Unlikely Warrior (5 page)

Papi, 1926.

I had two friends who shared my non-Aryan status, and we often took bicycle trips to the woods and mountains. I also began spending more time alone, tinkering or painting little watercolors. I passed many hours simply dreaming about the fantastic projects I would someday complete. My mind, which I began to visualize as a chest of many drawers filled with unbelievable treasures, became my very best friend of all.

*   *   *

The eastbound train screeched to a halt, and I shook myself unwillingly from my reverie. Walter Haas, the soldier next to me, stood up, opened the sliding door, and looked out. He then announced to all and sundry, “Halt of indefinite period. Probably waiting for approaching train. You can barter for food. Vodka, too.”

With that he jumped down onto the embankment, where a dozen Russian women were standing next to a ramshackle signalman’s hut. Various-sized baskets filled with food hung over their arms, and they peered at us appraisingly from under their drab knitted shawls.

Private First Class Haas, who had spent the previous days sitting next to me either snoring or drinking vodka, was already inspecting the wares being offered. He was a pro and knew all the prices. It was his third trip to the front in as many years. Until now we had exchanged only a few words with each other, but he impressed me as one familiar with all the tricks of making war and, more important, of survival.

As I came up beside him he began extolling the goods of the Russian women, just like an experienced carnival barker: “Step right up! Here we have eggs, potatoes, bacon, hard bread, dried cherries, and bottles of booze!”

I wandered over to watch a soldier unloading his old wristwatch on a Russian train official. Then I heard Haas calling, “Hey, Rauch. Come back over here for a minute.”

One of the women was holding up a fat goose. “Are you in the mood for roast goose?” Haas asked, rubbing his stomach suggestively. “Maybe we can bargain her down together.”

He nudged the woman with his elbow and looked at her questioningly. She traced the number 30 with the toe of her boot in the damp earth.

“You’re crazy.” He laughed and turned to walk away. She reached out to grab hold of his sleeve and scratched a 25 in the dirt.

“Still too much,” Haas replied.

Without letting go of his sleeve, she pointed at my colorful neck scarf.

“Hmmm, that would be a good bargain, if you’re willing to part with it. If it doesn’t have any sentimental value for you, ‘farewell from my girl in Vienna,’ and all that.” He grinned and added, “I’ll buy the next goose.”

It was a very fat bird. We roasted it in pieces on the heavily smoking iron stove that was bolted to the floor in our boxcar and stuffed ourselves for two days, washing down the grease with the vodka that Haas had managed to barter for just as the train pulled out.

In the process, we became closer. We had greasy hands, faces blackened from the coal smoke, and dirty, fat-smeared uniforms, but the depressing atmosphere of the trip had diminished considerably.

On the second day of our new friendship, after a last satisfying burp, Haas asked, “Are you worried about all the crap that’s waiting for us at the end of the line?”

I shrugged and answered, “Nobody’s ever shot at me before.”

“Well, take a look at me.” With that he rolled up a shirtsleeve. “I’ve already been three years with the firm”—his word for the German army—“always right up at the front where things are the hairiest. They must have shot a good six tons of gunpowder at me, and that’s all they’ve managed to achieve so far.”

He pointed to a three-inch scar on his forearm. “Not every bullet finds a target,” he said, clapping me good-naturedly on the shoulder.

Haas was a broadly built and very sturdy fellow. His face was round and congenial but also filled with peasant cleverness and with the lines etched by the past three years of cold, heat, hunger, and proximity to the dead and dying. Even the most hard-bitten Nazi couldn’t have held it against him when he declared at every opportunity, with the charm of a first-class comedian, that the firm, for reasons known only to him, was on the verge of bankruptcy. That’s why he had already sold off all his stocks and bonds.

One evening, when the rain had been hammering away for hours on the top of our car, I asked him, “Are there any Germans who cross over to the Russians—who defect?”

“I don’t know of any,” he answered, gazing into my eyes a few seconds longer than necessary. “In a few days, when you are lying in a hole in the ground and they come toward you in their filthy overcoats, their Mongolian eyes filled with hate, yelling that horrible
‘hurrreee’
at the top of their lungs, then you’ll understand why no one has any particular desire to go over to them. There aren’t any representatives of the International Red Cross with rest homes in the mountains on their side. They want just one thing: to squash us into a pulp, because we have occupied their country.”

When I listened to Haas talking like this, I felt as though I were being instructed by a member of the older generation, but actually he was barely three years older than I was. His descriptions of what lay ahead weren’t pleasant, but there was now no turning back, so I began trying to accustom myself to the situation.

It’s difficult at nineteen to stay depressed and frightened for long periods, especially when the future is such an unknown quantity. Back home I had become familiar with the dangers of Nazi Austria and learned how to avoid them. Probably it wouldn’t be long before I became as clever as Haas in dealing with whatever Russia had to offer.

My concerns about my mother weren’t so easy to shake off, though. I wondered how much longer she would be able to continue her underground activities without being detected. Even now I couldn’t quite understand how she had become so deeply involved.

During the first three years of the war, the German military victories and Hitler’s successful economic policies had enraptured legions of Austrians. Those positive developments had assuredly helped blind them to the fact that the Gestapo’s grip was also becoming stronger. More and more of the Jewish population began disappearing to faraway work camps, and nothing further was heard from them.

In January 1940, my aunt Dora Breuer jumped from her fifth-story window in the Doroteergasse when the Gestapo came to pick her up. During that same month, at two o’clock one morning, my mother’s best friend, Herta Dressler, appeared at our door and asked if she could hide in our attic. She had just managed to slip out of the Gestapo’s grasp by climbing over a neighbor’s balcony and sliding down a shed roof. She arrived with only the clothes on her back.

