Train to Budapest (13 page)

Theodor Orenstein had devoured his piece of Camembert and went into the kitchen to find more while he continued to tell them about the reasoning of his mother, Frau Magdalena Ruthmann. Had she been an optimist? Let’s just say she had been incredulous, despite what she saw happening in her beloved city where shops belonging to Jews were being systematically stoned and set on fire, where synagogues were being destroyed and the homes of the
better-off were being plundered and expropriated, where employees like her husband, who had nearly reached pensionable age and never missed a day’s work, were peremptorily dismissed from their jobs; despite all this she believed the storm would soon pass and normality would return. But the situation got worse day by day. Naturally the subject of pensions could not even be mentioned. Could a Jew have any right to a state pension? Of course not, who knows how much money he had stolen and stuffed under his mattress during his lifetime! So screamed the papers; let’s just get hold of that money and stop wasting everyone’s time! But what Frau Magdalena von Orenstein could not accept was that her two best friends, Mitzi and Petra, had begun pretending they didn’t know her. It seemed harder to put up with this than anything else. This was the really sinister aspect of the new regime which otherwise, she thought, would rapidly pass like a cyclone which, precisely because of its enormous capacity for destruction, was bound to collapse once it had swept away the city and its trees. A few people, the oldest, would be lost, but the rest would stay in place and like surviving trees would put out new leaves next spring. This was not optimism, explained the painter Theodor Orenstein as he talked of his mother, throwing into his mouth another piece of cheese, crust and all; no, this was patriotism.

Yet this brave woman, who saw herself as Austrian to the core, had been deported with thousands of other Jews simply because she belonged to another race, a race that must be exterminated. ‘But when they were in the train on their way to the camp they knew nothing of this,’ insists Theodor, wiping his mouth on his shirtsleeve. His teeth are stained with tobacco but the smile he turns on Amara is radiant. For him this Italian girl is directly descended from Piero della Francesca and Mantegna, two painters he loves above all others and seems to see in her face with its fine chestnut hair and lively nut-brown eyes.

The trains were crammed full beyond all limits. People died of hunger and thirst. Especially those who had come from far away. It wasn’t really very far from Vienna to Auschwitz. But the train would stop for hours in open country for no apparent reason. Some managed to glimpse something between the crossed planks. Many of the wagons were ordinary goods trucks without steel doors, so to prevent any contact with the outside world planks
had been nailed up horizontally and vertically. But sometimes a chink had remained, and someone had clambered up on someone else’s shoulders and reported back: Where were they? What could he see? Were there any guards about? Was there anyone to ask for a little water? Or who might take a bit of paper with an address on it?

But while they were discussing what to do the train would give a great jerk and continue on its way, belching out a stinking suffocating black smoke that infiltrated the chinks. Everyone was coughing. Someone swore. A child was crying. A mother tried to comfort it. Some had never left their native villages before and never been on a train. They had of course seen cattle trucks stopped at level crossings, full of the tossing silent heads of cows. Dark and peaceful yet terrified eyes peering at the outside world. Could those cows have known they were on their way to death? Of course not, though they may have sensed something. That standing crammed side by side in the dark, that mad racing without rest, light or air, was that not a sufficient sign of contempt to make them suspect a catastrophic end? But the cows passing through the crossing still seemed to be hoping for a place to graze, a little grass, a little sun. While these were men, women and children who never, no matter how vivid their imagination, could have thought they would find themselves in those same trucks, in exactly the same conditions as the cows that had staggered against one another and lowed in desperation while horseflies stung their backs and the floor became slippery from the urine flowing uncontrolled from their congested guts.

