The Runaway Family (32 page)

Shaken and frightened, and ashamed of his fear, David retraced his footsteps along the canal to the corner where Jacob had dropped him, and as his car slid up beside him, he wrenched open the back door and scrambled in.

“Home,” he said.

“There is nothing we can do if he has been taken to the Metropol,” he said to Edith when he reached home again, and armed with a stiff drink told her what he had discovered.

Edith stifled a cry. “What will you tell your mother?” she asked. “What shall we tell the children?”

“We tell the children nothing more than they know already. That he has been arrested, but will be home again soon. As for Mother, we’ll see how she is. Today she was in shock. Tomorrow she’ll be stronger. In the meantime I will consider what, if anything, we can do.”

“Can you really not go into the hotel and ask?” Edith looked at him with wide blue eyes. “He’s your father. They must tell you if he’s there. If it were one of my family…”

David turned away, his shame at his own fear making him harsh. “Your family! When your sister wrote to you and told you she’d been burned out of her home by the Nazis, you didn’t even answer the letter,” he snarled. “Don’t talk to me about family duty.”

It was Paul who found his grandfather. Coming home from school the next day, he saw a crowd gathered on a street corner. They were shouting and jeering, their laughter ringing out across the street. Paul walked over to see what all the fun was, only to stare in horror at what he saw. A group of people were on their knees and armed only with a scrubbing brush and bucket of water, were being made to clean the street. Two SS men stood over them, ready to deal with any trouble. Even as he watched, one of the guards kicked an old man in the ribs shouting at him to scrub harder, and as the old man’s face jerked upward, Paul found himself staring down at his grandfather. The jeering crowd applauded the soldier’s action, with shouts of, “That’s right! Make the dirty Jew clean up properly! Come on, Granddad, get scrubbing. Time you did an honest day’s work!” There were some small children in the crowd; one, high on his father’s shoulders, chanted merrily, “Dirty Jew! Dirty Jew! Dirty Jew!”

Paul stood petrified, his face a mask of horror. His grandfather, looking up, saw him. Paul took a step forward and the old man hurled the scrubbing brush at him, screeching shrilly, “Seen enough, have you? Come for a good laugh? Here to see the Jews getting what’s coming to them?” His shrieks were cut off by another boot in the ribs, and another roar of laughter from the assembled crowd as he crumpled forward on the ground. Paul turned away sickened, his legs like jelly as walked away. Once round the corner and out of sight he began to run, and although the breath was screaming in his lungs, he didn’t stop until he was home. David was already there, and came out of his study to see what was the matter as Paul crashed through the door and collapsed sobbing on the floor.

“Paul? Paul! What on earth…?”

“Opa! It’s Opa!” was all he could say.

Gradually they calmed him down, and he managed to tell them what he’d seen. Opa, scrubbing the streets. Opa on his hands and knees with a scrubbing brush and bucket, the jeering crowd, the little boy chanting… and the soldiers with guns… kicking, kicking Opa in the ribs.

“Where, Paul? Where was this?” asked his father.

Paul still looked dazed but he knew where. He passed that street corner every day on the way to school.

“Antonstrasse,” he said. “By the pharmacy.”

David turned to Edith who, wide-eyed with fear for her son, was sitting beside Paul on the sofa, clutching his hand. “Edith, you must go and see what’s happening,” David said. “Go and find out where they are keeping him?”

“Me!” Edith shrieked. “How can I go? I have to stay here and look after Paul.”

“Paul’s fine,” David said, trying to stay calm himself. “It has to be you, Edith. If I go anyone there will recognise me as a Jew. You look as Aryan as the best of them. No one will notice you in the crowd and maybe you can follow and find out where he’s being held.”

Edith stared at him in horror. “David, I couldn’t,” she stammered. “I really couldn’t.”

“Edith, my father earned himself a kicking so that your son, our Paul, wasn’t recognised as a Jew by the crowd. You have to go.”

“I’ll go back, Papa,” Paul said. He sat on the sofa beside his mother, white-faced, but determined. “I’ll go back and see what’s going on.”

“No!” Edith was on her feet. “I’ll go.” Without another word she walked out of the room and they heard the front door slamming behind her.

Paul stared up at his father. “Will she be all right?” he asked. “You should have gone.”

“No,” replied David, “I would have made things worse, and might have been arrested as well, which would have helped no one. Your mother can pass as just a bystander, just another in the crowd. Now we’ll just have to wait.”

