Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

From Mátyás there was a different note of indignation, a schoolboy’s protest against Hitler’s geographic revisionism: How can he demand the “return” of the Sudetenland when it never belonged to Germany in the first place? Who does he think he’s fooling? Every second-former knows that Czechoslovakia belonged to Austria-Hungary before the Great War. To that, Andras had written back that the Hungarian government itself was likely implicated in Hitler’s plans, since Hungary would stand to regain its own lost territory if Germany took the Sudetenland; the word return was an incitement to anyone who felt that his country had been shortchanged at Versailles. But at least you’ve been paying attention in school, he wrote. Maybe you’ll get your baccalaureate after all.

The Paris papers revealed more as the situation unfolded: On the twelfth of September, in his closing speech at the Nazi party rally in Nuremberg, Hitler brutalized the air with a fist and demanded justice for the millions of ethnic Germans living in the Sudetenland; he refused to stand idly by and see them oppressed by the Czech president Beneš and his government. A few days later, Chamberlain, who had never before set foot on an airplane, flew to Hitler’s mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden to discuss what everyone was now calling the Sudeten crisis.

“He should never have gone,” Polaner said, over a glass of whiskey at the Blue Dove. “It’s a humiliation, don’t you see? This old man who’s never been on a plane before, made to travel to the remotest corner of Germany for a meeting with the Führer. It’s a show of force on Hitler’s part. The fact that Chamberlain went means he’s frightened. I promise you, Hitler will see his advantage and take it.”

“If anyone’s making a show of force, it’s Chamberlain,” Andras said. “He went to Berchtesgaden to make a point: If Hitler attacks Czechoslovakia, Britain and France will go to any length to bring him down. That’s what this is about.”

But soon it became clear that Andras was wrong. The papers reported that Chamberlain had come out of the meeting with a list of demands from Hitler, and was now determined to persuade his own government, and France’s, to meet the Führer’s conditions in short order. French editorials argued in favor of the sacrifice of the Sudetenland if it meant preserving the peace that had been won at such staggering cost in the Great War; the opposing view seemed to belong to a few fringe communist and socialist commentators. A few days later, envoys from the French and British governments presented President Beneš with a proposal to strip the republic of its border regions, and demanded that the Czech government accept the plan without delay. Andras found himself spending all day combing the papers and listening to the red Bakelite wireless at Forestier’s set-design studio, as if his constant attention might turn events in a different direction. Even Forestier put aside his design tools and mulled over the news with Andras. In response to the Anglo-French proposal, President Beneš had submitted a measured and scholarly memorandum reminding France that it had sworn to defend Czechoslovakia if it were threatened; a few hours after the memo was transmitted, the British and French foreign ministers in Prague pulled Beneš out of bed to insist he accept the proposal at once. Otherwise he would find himself facing Germany alone. The next day Andras and Monsieur Forestier listened in incredulous dismay as a commentator announced Beneš’s acceptance of the Anglo-French plan. The entire Czech cabinet had just resigned in protest. Chamberlain would meet with Hitler again on the twenty-second of September, this time in Bad Godesberg, to arrange the transfer of the Sudetenland.

“Well, that’s that!” Forestier said, his broad shoulders curling. “The last democracy of Central Europe kneels to Hitler at the urging of Britain and France. These are terrible times, my young Mr. Lévi, terrible times.”

Andras had assumed then that the crisis was over, that a war had been averted, even if at a cruel price. But he arrived at Forestier’s on the twenty-third of September to learn that the meeting in Bad Godesberg had yielded more demands still: Hitler wanted his troops to occupy the Sudetenland, and he required the Czech population of the area to vacate their homes and farms within a week, leaving behind everything they owned. Chamberlain brought home the new list of demands, which were promptly rejected by both the French and British governments. A military occupation was unthinkable, akin to surrendering the rest of Czechoslovakia without a fight.

The dreaded call-up has come, Andras had written to Tibor that morning, the eve of Rosh Hashanah. The Czech military has been mobilized, and our Premier Daladier has ordered a partial mobilization of French troops as well. Andras had watched it happen that morning: All over town, reservists left their shops and taxicabs and café tables and headed for points outside Paris where they would meet their battalions. When he went to send the letter to Tibor, there had been a crush at the postbox; every departing soldier seemed to have a missive to mail. Now he sat on his bed with his tallis bag in hand, waiting for Eli Polaner and thinking of his parents and his brothers and Klara and the prospect of war. At half past six Polaner arrived; they took the Métro to Le Peletier in the Ninth, and walked two blocks to the Synagogue de la Victoire.

This synagogue was not at all like the ornate Moroccan-style temple of Dohány utca, where Andras and Tibor had gone for High Holiday services in Budapest. Nor was it like the one-room shul in Konyár with its dark paneling and its wooden screen dividing the men’s section from the women’s. The Synagogue de la Victoire was a soaring Romanesque building of pale gold stone, with a grand rose window crowning the arched façade. Inside, slender columns rose toward a barrel-vaulted ceiling; a high clerestory deluged the space with light. Above the Byzantine-ornamented bimah, an inscription implored TU AIMERAS L’ETERNEL TON DIEU DE TOUT TON COEUR. By the time Andras and Polaner arrived, the service had already begun. They took seats in a pew near the back and unbuttoned their velvet tallis bags: Polaner’s tallis was of yellowed silk with blue stripes, Andras’s of fine-spun white wool. Together they said the blessing for donning the prayer shawls; together they draped the shawls over their shoulders. The cantor sang in Hebrew, How good and sweet it is when brothers sit down together. Again and again the familiar melody: one line low and somber like a work chant, the next climbing up into the arch of the ceiling like a question: Isn’t it good for brothers to sit down together? Polaner had learned the melody in Kraków. Andras had learned it in Konyár. The cantor had learned it from his grandfather in Minsk. The three old men standing beside Polaner had learned it in Gdynia and Amsterdam and Prague. It had come from somewhere. It had escaped pogroms in Odessa and Oradea, had found its way to this synagogue, would find its way to others that had not yet been built.

For Andras, who had spent the past four weeks constructing a wall around the part of himself that concerned Klara Morgenstern, the melody had the effect of an earthquake. It began as a small tremor, just enough to make the wall tremble-yes, it was good when brothers sat down together, but it had been months, months, since he’d seen his own brothers-and then there was a jolt of unbearable homesickness for Konyár, and a second jolt of homesickness for the rue de Sévigné and for the deeper, more intimate home that was Klara herself. For the past four weeks he had immersed himself in the news of the world and turned his thoughts away from her; late at night, when it was no use to pretend that he had really put her out of his mind, he told himself that her silence alone could not be taken to mean that all was over. Though she hadn’t contacted him, she hadn’t sent back his letters or requested that he return the things she kept at his apartment, either. She hadn’t given him reason to abandon hope altogether. But now, as the population of Paris fled to the countryside in anticipation of a bombardment, as the abstract possibility of war became a real and tangible thing, what was he supposed to make of her continued silence? Would she leave Paris without letting him know? Would she leave under the protection of Zoltán Novak, in a private car he had sent for her? At that very moment was she packing the same suitcase Andras had unpacked for her a few weeks earlier?