They could never have believed that one day they too would be imprisoned in those cattle trucks, crushed and desperate like the cows they had so pitied when the train had stopped near the closed barriers of a level crossing. That had been the fate of Theodor’s parents. How could he know, when he had managed to escape and had never seen the inside of such a train? It was only after the end of the war that one morning he heard a survivor talking on the radio about how he had suffered on one of those freight trains where he had been thrown together with a lot of other Jews, it was only then that Theodor realised what had happened. He knew for a fact that his parents had been in those trains because the young man, presented by the radio interviewer
as a miraculously unharmed extermination camp survivor, had mentioned Krügerstrasse. Theodor and his parents had lived at number 9 Krügerstrasse. The survivor himself had lived at number 17 Krügerstrasse and said that on that morning of 15 January 1944 three Jewish families had been taken away, two from number 17 and one from number 9. Number 9, the survivor continued, had a great plaque over its front door to say that Mozart, as a child, had lived a few weeks in a flat on the first floor. How strange the name of Mozart sounded in the context of that inferno of human lunacy and brutal abuse. The mere thought of Mozart jarred with that confusion of crime and persecution. What would the young wonder musician have said if he had seen with his own eyes those innocent and unsuspecting people crushed into a truck, ten, thirty or a hundred together, simply because they were Jewish? Yet now when Theodor thinks of their home at Krügerstrasse 9 he can’t help feeling a sense of lightness. As though in the midst of that horror there had been one kind soul. Perhaps Mozart had never really lived in that house, perhaps it was only a myth, a grotesque boast: how could anyone ever prove the great musician had spent a few weeks in that building? He himself was not convinced, but he liked to treat the episode as historical fact. After all, who could be sure that, in some childhood letter, the adolescent Wolfgang Amadeus might not have mentioned that very building in Krügerstrasse? The mere mention of his name had been enough to prompt a smile of pleasure. Even if the smile had quickly changed to a grimace at the state of the staircase with its broken treads, the fallen and broken windows, and the main door, once embellished with decorative carvings and now reduced to a mere fragment of arch, worm-eaten and splintered. That musical name has a light liquid sound like a freshwater spring in the middle of a baked and bleak desert, insists the painter, by now in the grip of an irresistible surge of patriotic musical love. They would never have wanted to change the name of their palatial building, pretentiously known in the district as the Mozart House. Even if its forty apartments had contained more than three hundred people who hardly knew each other but had watched one another with suspicion since the passing of the anti-Semitic laws, and made accusations against each other whenever they had the chance. That name associated by everyone with familiar music and a happy collective memory, had
sometimes been enough to bring a little peace to quarrels between households, to disperse persistent anger, to calm souls embittered by privation and the struggle to find a little milk or sugar. You only had to remind everyone in a loud voice, ‘But ladies and gentlemen, this is the Mozart House!’ and they would be struck dumb with shame and go back to their sad existence in what seemed an endless war.

The survivor had remembered the other two families deported at the same time as his own. He described them and in his portrait of a dressmaker who never stopped sewing day or night, using tablecloths and curtains torn from windows that she carried folded in a small suitcase to make shirts for men and women, Theodor had recognised his mother the seamstress, Magdalena Ruthmann, Frau Orenstein. Thus he came to know for certain that his own family had been deported that same morning as he listened eagerly to the story the survivor told.

But what exactly had the man on the radio revealed?

At this point Theodor Orenstein stops as if gripped by sudden shame. The shame of pain, the shame of words imbued with translucent beer. Shame before strangers who might misunderstand. Though he knows the man with the gazelles also lost his mother in a concentration camp.

‘I did everything I could to trace that survivor, I phoned the radio, but they wouldn’t give me his name and address. So I went to the Jewish community and asked them to put me in contact with the former deportee who had been interviewed on national radio, and finally I discovered his address. I went to see him and he told me about the ‘dressmaker’ Magdalena Ruthmann who had become famous in the camp for her sewing skills. The SS wives competed for her and she could always get something to eat. While my father, who had tried at the roll call to seem more robust than he was, had been sent out to work. Getting up at five and wearing only the regular striped uniform of an inmate and with hard cold clogs on his feet, he would go with a group of young men to move heavy frozen wooden railway sleepers from one side of a country road to the other. With no gloves and no hat. Two of his toes developed frostbite and were unceremoniously cut off in the infirmary. But the wound would not heal. Blood leaked out night and day and no rag could staunch it. My father got steadily weaker.
Then one day the weight of a sleeper made him slip and fall in the snow, and he couldn’t get up again. The guard prodded him and pushed him with a stick, but it was no use. Two of his more charitable companions helped him to his feet, but he fell down in the snow again. He had no more will to fight. The guard, himself a prisoner, called to the SS man who was supervising them and who was standing apart beating his gloved hands together, wrapped in a greatcoat that reached to his feet. The SS man came over and loudly ordered the fallen man to get up. Huddling on the ground, my father knew quite well what to expect. Disobedience was not tolerated. But he could not go on, quite simply he could not go on and no longer even wanted to try. The SS man shouted at him one last time to get up, then pulled out his pistol. My father’s companions went on urging him to get to his feet, but he curled up even more tightly on the ground and the officer shot him in the head.’