They didn’t have to wait long. Less than ten minutes later Edith was back at the front door, calling David to fetch the car.

“They’ve moved on,” she said, “and they’ve left your father in the gutter. Come on, David. Get the car, we can pick him up.”

Within moments, they were in the car and on their way. They reached the street corner and saw what looked like a heap of old rags at the side of the road. As the car came to a halt, the three of them leaped out and ran to the old man. He was unconscious, his head bleeding, his arm twisted at an alarming angle, but he was breathing, his breath coming in painful rasps.

“Gently,” David said as he ran exploratory hands over his father’s body. “He’s dislocated his shoulder, we must move him very carefully and get him onto the back seat of the car.” Awkwardly the three of them lifted the old man and carried him to the car. He was a dead weight in their arms, and it was difficult to manoeuvre him through the car door, but at last they managed it.

“You’ll have to walk home, Paul,” said his father. “There’s no room for you. Off you go, quickly. We’ll see you at home.” Paul set off at a trot, and, having made the old man as comfortable as they could, David and Edith got back into the car. As they pulled away and turned the car for home, there was a thud on Edith’s door and she spun round to see a woman reaching for another stone to hurl at them, shouting as she did so, “Dirty Jews!” David accelerated away and the second stone fell short.

They got Friedrich upstairs and into bed, and, while he was still unconscious, David managed to ease his father’s shoulder back into its socket. Then he bathed the cut on his head and gave him a thorough examination.

“He’s very bruised,” he told his mother as she waited anxiously by her husband’s bed. “His ribs are probably cracked and will be very painful when he wakes up, but as far as I can tell they aren’t broken. The head wound looks worse than it is. They always bleed a lot.” He gave her a reassuring smile. “He’s lucky. It could have been a lot worse. He needs rest, but it won’t be long before he’s feeling much better.”

“And when he is,” David said to Edith much later when they were alone, “we’ll have to decide what we’re all going to do.”

“What
can
we do?” Edith said bleakly. “Things are going to get worse.”

“Yes,” agreed David. “The time has come to leave. I spoke to my father about it before. Now we must give it serious consideration.”

So we are to leave Vienna,” wailed Edith, “and go to Shanghai!”

“Shanghai!” echoed Ruth, staring at her sister.

“David says we have to go. After what happened to his father, he says it’s too dangerous to stay here and we must get the children away to safety.”

“But why Shanghai?” asked Ruth.

The two sisters were sitting in Edith’s drawing room, coffee cups in their hands and a plate of pastries, such as Ruth never saw these days, on the table between them. Edith had sent Jacob with a message that she needed to see Ruth, and, tired as she was from a day’s work in the shop, Ruth had trailed across the town to the house in Liechtensteinstrasse, when the haberdashery closed.

“He says Jews have been moving there for several years. There’s a big Jewish community. We shan’t be alone.”

“But, China! Surely there are other, better places you could go, America, England, France?”

“Those countries won’t take any more Jews,” Edith moaned. “They have quotas or something. David says if we go to Shanghai we don’t need visas to get in. We can just get on a boat and go.”

“If the Germans let you,” pointed out Ruth.

“Oh, they will. They want to get rid of us, we just have to leave everything behind,” Edith’s voice broke as she looked round her elegant drawing room. She said with a sob, “We’re allowed to take thirty marks and a suitcase each.”

“Thirty marks!” Ruth reached out and took her sister’s hand. “How on earth will you live?” she asked gently.

“David says…” sobbed Edith, “David says there are several hospitals there, so he will be able to work.” She pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and blew her nose, before saying a little more steadily, “He says, and I know he’s right, that the important thing is to get the children to safety; and his parents, too.”

“How is your father-in-law?” Ruth asked. “Has he recovered?”

Edith sighed. “He’s recovered physically, though his ribs are still painful where he was kicked, but he’s a changed man. He’s morose and silent. He stays upstairs most of the time and we have to send his meals up on a tray. He’s afraid to go out.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Ruth. “It was a terrible ordeal. What happened to him when he was arrested? Did he say?”

“We’re not sure,” sighed Edith. “He says he was taken to a prison and thrown into some sort of cell with lots of other people, but we don’t know where it was. It was so crowded that they could only just sit on the floor, there was no room to lie down, and they were given nothing to eat. Then the next morning they were taken out onto the streets and told to clean them up. He had to scrub walls first, to get rid of the last of the posters about the plebiscite. Then he was set to scrubbing slogans off the street. That’s when Paul saw him.”

