Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

Vienna. December ’41

Dear Amara, Papà no longer knots his tie. He says this is no time for ties. The roads are full of SS. The walls are plastered with gigantic drawings of Jews whose noses can piss into their mouths and whose hands are crammed with money. They say the Jews are busy destroying the country and must be hunted down. They are, we are, the greatest threat to our own country. There are murderous bloodthirsty Jews behind every street-corner, and if it weren’t for Hitler’s wonderful police they would be laying waste to the country and killing every living Austrian. Mamma laughs and says what stupid nonsense. ‘We’re more Austrian than they are, never forget your grandfather lost his arm in the First World War. Remember his parents were already living in this city before the goyim arrived from the southern provinces.’ ‘Mamma, you’re always going on about the same things!’ I tell her. She just shrugs her shoulders. She’s so convinced of her patriotic immunity that she never stops making plans for the future. Papà seems more worried. They’ve taken over his firm’s offices. And now it seems even the factory in Rifredi has been lost. Mamma says we’ll be able to go back to Florence. I’d be happy to, but Papà daren’t go and ask for permits, the thought of presenting himself to the police terrifies him. What if they stop him and arrest him just because he wants to go? A good patriot never leaves his country in time of war. But I’m not that Jew with a beaked nose and little snakes of dishevelled hair on a pear-shaped head. I don’t have those claw-like hands that grab the necks of poor Austrians and squeeze and squeeze as if throttling hens. I’m a boy shivering in my shorts and with chilblains on my heels, like every other Austrian forced by the war to sleep and study in an icy-cold home. I am the Emanuele you know and they don’t know. I have large hands red with cold, a little round nose and straight blond hair; and even if my arms are a little longer than most that doesn’t mean I want to grab people by the shoulders and slam them against a wall. All I want for my hands is to be able to squeeze yours, and feel your breath on my closed eyes, and know you are close to me, darling Amara, why have we been separated? I don’t understand it, I never will understand it…

Another great empty room. Another pile of objects: suitcases this time: little ones, big ones, cardboard ones, leather ones, suitcases with names on them: Klara Fochman, Vienna 1942; Peter Eisler, Berlin 1943; Maria Kafka, Prague 1943; Hanna Furs, Amsterdam 1942, and so on. Carried from all over Europe by men and women who didn’t know they were heading for their last journey. Imagine the care with which they must have packed their precious possessions into those cases, trying to work out how to save them from greedy hands. Today, empty and battered, the suitcases simply seem bored with those long ago plans. Tiny plans, admittedly, in an age of mass plunder and humiliation, but still believing in a future of work, no matter how difficult and spartan. No one packs a case to go to the cemetery. What these suitcases prove is the deceit practised on millions of trusting people who could never believe that anyone would ever want to remove their faces from the earth and even obliterate their very names, trampling on their bodies and casting them for ever into the great oblivion of history. There were no credible reasons for it. It was simply implausible.

The Nazis were masters at creating make-believe life, precisely when preparing their biggest death projects. Next to the so-called little white house, a gas chamber camouflaged as a shower, stood a lorry with a red cross on it to reassure the prisoners as they queued up for death. And what can one say of that fictive bathhouse. ‘Undress and leave your clothes here,’ the prisoners would be told. And naked, embarrassed, each reaching for a humble piece of soap, they would trust those reassuring words, forcing themselves to trust, silencing their deepest forebodings, calming their fears as they faced those icy but clean and fragrant officials in their impeccable uniforms, as they directed the children, the old and the sick to the gas chamber.

‘Emanuele has had a fall from the third floor. Luckily he landed in the black nightshade bush. Scratched all over but hasn’t broken a single bone.’ ‘Lucky for him. He has more lives than a cat.’ ‘I’ll wring his neck. One of these days there’ll be an end to those wings.’ ‘Passionately interested in flying, we just have to accept it.’ ‘I’ll give him flying!’ ‘His father’s given him a beating, to add to the scratches and bruises he already has.’ ‘His mother’s been crying like a sucking calf.’ ‘Gave him a kick as well.’ ‘Who did? Signor Karl Orenstein, that perfect gentleman who when it’s raining pulls his trousers a bit higher and fastens them at the ankles?’ ‘Signor Orenstein has beaten his only son.’ ‘And even Emanuele’s little friend, that awful Maria Amara, has been in trouble.’ ‘Really? Why?’ ‘Didn’t you know? The two of them were planning to fly off together from the top of the fifteenth-century tower in Via Maffia.’ ‘In a plane, I hope.’ ‘No, on wings made of rags and paper fixed to a wooden frame.’ ‘Mad, both of them.’ ‘They’re always together. No one can keep them apart. When Signor Orenstein locked the boy up in his room, he escaped through the window and rushed out to her. And his room’s on the third floor.’ ‘Wings again?’ ‘No, this time he climbed down the drainpipe.’ ‘Utterly mad! Good-looking boy, though. Like a cherub with that fair hair and shining black eyes.’ ‘You’d never know he was a Jew.’ ‘Is she Jewish too?’ ‘No, she’s just in love.’ ‘Even children fall in love.’

Amara walks on, down icy corridors. ‘Through me you come into the grieving city. Through me you come among the lost people.’ Her mind trips on these words that slip from her memory like the snaking tendrils of an obstinate creeping plant.

And what’s this that seems to be shining and dancing before her like a great mass of dragonflies with vibrating wings. Thousands and thousands of spectacles, sunglasses, glasses for the short-sighted and the long-sighted, with aluminium or copper or Bakelite frames. Any gold ones had already been taken away and melted down.

How would short-sighted people have known where to put their feet when their glasses were taken from them? Or did they let people go into the shower in their glasses, and only rip them off after they were dead? When their eyes were no longer aware of the details of the misery that surrounded them. Eyes blinded and lost. Emanuele sometimes wore glasses, too. But would she ever be able to recognise his glasses in that shimmering, glittering heap? Walking eyes, dancing eyes, idling eyes, eyes raised to look at a mouth or an absent smile. They have all disappeared, those smiles. The mouths are closed, the corners of their lips turned down. And the eyes that saw those grimaces; perhaps they understood or perhaps they didn’t. Times had changed; one had to adapt to a new reality. How could those soldiers, always so elegant and smart, keep their purpose in view: to slaughter every single person, down to the last child? Some of them had decent faces, like good family men. And indeed that was what they were. Along the road to Birkenau their wives and children were at home waiting for them behind embroidered curtains. And when they came home in the evening after doing their duty as slaughterers, the men would bend smiling over those children.

Amara sits in front of the ruins of one of the gas chambers. The Nazis blew it up before they left. The crumbling and collapsed roof is in a large room in which one can still see concrete walls marked with blue with a few pipes sticking out of them.