Such had been the fate of the father of the painter Theodor Orenstein. Or at least, this was how it had been described to him. Who knows if that man, who no longer had a name but had been reduced to a mere number shouted out at the dawn roll call, had really been the civil servant Adolf Orenstein, who once had dressed himself for the office every morning from head to foot in grey trousers with grey braces, a pearl-grey waistcoat, an iron-grey jacket, a mouse-grey tie decorated with tiny bluebells, and with a lead-grey hat on his head. Had he really been that faithful patriotic office-worker who voted for Dollfuss, the self-styled democrat who no sooner elected abolished all the political parties? Had he really been the nationalist Adolf Orenstein, who saw himself as having no religion since he practised no religion, and who had devoted all his efforts to the preservation of an Austrian state whose great traditions meant more to him than any god in the sky? Had it really been he who let himself fall in the snow, hiding his bandaged but constantly bleeding foot? The faithful husband of one single deeply-loved woman, Magdalena Ruthmann, dressmaker by profession, with whom he had shared home and bed for more than twenty years?

The painter Theodor Orenstein has no doubts. Hans seems a little puzzled, but doesn’t dare speak. He knows the painter is deeply moved. How long since the last time he told the story of his father’s death at Auschwitz that morning in January 1945, crushed
by a railway sleeper, his foot with its two amputated toes that never stopped bleeding, his ribs so prominent in his chest that they could be counted one by one, his face hollow after his front teeth fell out one evening when he was trying to bite through a bread crust made from potato peel and, who knows, sawdust or even the plaster used to stop up holes in the huts? Who knows how long Theodor has been reliving that death, unable to come to terms with it? That useless, devastating, humiliating death. A death he has tried to forget but which rises again as if regurgitated in his throat every time he talks of his past. Perhaps he hates his visitors, thought Amara, for having forced him to remember. Will he be able to go on painting angels on roofs after being lacerated by that bloody memory? Or will he have to change the subject matter of his paintings? Why did such a painter with such memories not paint his father with his prison companions and his bandaged and bleeding foot, shifting frozen railway sleepers one morning in the snow? Amara would like to ask him but refrains. There is no room in Theodor’s pale, desperate face for reasoning, only for a pain that demands respect.

16

Magdalena Ruthmann Orenstein escaped the gas chambers. He had discovered this too, but not from the survivor he had heard on the radio and later tracked down and interviewed. But rather from the diary of the widow of an SS officer who, seven years after her husband’s death just before the camp was liberated, and after starving in a hovel among the ruins of Berlin, had found a publisher for her diary of the years 1944–1945. Its title was
Auschwitz
, and its subtitle
I Was There Too
. It was not the memoir of a surviving inmate, but of a woman who had lived with her SS officer husband in a little house all flowers and pretty curtains at the edge of the camp.

This woman had described how as a young bride she had lived in Bremen with her young husband who had started as an ordinary soldier in the Wehrmacht. Then with the growth of Nazism she had found herself first the wife of an SS-Hauptscharführer (Chief Squad Leader) and then of an SS-Untersturmführer (Junior Storm Leader or Second Lieutenant) and finally, transferred overnight to Berlin, the wife of an SS-Obersturmführer (Senior Storm Leader or First Lieutenant), which had made her very proud indeed. During these years three children had been born, of whom the youngest, Adolf, was a most beautiful blond child with blue eyes, just as recommended by the great Hitler. When her husband the SS-Obersturmführer received relocation orders he did not tell her where they were to live. It was only when they got there that his wife understood that they had been transferred to a work camp for Jewish prisoners. It was almost impossible for Aryan women even to pronounce the word ‘Jewish’ at that time. When they could not avoid it, they felt bound to add a grimace of disgust. According to the newspapers they all read, the Jews had been responsible for every kind of wickedness: as born loan-sharks they had stolen money from poor Austrians forced to struggle all day for a
living, and had made secret pacts with the enemies of the fatherland, plotting to kill the Aryans and create a country in their own image. They were violent and domineering and wanted to impose communism, meaning the immediate and total confiscation of all private property, with the possible shooting of anyone who kept back anything at all for themselves, even a ramshackle old bicycle. On top of this they were usually physically ugly, with hooked noses, prominent negroid lips and greasy black hair. This was how they were depicted in caricatures; stooping, bony, hunchbacked and hostile, ready to grab any poor unsuspecting Austrian and suck his blood by sinking two canine teeth as sharp as corkscrews into his neck.