“Thank goodness he did. You might never have found him again otherwise.”

“They left him for dead in the gutter,” Edith said bleakly. “An old man. No one went to help him.”

“No one dares,” said Ruth, gently.

“No one wants to,” snapped Edith. “They all hate us. Look at what’s happening to all the Jewish families. David’s parents have lost their home and it will probably only be a matter of time before we’re turned out, too. Paul’s not allowed to go to the gymnasium anymore, none of the Jewish boys are. It’s not fair.” Edith’s voice was a childish wail: “It’s not fair, he was doing so well.”

Fair? Ruth stared at Edith in disbelief at her naivety. What did “fair” have to do with anything anymore?

“No,” Edith was continuing, “no, Ruth, we have to go, David’s right. The sooner we get the children out, the better, and of course we must take his parents with us too.”

“Do his parents want to go?” enquired Ruth. “It will be an enormous wrench for them to leave Vienna. They’ve lived here all their lives.”

“They don’t have much choice,” said Edith. “David’s made up his mind. We’re going, and his parents are going to come too.”

“I see,” Ruth said, adding, her voice deceptively calm, “and your parent?”

Edith stared at her. “My parent? You mean Mother?”

“Have you another?” asked Ruth tersely.

“Well, Mother’s with you, isn’t she?”

“Yes, she is,” agreed Ruth, “but it doesn’t mean she’s safe. None of us is safe, Edith. We’d all like to go, but we can’t.”

“So you think that just because you can’t go, we shouldn’t? Is that it?” Edith’s eyes flashed with anger. “Is that what you think, Ruth?”

“No, not at all. Quite the contrary, in fact. If you ask David, you’ll find that I told him you should all go sometime ago, well before anything happened to your father-in-law. But I just think you might have given Mother a thought.”

“She wouldn’t want to come,” Edith said defensively. “She’d want to stay with you and the children until Kurt gets here.”

“Kurt won’t come here now,” sighed Ruth. “It would be madness. Things are worse here than they were in Germany. I told him not to try, it’s too dangerous.”

“Oh, I nearly forgot,” Edith interrupted suddenly, “what with Shanghai and everything, there’s a letter for you. It came yesterday morning.”

“ A letter!” Ruth almost dropped her coffee cup. “Why didn’t you tell me? Where is it? Give it to me!”

“I am telling you,” Edith replied plaintively. “That’s why I asked you to come, so I could give you the letter.” She got to her feet and went to the bureau in the corner of the room. “I’ve got it in here. It’s quite safe.” She opened a drawer and drew out the letter. “Here you are. The postmark’s Hamburg, so he must be there, mustn’t he?”

Ruth snatched the envelope from her sister’s hand, and after a quick glance at handwriting and postmark stuffed it into her bag.

Edith looked surprised. “Aren’t you going to open it? I thought you’d want to read it right away.”

“So that’s why you kept it for a whole day?” fumed Ruth inside her head, but all she said was, “You could have sent it with Jacob when he came yesterday.”

“But I wanted to give it to you myself,” bleated Edith. “And I wanted to tell you about Shanghai.”

“Are you going to come and tell Mother, yourself, that you’re going to Shanghai?” Ruth asked, rising to her feet and preparing to go home, “or do you expect me to tell her?”

“Couldn’t you bring her here?” wheedled Edith. “I’m sure she’ll want to see the children before we go.”

Ruth compressed her lips into a tight line, biting back the flood of anger that threatened to stream from her mouth. She was furious with Edith and her self-centredness, but she knew in her heart that Edith was right in this at least, her mother would want to see her grandchildren before they left.

“We’ll try and come at the weekend,” she said. “Do you want me to break it to her about Shanghai?”

“Would you?” The relief in Edith’s voice was heartfelt. “Tell her I’ll explain it all to her when I see her.”

Ruth couldn’t wait to get out of the house, and once she was safely back on the street she almost ran to catch the bus home. Several times on the way she slipped her hand inside her bag, to make sure the precious letter was still there. Hamburg! What was Kurt doing in Hamburg? She had heard nothing since their brief phone call nearly four weeks ago. He had not phoned again as he’d said he would and her fears for his safety had increased with every passing day.