Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

‘How could these good Viennese citizens, local people she knew and had always greeted, suddenly change? What had happened to make them turn away when they saw her approaching? How could they pretend they didn’t know what was happening to people arrested in the street for no apparent reason? Thrown out of their shops and homes, robbed, beaten and stripped of everything they possessed?

‘Many believed and repeated among themselves that this treatment was not meant for Jews in general but only for dangerous communists who wanted to abolish private property: everything you have, house and garden, a ring, a car, a book, away with it, away with the lot, give it to the working class, that’s what they said, but what did everyone else have to do with the communists? People had always been on the side of law and order. Had they not conscientiously voted for Dollfuss and his Christian Social Party in 1932? Yet it had been this same trusted Dollfuss who in ’33 outlawed every political party except the Patriotic Front. How could this have happened? Even so, surely someone would sort these hotheads out. They said Hitler believed in order, and that when he came to power he would deal with these fanatics and restore harmony. Why not trust him?

The mother of the painter Theodor Orenstein had believed with many other Austrian Jews that all the buffoonery would come to an end in the firm grip of a collective conscience. Someone would awake from this sleep of reason, and giving a great guffaw of laughter would shake off the stupid fanatics who were trying to ruin a country that had lived for so long at peace with itself and others.

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.