard the howl of approaching sirens. Suddenly, a black canvas-covered transport truck turned the corner and roared down the street. It hopped the curb, screeching to a halt in the middle of the crowd. A mother swung her young son out of its path in the nick of time, but she was still bowled forward by the truck’s bumper. She managed to scramble away, as did the others near her.

Six or seven SS troopers brandishing machine guns jumped out of the truck and rushed the crowd. More trucks thundered down the road. They skidded noisily to a stop in a long row behind the first one. More men in black poured out of them. One of the SS men raised a megaphone to his mouth and shrieked, “All male Jews over the age of fourteen step forward!
Now! Mach shnell!
”

Franz stopped dead. A trooper unleashed a round of deafening gunfire into the air. Several people dropped to the ground in terror. Others leaned back against the building’s windows and walls as though trying to melt into them. More screams, shouts and gunfire. And then Jewish men, their faces clouded with fear and despair, began to step forward. With punches and kicks, the SS men herded them—often by the scruff of their necks—toward the backs of the trucks without a single word of explanation.

Franz dropped his gaze and carried on. Despite the urge to flee, he was careful not to move so fast as to draw attention. Without even looking up, he passed the consulate’s entrance, turned the corner and walked away from the building.

Legs wooden with dread, Franz trotted three or four blocks before he slowed to glance at his watch. It read 10:55. The eleven o’clock appointment with the British vice-consul might have represented his family’s final chance for a visa, but he also knew that the SS would stop him outside the consulate. His only identification—the passport he carried in his pocket—was stamped with an incriminating large red J. He could not
risk being arrested, not before he had gotten Hannah and Esther out of the country.

Franz spent the next hour wandering the streets, never straying far from the consulate. Strolling the City of Music, his beloved Zeiss-Ikon plate camera in tow, had once been his favourite pastime.

Franz had originally taken up photography to appease his wife, who had given him a camera as a birthday present. Hilde soon became his primary subject; he snapped countless photos of her. After her sudden death, Franz found it too painful to view the photos. Even lifting the camera stirred too many memories, so he abandoned the hobby. A few years later, he came across the camera, dusted it off and, on a whim, took it outside to snap photos of buildings that had caught his eye. The initially random pursuit grew into a passion. He began photographing buildings all over Vienna, ignoring the famous landmarks to focus on quaint, often rundown structures whose shapes or settings had struck him as quintessentially Viennese. To Franz, it was never about art so much as precision. He found the challenge of capturing the exact light, focal point and angle akin to surgery.

But light and angles were the least of his concerns now. Every moment he spent out on the street, exposed, compounded his worry. His surroundings, once such a source of pride and comfort, struck him as more than just hostile. His birth city—the only place he had ever lived—felt foreign to him.

After covering at least two more miles, and witnessing more broken glass and vandalized property than he imagined possible, Franz finally looped back toward Jauresgasse. As he reached the British consulate, he was desperately relieved not to see any sign of SS men or their trucks. The lineup had thinned considerably but still ran at least two blocks long and consisted almost exclusively of frightened women and bewildered children.

Franz headed straight for the front of the queue, where two British soldiers in combat fatigues and berets guarded the door with rifles held across their chests. He shouldered his way past a group of women at the
front too traumatized to object to the intrusion. He approached the taller soldier, a chunky redhead. With an embarrassed shake of his head, the guard pointed to a sign posted above him that read in large-print German, “The consulate regrets to announce that His Majesty’s Government will not process new immigration visas until further notice.”

“I have an appointment with Mr. Edgewood,” Franz said in English. In 1933, Franz and Hannah—a toddler at the time—had spent six months in London at St. Mary’s Hospital, where he completed a surgical fellowship while honing his English skills.

“Your name, sir?” the soldier asked.

“Dr. Franz Adler,” he said. “I apologize for my lateness.”