I didn’t see her until the next morning, when she came through the attic door and disappeared into the bathroom.

“What’s Haday [as we called her] doing in our attic?” I asked my mother, who was preparing breakfast.

Calling my older sister, Vroni, from her room, my mother explained to both of us, “The Gestapo is looking for Haday, and we must hide her in the attic for the time being.”

“Why did she come here?” I wanted to know.

“We are the only friends with whom she feels completely safe. No one must know she is here, not the others in the house, not our friends, no one! If anybody else finds out about her presence here, we will all be picked up.”

I liked Haday. She was a pleasant-looking woman, about forty years of age, with dark, curly hair and a pale, very Jewish-looking face. During the past couple of years she had come often to our house as a Latin tutor for my sister.

I was sixteen at the time, and I accepted this change in our household without thinking much about it. There were so many exciting or upsetting things happening every day, what with the constant reports from the fronts, the news that one acquaintance or another had been killed or wounded, the rationing of everything down to the simplest consumer articles. Above everything else, there was the constant mental bombardment of Reichsminister Goebbels’s propaganda spurring the population on to even greater enthusiasm and achievements in the factories.

My father repaired the broken glass in the small attic window, and in one corner I helped him construct a makeshift bed from three-piece horsehair mattresses to accommodate our new guest. We also installed a light with an old yellowed lampshade and covered the small window with black paper. That was about the extent of his active involvement. It seemed to me that, for the most part, my father simply put up with the new situation.

My eighteen-year-old sister was quite occupied at the time with her fiancé, who, just to make things a bit more complicated, happened to be a lieutenant in the German army and was often a guest in our apartment.

As it turned out, Haday’s hasty arrival was just the beginning. In the following weeks and months an older couple arrived, followed by a Jewish carpenter and others. I remember the carpenter the most vividly, because it was he who built the complicated false walls into the attic behind which our guests could disappear whenever it was necessary.

The old couple had owned a jewelry store and brought a number of valuable pieces with them. For the Jews already hidden and those who were to follow, it became customary to place their possessions into my mother’s hands for management. She then took up the task of feeding and clothing everyone.

I had mixed feelings about one task that fell to me, that of taking some of the money that my mother received for selling our secret guests’ valuables and exchanging it for food coupons on the black market. The chance always existed that others involved in this illegal activity could be doing undercover work for the Gestapo. But my mother ordered me to do this, and there was no discussion. It was a time of parental authority, and the thought of refusing to do something because it was unpleasant or even dangerous simply wasn’t considered.

I had come to understand that although I was a citizen with limited rights, for the full Jews it was a much harder time. With that, the question was settled, as far as I was concerned. It even seemed rather romantic to me when I discovered that my mother sometimes slipped out of the house after midnight with one or another of our visitors to rendezvous with unsavory characters who promised, for high prices, to smuggle the Jews through Hungary to Yugoslavia or Bulgaria. From there they hoped to make it into neutral Turkey and then to London or the United States.

I helped my mother prepare miniature travel kits, which included a small collapsible Sterno stove, a cup, a spoon, needles, some thread, paper and pencil, and a large traced map of the area through which the refugees would be traveling.

It was also during my seventeenth year that I began building complicated alarm systems throughout the apartment as a safety device against the sudden arrival of unexpected official visitors. The materials for these came from the basement laboratory of Tante Herta Jaeger’s husband, a well-known physicist and professor at the University of Vienna, who had died three or four years previously. Since none of his own children or grandchildren had shown any interest in the piles of equipment and electrical apparatus that he left behind, I had been given permission to use whatever I wished.

During the months following this windfall, I taught myself to put simple radios together. At first it was very difficult, but as my knowledge and technical abilities increased, the quality of the radios improved and I even taught myself to build a shortwave receiver. I was so excited the first time I heard the station signal for the British shortwave program in the German language that I proudly turned the volume up as high as possible to let my whole family know of my success. Big Ben rang out loudly over the entire third floor. At that my father came tearing into the room, yanked the cord out of the wall, and hissed, “Are you out of your mind? Don’t you know that it is absolutely forbidden to listen to foreign radio transmissions? They’ll come and take us all away!”

My spirits were dampened for a while, but shortly afterward we arranged for a particular hour, once a day, when all the attic guests could assemble in my room in order to listen to the latest bulletins from London. Whenever these dealt with Allied advances, their hopes began to rise.

For my next project I laid a wire connection to my cousin Kurt’s room on the floor below. Equipped with small beep devices, earphones, and the elegant walnut keys discovered in one of my uncle’s treasure chests, we began sending Morse code to each other.

At first we made slow progress, our mistakes far outnumbering the accurate letters transmitted, but with practice we began to master our new craft. Often we would lie in our respective beds, sending Morse messages until late into the night. Our parents, of course, suspected nothing.

We began copying wireless messages from the shortwave radio. Once in a while we were lucky and came across a message that was uncoded, in German, and slow enough to decipher with our limited skills. Translating these messages made us feel more important and grown-up, even though we were vaguely aware of intruding into a world that wasn’t intended for us.

But it wasn’t until I constructed real, if still imperfect, transmitters and receivers and we began sending our messages by wireless that our activities were brought to a sudden and frightening conclusion. One afternoon Tante Herta came up to our apartment, accompanied by two men from the SS. “These gentlemen from the Wireless Intercepting Service are convinced that there is an illegal shortwave sender in this house, and they are going to conduct a search. Do you know anything about this?”